2. Black Panther was created in 1965, a full a year before he first appeared in Fantastic Four #52. Originally Jack Kirby created him to be hero of his own title.
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3. The history: in 1965 Marvel publisher Martin Goodman heres that rival publisher Harvey was expanding into superheroes, so he tasked Jack Kirby & Stan Lee to expand Marvel with more titles.
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4. Lee & Kirby (mostly, in my opinion Kirby) came up with a raft of concepts, including The Inhumans & an African superhero, originally with regrettable name Coal Tiger. https://adeptpress.files.wordpress.com/2015/04/coaltiger.jpg …
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5. Integral to creation of Black Panther was Lee/Kirby coming into contact with fans for first time (first conventions they attended were in 1964 & 1965. Kirby: "I suddenly discovered that I had a lot of black readers."
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6. Marvel didn't go through with planned 1965 expansion & instead concepts were rolled into Fantastic Four (leading to richest period in series with introduction of Inhumans, Galactus, Silver Surfer, Black Panther & more in space of half a year).
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7. Key point here is that in 1965, Kirby was already conceiving of Black Panther as main character in own title. Marvel wasn't ready & made him secondary character in other books (Fantastic Four, Avengers, Captain America etc.)
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8. Anyways Marvel kept kicking Black Panther (at times renaming him The Panther to avoid political association) in secondary role, only giving him feature in Jungle Action (1973) due to pressure from Don McGregor.
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9. Kirby finally got a chance to do a Black Panther solo comic (his original idea) at the tale end of his final tenure at Marvel (1977-79) but that was cut short after 12 issues because he decided he was fed up with Marvel.
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10. As Brent Staples notes, Marvel had a hard time knowing what to do with Black Panther until Christopher Priest reinvented character in 1990s.https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/24/opinion/afrofuturism-behind-black-panther.html …
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Hollywood has been underestimating black films in general for much longer
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