It's the last official day of Black Panther Month, and we've still got plenty of links to share...

• Michael Maher talks with Hannah Beachler, the production designer who designed the afrofuturistic look of the film.
• Tasha Robinson spoke with Joel Harlow, Black Panther's makeup designer.
  
• Aisha Harris interviews Beth McGuire, Black Panther's dialect coach, on how she's trying to raise the bar for African accents.
  
• Rosie Knight talks with Don McGregor about creating Killmonger.
• Ryan Parker and Aaron Couch get the low-down on Wesley Snipes' attempt to make a Black Panther movie back in the 1990s.
• Abraham Riesman profiles Christopher Priest, who's seminal run on Black Panther had a huge influence on how the character has been used in all media since then, argueably defining the character more than anyone else since his inception.

Last year, I ran a piece (mostly borrowing heavily on the work of Jim Kosmicki) on how/why Jungle Action was cancelled. I think it's insightful and worth running again this month...

Years ago, I was collecting and collating historical information on the first 100-ish issues of the Fantastic Four. Creator interviews talking about that period, letters pages, scans of original art... whatever I could get my hands on. My idea was to write a book about the FF's creation, using as many as-close-to-first-hand sources as possible. I never got around to writing it -- I had trouble believing there was an audience for it -- but Mark Alexander eventually put together more or less the same thing.

Anyway, I've still got the binder of materials I put together, and it includes some print-outs of a Yahoo Group discussion from 2002 about the Black Panther. One question that piqued my interested was why Don McGregor's Jungle Action got abruptly canceled in late 1976, only to be replaced by Jack Kirby's Black Panther two months later? Jim Kosmicki had a fascinating history/analysis of that period, and I thought I might re-present it here...

70's Marvel appears to have been ripe with inter-personal politics. When Kirby came back, he only wanted to be left alone. He took his characters and pulled them away from the Marvel Universe. He wasn't interested in continuity. Remember that Kirby was the originator of T'Challa (there's evidence of a character named Coal Tiger in his files that shows that he had wanted to do this character for a while before it showed up in FF). When he came back to Marvel after going to DC in the early 70's, he didn't want to work on other people's characters. There was a deliberate attempt to keep these stories separate from what had been done before with the characters -- to go back to the original concepts of the characters as envisioned by Jack. He wanted Captain America back, as his claim to that character dated pre-Marvel, and the only other character he'd co-created who was considered available was the Black Panther.

Now, your question is WHY was Black Panther considered available? Remember that we are remembering Jungle Action from the benefit of hindsight. JA was popular with a certain level of reader, but was never a popular hit. The vast majority of comic buyers at this point in time were still young boys, not older fans of the medium. JA never rose above bi-monthly status, which indicates that its sales were solid enough to avoid cancellation, but not enough to raise it to monthly status. This is true of most of the more "adult" Marvel books of the 70's: Warlock, Captain Marvel, Dr. Strange, Killraven, etc.

Kirby was pure action and perfect for that target audience. There should be circulation figures in issues of JA and BP that would allow one to compare the relative popularity of the two runs. I would guess that the Kirby version probably sold a little better, but to an entirely different audience than JA. (unfortunately neither audience was big enough -- maybe if they could have been combined somehow).

As I recall, and I'm sure people on this list, including Don, can attest, Don's books, even though most were bimonthly, were often late on deadlines. Marvel was very sensitive about this issue, to the point that when Jim Shooter took over, he instituted several policies guaranteeing "fill-in" issues be ready at a moment's notice. If JA was one of those chronically late books, taking it away and giving it to Jack, who never missed a deadline, could be seen as a good business decision. Not an artistic decision, but a business decision.

In addition, comic distributors were always very cautious about offending people in the rural midwest and South. There are anecdotes galore about how publishers wouldn't even allow black characters or heroes because it would offend major distributors. In a newstand distribution model, if you don't get distributed, you don't even have a chance to sell your product. The story against the Klan could very well have been creating some of these negative reactions. Newstand distributors in the 70's were an odd bunch. Again, there are many different stories, but if they decided to kill a book, they could. They could simply refuse to put the book out, and automatically claim a return against the "unsold" copies. There's some strong anecdotal evidence that many "hot" books of the 70's like Green Lantern/Green Arrow and Kirby's Fourth World books were being sold in case lots out the back door and then those copies claimed as unsold because they were never counted as having been distributed through "normal" channels. The Klan story could very well have given these distributors a reason to stop pushing a marginal title, whether there was any actual public outcry or not.

