BLACK PANTHER 63
his neck—leads to one of the most startling, intimate love scenes ever depicted in the
medium of comics, yet it evokes the blind devotion that often accompanies fi rst love.
Keith’s attraction to Eliza is based almost entirely on her mutation—a lizard tail. Both
couples fantasize about running away together forever, about escaping from their world
to create something new.
However, Black Hole does not off er a neat and tidy plot. Readers do not learn the
etiology of the disease, why it aff ects individuals so diff erently, or how long it lasts. Read-
ers are not assured of a happy ending for Keith and Eliza together or for Chris alone,
although neither do these characters meet their demise. Instead, Black Hole off ers a
thick slice of a crucial time in these characters’ lives as they emerge from the chrysalis of
puberty and enter adulthood, which is a dangerous, alien world.
Anthony D. Baker
BLACK PANTHER. Black Panther is the alter ego used by T’Challa, king of the fi ctional
African nation of Wakanda, in Marvel Comics. Black Panther was created by writer
Stan Lee and artist Jack Kirby in 1966, for an appearance in Fantastic Four #52.
Although not the fi rst black superhero, Black Panther—along with other Marvel
Comics characters Luke Cage and Blade—were signifi cant as positive depictions of
black superheroes.
T’Challa, as king of Wakanda, is also the head of its Panther clan. Th e character’s
primary motivation is the defense of his homeland from exploitation by the outside
world. Wakanda, located in central Africa, is a technologically advanced society and the
home to a massive meteoric deposit of the fi ctitious element vibranium, which has pow-
erful, energetic properties as well as a tendency to cause superpowered mutations in
humans. T’Challa protects Wakanda from the outside world by concealing its existence
from foreign nations. Black Panther’s fi rst appearances as a guest character in Fantas-
tic Four portray the character teaming up with the Fantastic Four against the sinister
Ulysses Klaw, who killed T’Challa’s father T’Chaka in an attempt to steal the country’s
vibranium deposits. With T’Chaka’s death, the identity and costume of Black Panther
pass to T’Challa, along with the rule of Wakanda.
Black Panther’s appearances as a guest character remained sparse through the
1960s and early 1970s, in part because of the potential controversy over the charac-
ter’s name, which evoked the radical Black Panther Party, founded in 1966, the fi rst
year the character appeared. At one point in the early 1970s, the character was briefl y
referred to as Black Leopard, a change justifi ed within the story as a simple diff erence
in translation.
From 1973 to 1976, Black Panther starred in his own feature series, Jungle Action.
Jungle Action was originally an anthology title published by Marvel Comics’ predeces-
sor, Atlas Comics, featuring characters such as Ka-Zar and Leopard Girl. Starting with
the fi fth issue of the revived Jungle Action , Black Panther was the series’ most important
recurring feature. Th e Black Panther stories in Jungle Action , written by acclaimed comics
creator Don McGregor, were self-contained multi-issue storylines. Th ese self-contained
