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This week, over in Darrin Bell's Candorville, Lemont waxes about Black Panther. This is the only reference to/of/about the movie in comic strips that I've seen to date.
A little later today, my wife and I will be seeing an early evening screening of Black Panther. We also have tickets for an afternoon showing tomorrow, and there's a good chance we'll see it again on Saturday as well.

This will be the first time my wife and I have gone to the theater together. In the past nearly-decade that we've known each other, we've never gone out to see a movie. We're just not big movie people. I've seen about half of the Marvel movies, about half of which at home, and most of those were out of some sort of "professional" obligation -- i.e. I felt like I had to see them because my status as a comic book fan invariably means someone's going to ask me about them... despite the fact that I'm generally more interested in the medium of comic books than the characters that debuted in them. But whatever. The point is that, even with my interest in the source material, I don't go rushing out to see all the Marvel movies. And my wife, who's not really a comic book fan and certainly not a superhero fan, has even less interest.

But we're going to see Black Panther. On opening weekend. Repeatedly.

Partly to lend out support to a major motion picture that, if it succeeds financially, will lead to Hollywood maybe reconsidering that a movie can't have any people of color or it won't sell. And partly because my wife hasn't seen a Black woman as a kick-ass role model on-screen since Pam Grier was the female star of blaxploitation films in the 1970s. And here in Black Panther, we've got Lupita Nyong'o, Danai Gurira, Letitia Wright, Florence Kasumba, Sydelle Noel, and Angela frickin' Bassett! Not to mention the rest of the women portraying the Dora Milaje!

I have never, in all the time that I've known her, seen my wife this excited for something like this. She was thrilled when Barack Obama was elected President, she's always excited for a new Beyoncé album, she looks forward to any time we have a relative that has a destination wedding and gives us an excuse to travel, she even fangirl-squeed when she met Pam Grier... but I've never seen her like this.

She has a co-worker who's a big Marvel fan and he's tried to insist she watch Captain America: Civil War so she can see T'Challa's debut. No interest. She knows full well that I actually appeared in the first Avengers movie and she's never watched that either. Black Panther we're seeing.

Because my wife shouldn't have to go several decades between her heroes.

Because any Black women younger than my wife shouldn't have had to wait until 2018 to see themselves represented as a hero on-screen for the first time.

Because the people who worked on this movie shouldn't have had to bust their collective ass eight times harder than any other crew of a blockbuster just to be treated only half as good.

Because it's about damn time!
Back in the early 1970s, Marvel tried making Dr. Doom a protagonist by headlining him in the anthology title Astonishing Tales. He was originally given equal billing with Ka-Zar, although his cover space was reduced on #7 and reduced again on #8 before being dropped from the title altogether. But in his short stint as one of the book's headliners, he fought against none other than Black Panther for two issues.

The plot is pretty simplistic. Doom decides he requires vibranium to build his "most perfect weapons" and he digs a tunnel from Latveria to Wakanda (something in the 3,000 mile range!) to just excavate it himself. In the process, he sets off volcanoes and earthquakes in Wakanda, alerting T'Challa to his presence. The two face off, Panther is briefly captured, but eventually gains the upper handing by threatening to destroy all of the vibranium rather than let Doom steal it. Doom leaves, wondering if he might someday ally himself with T'Challa.

The story is... not good. The premise is incredibly weak to begin with, and having two different creative teams work on the front and back halves doesn't help matters. (Larry Lieber and George Tuska did the work in #6 while Gerry Conway and Gene Colan did the work on #7.)

And then we have the characterization... every bit of it is awful on so many levels. First, Doom is portrayed as basically a two-bit thief. I mean, he's the monarch of an entire country; why not just, you know, buy the vibranium he needs? And then to be so careless with his excavations that they send shockwaves through the entire country? Black Panther is nominally better, mostly by virtue of being a hero, but he still threatens to destroy all of the country's vibranium and his people to keep Doom from getting it. As the story is written, it's not an empty threat either. I'm sure it's been since retconned as such, but T'Challa's thought balloons clearly indicate he's perfectly fine sacrificing his entire nation without a moment's hesitation. He also makes reference to his people recently being released from slavery, even though historically Wakanda was never conquered. You could argue he was talking about "people of color generally" or maybe "any people who've ever experienced slavery" but the dialogue seems pretty clearly written as if he were an American referring to enslaved Black people.

But the worst offense here are the nameless Wakandans shown in some of the background pieces. As of 1971, when this book was written, Wakanda had been well established as having more and better technology than any other country on the planet. But every instance where Wakanda and/or its inhabitants are shown, we presented with stereotypical Hollywood-esque "Africans." (T'Challa even says, "The African brothers are in danger!") We see Wakandans in bare chests, grass skirts, and the like. Plus they harbor a HEAPING dose of tribal fear in the "wrath of the gods!" vein. That is literally part of the dialogue. The ostensibly most advanced nation on Earth is shown as a "Darkest Africa" backwater that makes the natives in the original King Kong look like they're the height of technological and social achievement.

