On Strips: BP #20 Review

As I mentioned yesterday, this month I'll be trying to focus all of my posts on the Black Panther to celebrate the movie coming out in a couple weeks. Most of my topics I don't think will pose any problems. The character certainly has plenty of History, there's plenty of Business angles to discuss, the character has built-in "-isms" all over the place, and with the movie hype, I don't doubt there will be a good amount of Panther-related Links to post on Wednesdays.

My "On Strips" pieces might be a tad more challenging. Not only has T'Challa never carried his own comic strip, but I can't even seem to find any instance of him every appearing in one. Not the long-running Spider-Man strip, the short-lived Hulk strip, or even as just a joke/gag character appearing in some other comic for humorous effect. I'm going to keep digging throughout the month, though, and we'll see what I can find.

Today, though, I do have something interesting. It's a comic strip that I wrote/drew back in the day that reviewed Black Panther #20 circa 2000. As I recall, I had been doing the letterhack thing for a year or so, and had gotten pretty decent at it. I seem to recall figuring I had a letter published on average every other week for at least 6 or 8 months. And while I hadn't gotten bored with that, I did want to up my game a bit. So I thought I would try composing my letters as comics. There was definitely a heavy Fred Hembeck influence there, setting myself up as the primary character who talked with the heroes, who were well aware of their role as comic book superheroes.

I seem to recall only doing a handful of these. Partially because I'm not that great of an artist and they were very time-consuming, but also Marvel started dropping their letter columns altogether anyway. Ultimately, none of my strips were ever published. (No great surprise there.) I probably have the original Adobe Illustrator files burned on a CD somewhere, but for your viewing purposes, I did find this JPG of what I sent off to Marvel shortly after the issue came out...
As much as I enjoyed Christopher Priest's run on the book (I think Black Panther was the title where I had the most letters published) I think it's still a very valid point that I raised in the comic about trying to build suspense about a character's death when all of the guest stars have defied death already. (For the record, though, Black Panther wasn't back among the living until the issue after the next one.)

Related Items On Strips