Tag: Black Panther

The Klaw!

We’re mov­ing into our last sev­en days of Jack Kir­by Trib­ute Month 2025, ded­i­cat­ed to the Fan­tas­tic Four and relat­ed char­ac­ters. Today’s prompt is Klaw, “the Mur­der­ous Mas­ter of Sound.”

Klaw’s ori­gin is very much entan­gled with the Wakan­dans and Black Pan­ther. We learn via flash­back in FF #53 that Klaw was a sci­en­tist who, in a ruth­less pur­suit of his research into the field of sound, decid­ed he had to have access to the Vibra­ni­um owned by the Wakan­dans. When T’Chal­la’s father King T’Cha­ka denies Klaw access, Klaw uncer­e­mo­ni­ous­ly shoots him dead on the spot! Lat­er, Klaw thinks he’ll shoot the young T’Chal­la, but he under­es­ti­mates the boy, los­ing his right hand as a result.

In FF #53’s present day, Klaw is cre­at­ing mon­sters of “sol­id sound,” using a con­ver­tor of his own inven­tion. Los­ing once again to T’Chal­la and the Wakan­dans, Klaw’s hid­den lab most­ly destroyed, he makes one last des­per­ate gam­ble, jump­ing into his con­ver­tor him­self. We don’t see the result of this exper­i­ment until #56, when he’s revealed to have been trans­formed into a being made of sol­id sound.

There’s a neat thing they do in these issues with the sound crea­tures, where all of them are col­ored bright red to visu­al­ly call them out. And when Klaw trans­forms, he too comes out red. His visu­al for the most part is a lot sim­pler than many oth­er Kir­by designs at the time, though the face is unique.

If you wan­na see who’s next, feel free to come back by again tomorrow!

On the Prowl

We’re now at Day Six of this year’s Jack Kir­by Trib­ute Month. This time, cura­tor Howard Simp­son has focused on char­ac­ters from Jack and Stan’s Fan­tas­tic Four run. And today’s prompt is the Black Panther!

Though Black Pan­ther was not the first black super­hero (most agree that dis­tinc­tion should go to the Gold­en Age char­ac­ter Lion Man), he was still ground­break­ing. Thank­ful­ly, they did­n’t go with the name “Coal Tiger” that they were appar­ent­ly con­sid­er­ing at one point (based on notes on an ear­ly sketch).

Since this Trib­ute Month is FF-themed, I opt­ed to base how I drew Black Pan­ther on how he first appeared dur­ing Jack and Stan’s FF-run. Kir­by and Joe Sin­nott (in the inks) real­ly pushed the black-spot­ting on his cos­tume, plus there was the short cape held on by a strap across his chest.

Instead of the stan­dard blues typ­i­cal­ly used in comics for black cos­tumes like this, ini­tial­ly they went with a col­or for­mu­lat­ed out of all three of the usu­al print­ers’ inks (cyan, magen­ta and yel­low) that mim­ic­ked gray. An actu­al gray was not pos­si­ble inside a com­ic in those days, with the lim­it­ed palette of 64 col­ors. It was a unique look. Lat­er, they changed the Pan­ther’s col­or to a more stan­dard blue. Most like­ly because they could guar­an­tee it would print more con­sis­tent­ly than the fake gray.

I almost drew the Pan­ther in the “tech­no-jun­gle” where he con­front­ed the FF in his first appear­ance. Such a wild con­cept (and very Kir­by), I don’t think they ever used that idea again after his first appear­ance. So I fig­ured going with a more reg­u­lar type of jun­gle foliage would prob­a­bly be best.

A bit of triv­ia: some years back in my day job in ani­ma­tion, I end­ed up (so far as we know) cre­at­ing the char­ac­ter mod­el for Black Pan­ther’s very first appear­ance in ani­ma­tion! It was in X‑Men: The Ani­mat­ed Series. You can read about it here.

That’s it for this one. Come by tomor­row if you’d like to see who’s up next!

The Black Panther, and His Unexpected Adventures

Amaz­ing­ly, I’ve made it here to Day 25 of the month-long online Jack Kir­by Art Trib­ute, sponsored/suggested by Howard Simp­son. I was­n’t sure I was going to get through all of these, but here we are! It’s open to all cre­atives, and you can find the work on your favorite social media plat­forms by the hash­tag #Kir­b­yArt­Trib­ut­es.

The prompt for today reads: “Draw a char­ac­ter or scene from Jack Kir­by’s Black Pan­ther series.” I chose to draw Black Pan­ther him­self, along with Princess Zan­da and Abn­er Lit­tle, two oth­er key char­ac­ters from that run.

When Kir­by left DC to make his return to Mar­vel in the ’70s, and fans heard he was going to do a Black Pan­ther title, many expect­ed he would just pick up the same con­ti­nu­ities and types of sto­ries that pre­vi­ous cre­ators had been doing with the char­ac­ter. But that was­n’t what they got, and some were appar­ent­ly dis­ap­point­ed. At this point in Kir­by’s career, he seemed to want to be allowed to just have a lit­tle cor­ner of his own where he could do his own thing with­out imping­ing on what oth­er cre­ators might be doing, or hav­ing oth­ers impinge on his creativity.

You have to take Jack­’s Black Pan­ther run on its own terms. His view of the char­ac­ter and the sto­ries he want­ed to tell with him seemed to have roots in the types of exot­ic adven­ture sto­ries H. Rid­er Hag­gard used to write, like King Solomon’s Mines, or She. If this com­ic had come out four or five years lat­er, read­ers might have asso­ci­at­ed it with the sorts of arcane arche­ol­o­gy Indi­ana Jones delved into in Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Hope you enjoy, and feel free to tune in again tomorrow!