And it’s entirely possible that none of it would have happened without McGregor.
The character and his film are already cultural icons. Reviews have been overwhelmingly positive. The response to it has been astounding - it’s been regarded as a major cultural moment for months, if not years. T’Challa just made his big-screen debut in an eponymous Marvel Studios film directed and co-written by Ryan Coogler. Nearly 50 years later, it’s safe to say that people have figured out how Black Panther works. “I read every book he’d been in, and I started making notes about what I thought really worked and what needed to be looked at, because we really didn’t know how it worked.” Imagine his surprise, then, when he, a 20-something with virtually no comics-writing experience, was asked to put his money where his mouth was and write new Panther stories for Jungle Action, starting in 1972. “I wasn’t even thinking of the Black Panther at the time, and certainly not that I was gonna get a chance to do it,” McGregor swears. Related Storiesīlack Panther Is Unusually Gripping and Grounded for a Superhero Film So second-rate was the Panther that when McGregor made his plea, he didn’t have the guy in mind. He’d pop up occasionally to pal around with the Fantastic Four or the Avengers, but that was about it. T’Challa had been created in 1966 by Jack Kirby and Stan Lee, but honestly, he hadn’t done a whole lot of note since then. He was best known by his nom de guerre: Black Panther. His name was T’Challa and he was the superpowered monarch of hidden Wakanda, an African nation made technologically advanced thanks to the presence of a rare metal called vibranium. Marvel really only had one such property at the time. “Finally, it was decided to put some new material in, and I said something like, ‘It needs to have a black jungle character. “I kept saying to them, ‘I can’t believe you guys are printing this racist material in the 1970s,’” the 72-year-old McGregor says in his stout Rhode Island brogue.
CRINGE RAGE COMICS SERIES
There was a series with the cringe-inducing name of Jungle Action, and its contents were primarily reprints of 1950s tales about white people - Jann of the Jungle, Lorna the Jungle Queen, Tharn the Magnificent - having adventures in ill-defined African locales. In 1971, Don McGregor was a proofreader at Marvel Comics, and one particular thing was driving him nuts.
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