Black Panther

I've been a fairly vocal critic of Reginald Hudlin's new Black Panther series, for various reasons. The one particular complaint that has perhaps garnered the strongest reaction from fans is the book's somewhat loose approach to continuity and the character's history.

For those of you unaware of what's taking place in the new series, Hudlin has basically rewritten the Black Panther origin story, a la "Man of Steel" or "Spider-Man: Chapter One" (at one point, it was suspected that it was more like Byrne's "Doom Patrol," and he'd retconned away T'Challa's entire career to date). The broad strokes are still there, but a great many of the details have been changed, some more dramatically than others.

I believe this is very significant for the character of T'Challa, because of the type of origin story he has. Most comic book heroes' origins are the stories of how they got their powers. They got struck by lightning, or exposed to radiation, or were given a power ring or a serum, and subsequently put on a costume and proceeded to have adventures.

But a handful of the more iconic characters' origins don't merely involve how they obtained their powers, but also rely on a formative event in the character's history. For Spider-Man, it was the death of Uncle Ben. For Superman, it was Krypton's explosion and his being sent to Earth. For Daredevil (particularly post-Miller), it was his father's murder.

Chief among these 'formative event' origins is that of Batman. The motivating event in Bruce Wayne's life was when he was a boy, years before he ever donned a costume. It was when his parents were gunned down in a common mugging, and young Bruce was left an orphan. The occasional writer or adaptation has tried to tinker with this (i.e. giving Bruce a brother, or making Joker the murderer), but it doesn't take long for those changes to be abandoned or rejected, and for the traditional details to be reestablished.

Of all the major comic characters I can think of, T'Challa's comes the closest to Batman's 'formative event' origin. Whereas Bruce's defining moment was his parents' murder, T'Challa's was when his father died defending Wakanda, and T'Challa chose to defend his country and his nation by responding in kind. It's not an origin that tells why T'Challa is a superhero. It's an origin that tells how T'Challa came to be the person he grew into. How he became the king he is.

Thus, to make significant alterations to that formative event is to change what most shaped T'Challa's character as a boy. It's akin to retelling the Batman origin where Joe Chill is an employee that Thomas Wayne laid off. Or where the Waynes murder took place during a home invasion. Or giving Bruce a baby sister who was with Alfred when Thomas and Martha were shot. Any of these changes would have distinct effects on Bruce's character, and they'd also affect the iconic nature of the event.

The same goes for what Hudlin has done with T'Challa's formative event, by scrapping T'Challa's family makeup, changing Klaw's motivation, and completely overhauling the circumstances of the murder itself. And these aren't changes that have merely been made for a stand-alone Black Panther movie, but rather replace the tradiational details of T'Challa defining moment in the Marvel Universe itself. How do these changes affect the story of the Black Panther, and why do I disapprove of them so? That's what I plan to address through a series of posts over the coming days.