Gene Colan (1926–2011)

Access a version of the below that includes illustrations on my blog.

After Don McGregor's Black Panther run from Jungle Action was cancelled back in 1976, he actually got invited back two more times: he did a story called Panther's Quest published in Marvel Comics Presents in 1989 and a four-issue prestige miniseries called Panther's Prey in 1991. This "Epic Collection" collects both of them, along with five short Black Panther tales by other creators from the same era.

Panther's Quest sends the Black Panther into South Africa in order to find his mother, missing since childhood. Sure, we did apartheid in a thinly fictionalized version of South Africa in the immediate previous Black Panther storyline, but why not do it again in the real place? This story ran twenty-five biweekly installments of (usually) eight pages... and it is interminable. Like, eight pages will go by and all that's happened is Black Panther has punched a guy. One thing I liked about McGregor's Panther's Rage was how it really made you feel the difficulty of what the Black Panther did, but this goes too far with it, because everything is immensely difficult, everything is enormously slowed down, it never feels like we're getting anywhere, being crushed under the weight of McGregor's enormously wordy style. Being set in South Africa means we again lose the worldbuilding that made Panther's Rage so interesting, too. It has it moments, including some nice side characters in South Africa, but ultimately, a tedious slog with little to say.

Panther's Prey almost has the opposite problem: this is made up of four forty-page installments and is all over the place. Wakanda is modernizing, connecting with the outside world more—this is nicely demonstrated by the appearance of a food court selling pizza. But with the benefits of connecting to the outside world also come the downsides, and someone is smuggling crack into Wakanda and vibranium out... using an army of cyborg pterodactyls, of course! The story follows this main storyline, but also T'Challa's mother acclimating to life in Wakanda, what Monica Lynne's been up to in the U.S. since we last saw her in Jungle Action (McGregor ignores her later appearances), the guy organizing the drug smuggling operation, and updates to various members of Black Panther's Wakandan supporting cast. There's a lot of nice moments here but overall not much actually seems to happen despite the fact the story runs over one hundred and fifty pages. Black Panther doesn't even meet the villain until about ten pages from the end, and beats him by luck in about six seconds. And in the end, crack is still a problem in Wakanda! Way to cheer me up, McGregor.

The other stories here are nice to have for completism's sake, but not very memorable.

What's interesting to me reading Black Panther in terms of publication chronology is to see the development of the character I know from the movies. His mother, Raimonda, debuted in this volume, but she's not the imperious ruler of screen, but a South African woman romanced by T'Challa's father who returned to her homeland after her husband died. Many elements of the mythos have yet to appear at all. There's also still no sense of cohesion: McGregor doesn't really acknowledge that anyone used the character other than him since 1976. (Can't imagine why the "Black Musketeers" don't come up in discussions of T'Challa's family!)… (more)

If you ever need proof that you can't go back again, this, right here, is your proof.

I'll leave it to everyone else to expound on how marvelous Wolfman and Colan were on their original Tomb of Dracula run (and they'd be right). Instead, I'll focus on a couple of things here.

At the beginning of this volume, Wolfman talks about how writing horror is different from most other writing, because you have to grab the reader by connecting with their fears and common dreads, about emotion. He states, "Horror demands that you create a nightmare from which the reader cannot awaken."

He's not wrong.

Unfortunately, he doesn't follow his own rule. Instead of connecting to our fears, he connects to our boredom with a facile political story that refuses to hook us because he takes absolutely no time to allow us to connect with either his heroes or Dracula himself. The characters are sketched in with the most rudimentary strokes and put through their low-stakes (pardon the pun) tasks.

There's no connection. And instead of creating a nightmare from which I couldn't awaken, he created a sleep aid that I couldn't fight off.

Colan's art was okay, but once again, nowhere near his best. Dracula deserves the deep blacks and rich reds that ink and a good colourist can bring. Greyish pencils and muted colours do a disservice to his art.

Go back and read this team's Marvel Dracula, but avoid this.… (more)