I don't know who should bear the brunt of the blame here. It doesn't really matter, though; it's a far cry from the characters and culture put forth only a few years earlier during Black Panther's debut. I haven't read every issue, but I got the sense that Roy Thomas and John Buscema tried to keep that in mind when they had T'Challa over in The Avengers -- I don't get that sense at all here. And given that Stan Lee oversaw all of it, I kind of think he never really understood the character in the first place. For even as wacky as Jack Kirby's 1977 Black Panther series was, he still treated all of the characters with respect, and didn't show them as barely literate tribal stereotypes.

Not every writer or every artist is going to have the same take on any given character; that's to be expected. But writing an entire continent off as something barely above savages is a pretty ugly way to use any character, particularly those that have been expressly shown to be otherwise.

Unless you're a completist of some kind, don't bother trying to track down these two issues.
Recently, someone apparently leaked Chadwick Boseman's pay for several of his movies. It breaks down like this...

Draft Day (2014)$315,657
Get on Up (2014)$346,452
Message from the King (2016)$405,844
Gods of Egypt (2016)$541,126
Captain America: Civil War (2016) $710,227
Black Panther (2018)$874,126

The immediate comparisons people have made is that Boseman was paid far less than Robert Downey, Jr. and Chris Evans have made recently. For Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015), some of the stars' salaries break down like this...

Robert Downey, Jr.  $40 million
Scarlett Johansson  $20 million
Chris Evans$6.9 million
Jeremy Renner$6.1 million
Chris Hemsworth$5.4 million

There's a problem with this comparison, though, and probably not one that you're thinking of.

Most of these figures are final salaries, and these numbers are not mentioned in their actors' contracts anywhere. That is, there are two parts to what these actors earn in Marvel movies. First is a base salary. "Here's XXXX dollars for you to appear in a Marvel film." The second part is a back-end deal where they additionally earn a percentage of whatever profits the movies make -- for all the instances I've been able to find, it's been 0.2%. "Hey, the movie turned out really well and earned a boatload of money; here's a part of that as a bonus." Age of Ultron grossed $1.4 billion in theater tickets worldwide and another $80 million in video sales. With a production budget of $330 million, that leaves a little over $1 billion to spread around. A 0.2% bonus based off that is a nice $2 million, so even up-front base salary of $500,000 could still lead to an actor getting a multi-million dollar paycheck.

(Notoriously, I should point out, though, Hollywood tends to use a lot of arcane budgeting tricks to bring that apparent "profit" number down as low as possible. So, on paper, and what would have been used to calculate actors' back-end bonuses, Age of Ultron officially netted probably noticeably less than $1 billion.)

All of this is noteworthy with regards to Boseman's leaked pay because the Black Panther number has to be an outlier. The $710,000 he earned on Civil War includes his back-end bonus deal. I've seen people estimate that his initial offering was in the $200,000 range. Which is about on par with other character's first appearances -- Chris Evans' initial offer in The First Avenger was $300,000 and Chris Hemsworth's first outing as Thor started him at $200,000.

The Black Panther listing mentioned above can't possibly be Boseman's final salary since the movie has yet to be released and, therefore, has no profits accounted for. Which makes that initial list a useless basis of comparison; you're putting apples and oranges in the same bucket. An (ostensibly) initial offer next to initial-offers-plus-a-percentage-of-final-profits.

Now, I am by no means suggesting that what Boseman is paid is fair and/or comparable to any of his peers. I expect that, if we were able to compare everyone's contracts directly, we would see that Boseman is indeed getting a worse deal than his melanin-deficient co-workers. But that $874,000 number isn't an accurate basis for saying that because that's not his final salary.
Here are this week's links to what I've had published recently...

Kleefeld on Comics: On Business: The Black Panther Credit Card
http://ift.tt/2EGHrLf

FreakSugar: Fanthropology: Super Bowl Fandom?

Kleefeld on Comics: On History: Billy Graham
http://ift.tt/2EJgMNQ

Patreon: MTV Geek Classic: Kleefeld On Webcomics #69: Whither Con

Kleefeld on Comics: Weekly Black Panther Links
http://ift.tt/2saTGxa

FreakSugar: Webcomics Wednesday: Instruction Webcomics
http://ift.tt/2E9dqqu

Kleefeld on Comics: On -isms: Black Leopard Redux
http://ift.tt/2BN2MnI

Patreon: MTV Geek Classic: Kleefeld On Webcomics #70: Thoughts From Greg Rucka

Kleefeld on Comics: On Strips: Pre-Panther Biographics
http://ift.tt/2nTPMTS
As I mentioned last week, I have not yet been able to find any instances where Black Panther appears in a comic strip. However, some of the actors who are in the film have.

Steve McGarry inherited the comic strip Biography from John Roman in 1989. Not surprisingly, each week featured a short comic-style biography of some famous individual. McGarry continued working on that until the strip was cancelled in 1991. In 2005, McGarry returned to a similar format launching essentially the same idea under the name Biographic. That strip still runs today.

While McGarry has done a number of famous characters, from Sherlock Holmes to Batman, and has showcased actors who feature in comic-based TV and movies, such as Hayley Atwell and Krysten Ritter, he has yet to mention anyone because of their work on Black Panther. He has however looked at two actors who were later cast in the movie: Martin Freeman, who was a subject in 2011, and Lupita Nyong'o, who was a subject in 2014...
 
I expect it's too late in his production schedule to suggest to him anyone else from the movie before it's released, but here's hoping he's got something related lined up to appear later this month.