And that is important, I think. JA was a marginal book. It's artistic impact may have been strong, and as you indicate in your email it's impact in the black community was disproportionate, but overall, the Panther was not a mainline character. He was published to a small but loyal audience. The publisher made a business decision to try a new approach to try to reach a larger, more profitable audience. I don't think that there was any conspiracy or even any racial overtones to the decision.

After all, Marvel has consistently tried to revive the Panther, so there's clearly some appeal to the character in the editorial offices. They finally concluded the Klan storyline in Marvel Premiere late in the 70's, the Panther was a long-running part of their bi-weekly Marvel Comics Presents title, there was the 4 part bookshelf series, and the revived series written by Christopher Priest.

There probably was a personality conflict that caused JA to be cancelled and given to Kirby, but it was also justifiable as a business decision. Ironically, Kirby's treatment in his second tenure at Marvel was a horror show, partially because people resented books like JA being cancelled and the Panther given to him.

I read this Hollywood Reporter article yesterday in which they talk about how Black Panther continues to do exceptionally well at the box office...

• The top second weekend of all time behind Star Wars: The Force Awakens
• The fourth movie to cross $100 million in its second weekend
• Tied with Jurassic World in reaching $400 million faster than any film in history behind The Force Awakens
• Already the top-grossing February movie of all time domestically

... and so on.

The article notes that, while still excellent, the international box office numbers aren't quite as record-breaking in other countries, but it still has yet to open in Russia, China, and Japan -- three very large movie markets. So final projections are naturally still sketchy, but many folks are easily counting on something north of $600 million.

All of those great numbers are easy to catch and smile about in the article. But on a subsequent reading, I caught something a bit darker that the "everything is amazing" tone of most of the reporting around the movie...

"The movie continues to play ahead of our modeling," says Disney's film distribution head Dave Hollis. "It has become a cultural phenomenon. This is a movie audiences were hoping for, and that delivered beyond expectations."

It looks optimistic enough, doesn't it? But let's sit back a moment to reflect on: "The movie continues to play ahead of our modeling."

Why do you suppose that is? I mean, Disney has been in the film business for a century now. They've shown repeatedly that they're experts at this sort of thing. And yet, not only were their initial projections way, way off but they had to keep revising opening weekend estimates all through opening weekend and into that Monday. And they still missed it by around $25 million! How did these people who have been doing this type of thing for decades suddenly miss so widely?

In a word: racism.

I'm not saying that anyone doing the actual calculations here is a racist, mind you, but the system as a whole is set up with very racial prejudices built into it. Essentially, the models aren't designed to take into account Black people.

The final first weekend total of Black Panther was $242 million, right? If you remove the 40% of the movie-going audience that was Black (which it was) and then remove half of those people again (based on anecdotal evidence, I'm guesstimating half of the Black audience saw the movie twice on average opening weekend) that would put the box office at $96.8 million -- right about where the initial projections were. If you want to be generous and add back in that 13% of the overall population that is Black, that still only brings you up to $109.4 million -- right about where the first revised set of projected estimates were.

That's back of the envelope math to be sure, but it certainly seems to suggest that Disney's "modeling" saw this film as just another superhero film in the Marvel franchise, and discounted what having a Black-written, Black-directed, Black-acted, Black-designed movie set in Africa about Africans might mean. I can kind of understand how your typical fanboy might miss that, being somewhat blinded to that by virtue of it being the last MCU film of "Phase Three" before getting to Infinity War but that the Hollywood folks were seemingly oblivious to this too suggests a cultural blindness. They couldn't see the film beyond what it originally slated on paper to be before Ryan Coogler was hired. Their cookie cutter models assume that all films are made by white men primarily for white audiences. They don't account for A) large numbers of Black audiences and/or B) how Black audiences buy movie tickets compared to white audiences. (That second part is how/why they kept revising their projection numbers during opening weekend; the incoming data they were paying attention to -- online sales made in advance of actually going to the theater -- wasn't taking into consideration audiences who just rolled up to the ticket window a few minutes before showtime.)

I am absolutely over-simplifying the hell out of this, but that's basically what happened. The models Disney used were dismissive of and/or ignored Black demographic habits and consequently they totally botched every single one of their projections.

One of the hopes a lot of people have right now is that Black Panther's success will prove to Hollywood executives that you can make a successful film by/about/featuring Black people. I'm skeptical, personally, but we'll see. I think one of the other hopes we should have, too, though is that whatever models are used to predict a movie's success will also be revised so as not to discount large swaths of potential audiences. But, frankly, I'm even more skeptical there.

