Black Panther In Five Seasons, Season 1: Panther's Rage

If Black Panther isn't the Marvel movie you're most amped up to see, you're probably either a bigot or you have terrible taste in movies. The trailers are amazeballs. And, finally, after years of there not being very many Black Panther collections available, now most of his solo adventures are in circulation. So I'm cobbling together a five season Netflixization of a Black Panther chronology.

The lists will seem shorter than some of my other "In Five Seasons" or "In Ten Seasons" because most of the Black Panther collections are three to four times the length of usual Marvel trades, and have the price point that reflects that difference. Also, unlike previous lists, this will contain Back Door Pilot episodes, the way DC television presented The Flash in an episode of "Arrow" before he got his own series, or the way Marvel/Netflix put The Punisher in "Daredevil" before he got his own series. 

---

Black Panther Season 1: Panther's Rage
(showrunners: Don McGregor, Jack Kirby, and Stan Lee)

Backdoor Pilot: Vibranium Frequency (an episode of The Fantastic Four)
(collected in Black Panther Epic Collection: Panther's Rage)
written by Stan Lee, art by Jack Kirby

What I hope will be the most successful Marvel-based movie character debuts in the comic home of the least successful Marvel-based franchise. And it doesn't seem promising that mid-1960s Stan Lee is the creator of the character. There are pages that, unsurprisingly, don't age well. But it does seem that The Thing, who says the most problematic shit, is being shown as out-of-touch when he refers to The Black Panther (who he hasn't met yet) as "a refugee from a Tarzan movie". The fun part of the story is that The Black Panther totally annihilates The Fantastic Four using technology, strategy, and brilliant pre-meditation. But he's never treated as a villain. He makes it clear as soon as the fight is over that he was prepping for a bigger fight, and The Fantastic Four immediately ally with him. All in all, it's a fun story. I have a difficult time with silver age books in general, and Stan Lee's books, in particular, but this one repeatedly acknowledged when it was being "cornball", and T'Challa really shows up Reed Richards and his whole team.

Episode 1: Zemoted
(collected in Captain America Epic Collection: The Coming Of The Falcon)

The first really cool run of Black Panther as a solo book refers to the fact that T'Challa has been away from Wakanda for a while, so we're going to start the series with his appearances in other Marvel books. In this story, T'Challa is still in Wakanda but is under attack and sends one of his amazing ships to New York to request the help of Captain America. Well, it turns out the villain is Baron Von Zemo, one of those Nazi shitheads who helped get Cap's partner killed (or sent to Russia to become The Winter Soldier, if you're going to be all modern about it), and got Cap, himself, frozen into a giant ice cube. So cap gets his revenge with Panther's help, and then T'Challa moves into The Avengers mansion to become a member of Marvel's Grade A superhero team.

Serial 1: The Avenger
(3 episodes, collected in The Avengers Epic Collection: The Masters Of Evil, and The Avengers Epic Collection: Behold The Vision!)
written by Roy Thomas, art by John Buscema and Gene Colan

T'Challah and the superbros fight crime around the world. It's utter madness with a ton of characters including pretty much all the Avengers from the movies, the classic X-Men lineup, Kang, The Masters Of Evil, The Sons Of The Serpent, even Ultron debuts in this series.  And The Black Panther, while not the central character is very important to the outcomes. 

If you are a continuity hound, you can check out Daredevil #69, which features The Black Panther helping Matt Murdock fight the first ever incarnation of The Thunderbolts, but it's problematic, and not a very long story, so you might want to skip it. He also shows up in Astonishing Tales to fight against Doctor Doom, but that's never been collected outside of the black and white Essential series.

Serial 2: Panther's Rage
(3 episodes collected in Black Panther Epic Collection: Panther's Rage)
written by Don McGregor, art by Rich Buckler, Billy Graham, Gil Kane, and Keith Pollard

While T'Challa was out in New York, one of the victims of Klaw's attack (from the backdoor pilot episode) has been sowing seeds of discord in Wakanda. Now The Black Panther must battle Killmonger and his many, many, many allies, including Venomm (a snake handler, not the Spider-Man villain), a white gorilla, a pack of wolves, and all sorts of others. This series is one of the earliest examples of epic storytelling in comics. It feels like the best of the dark 1980s superhero comics, but it came out in the mid-70s. 

Episode 8: The Panther Vs The Klan
(also collected in Black Panther Epic Collection: Panther's Rage)
written by Don McGregor, art by Billy Graham and Rich Buckler

Yea. That Klan. It's sad to think that this book would once again be considered controversial, but in the 70s, editorial didn't know if it was okay to have a black superhero battling the Ku Klux Klan. T'Challa goes back to America, along with his girlfriend (whom the Wakandans were happy to see leave) where he gets into a battle with some of America's biggest embarrassments.

Episode 9: The Collectors
(collected in Black Panther By Jack Kirby Vol 1)
written by Jack Kirby, art by Jack Kirby

From a realistic fight against racists, to a Really Weird battle against a bizarre set of villains in a quest for...Solomon's Frog? This is almost too weird to describe, and The Black Panther isn't as fleshed out as he is in better books, but it's a wacky ride with really cool Kirby art.

​Episode 10: The Musketeers
(collected in Black Panther By Jack Kirby Vol 2)
written by Jack Kirby, art by Jack Kirby

Every time T'Challa leaves Wakanda, somebody attempts a coup. This time, it's a family member, and we meet a great deal of T'Challa's family, some of whom will be major characters in the coming seasons. We also see, when T'Challa is otherwise engaged, a group of Wakandans who don their own costumes to protect the land in his absence.

Episode 11: Kiber The Cruel
(collected in Black Panther By Jack Kirby Vol 2)
written by Jack Kirby, Jim Shooter, and Ed Hannigan, art by Jack Kirby and Jerry Bingham

One of T'Challa's cousins is kidnapped by a mutated scientist named Kiber The Cruel, who first takes her, then The Black Panther, himself, to Kiber Island (that's right, he has his own island, what?) where they, naturally, must battle his minions in order to survive, and escape (in that order). This episode gets less fun as it goes on, as Kirby abandoned the story before it was over, and it got picked up by Marvel's most notorious editor, and an artist who was talented, but was not Jack Kirby. 

Episode 12: Panther's  Prey
(not yet collected)
written by Don McGregor, art by Dwayne Turner

This is a strange episode to end the season on, but it's a sequel to Panther's Rage, and it is entirely unlike anything that's going to happen in previous seasons. It even has a bit of the Kirby Weird factor, as it involves a sometimes invisible pteranodon man. But there's also drugs, there's T'Challa's mother dealing with her time as a sex slave, and there's T'Challa thinking of proposing to his girlfriend (who Wakandans still aren't super into). I had to read this online because it hasn't been collected, and I don't own the issues. It's not nearly as good as Panther's Rage or Black Panther Vs. The KKK, and while it has some problematic aspects, it's not terrible.

​
Season One is thirteen episodes (including the backdoor pilot).