Here are this week's links to what I've had published recently...

Kleefeld on Comics: On Business: Movie Sales and Review Notes
http://ift.tt/2HuUP6m

FreakSugar: Fanthropology: Dressing Up vs Cosplay
http://ift.tt/2ECJ8sm

Kleefeld on Comics: On History: 1966 Black Panther Letters
http://ift.tt/2sGk1Dp

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

Kleefeld on Comics: On -isms: Listen during the Panther Discussions
http://ift.tt/2EVRaQj

Kleefeld on Comics: On Strips: Editorial Panthers
http://ift.tt/2EMLzg9

With the US premier of Black Panther last Friday, it would normally have been the prime opportunity for editorial cartoonists to reference the movie, and its subsequent box office domination -- ultimately more than doubling the original estimates. However, since the day before was ripped up by yet another horrific school shooting, the headlines and subsequent editorial cartoons have largely been dominated over the past week with discussions about guns, the NRA, and the completely spineless inaction by virtually everyone in government, up to and including the maddeningly pathetic excuse we have for a President.

With that bit of my own editorilizing out of the way, I did find two cartoons from this past week that dealt with the Black Panther opening. Here we have comics from Steve Breen and Joe Heller...
Heller's is particularly interesting, I think, in that it specifically and directly challenges all of the non-POC movie-goers, and their typical lack of consideration for it being Black History Month, beyond the first few days of February.

After watching Black Panther, naturally my wife and I spent some time talking about it. Some of it was kind of superficial ("I need to find out how to use 'colonizer' at work without getting fired.") but a lot of it got into some of the larger issues within the film: the notion of a country hiding when it could be helping, whether the ends justify the means, etc. There was a lot to celebrate in the film, but a lot to consider as well. Particularly for a Black woman, like my wife. Being as I was the only one there with her during the discussion, I offered up my thoughts and opinions, but I tried to let her drive the conversation.

See, because despite my relative expertise in comics and superheroes (a genre which she actively dislikes), I knew that the movie wasn't about that for her. It was about that celebration of Blackness that was a through-line in the entire film, front to back. So from that perspective, she is decidedly more expert than me, a white guy.

She at one point noted that there was a lot to unpack in Black Panther and she would like to sit down for a debrief with around a half dozen of her Black friends to talk about it. With the friends she rattled off, I expect there'd still be jokes and light-hearted superficial comments, but I don't doubt that they could spend an hour or two just discussing Killmonger's "throw me in the ocean with my ancestors that jumped off the slave ships because they knew death was better than bondage" line.

She had mentioned something to the effect of wanting to debrief with her friends to a white friend who hasn't yet seen the movie, and they responded by saying that they'd love to chat with her about it. And while she didn't say anything, my wife was definitely thinking, "Yeah, the conversation I'm thinking about isn't one that you'd even want to be a part of, much less be able to contribute to." The point being that she, as a Black person, wants to unpack the Blackness of Black Panther with other Black people who can fully appreciate that Blackness.

As it happened, we did later sit down with a few friends after we had all watched the movie together. Of the five of us, I was the only white guy. And in that ensuing conversation, I mostly kept my mouth shut and just listened. When there was some question about continuity or how the movie differed from the comics, I threw in some facts around those points, but by and large, I just listened.

Because in that space, in that setting, in that context, my opinion is worth zilch.

I have nothing to offer in a conversation about what it means to be Black in America. I have nothing to offer in a conversation about being oppressed. I have nothing to offer in a conversation about how traditional African elements were both updated and honored. Not when I'm sitting with four Black people, two of whom had actually been born and raised in Zimbabwe.

All these Black Panther posts this month -- in fact, all of my On -isms columns -- they're not for POC. Everything I say here is shit they already know. Shit they've lived and had to deal with their entire lives. These posts are for the white folks who have only one Black friend, but they're not even really a friend because they just know them from work. My point here is to amplify what Black people are already saying, but have been ignored for the past few centuries. Maybe if a white guy like me, who by virtue of marriage happens to be a little closer to the Black community than most white folks, says what people of color are saying, it will have some additional privileged resonance among other people who look like me.

With that mind, let me make this suggestion...

If you're around any POC discussing Black Panther, whether that's in person or online, keep your mouth shut. I don't care if you have every comic book appearance of T'Challa ever and know the full history of Wakanda backwards and forwards, that is not your discussion to have. If you're in a comic shop or around a bunch of comic geeks, by all means, dive right into the conversation and enjoy! But if you're the white person among a circle of Black folks, shut up and listen. I can guarantee you will learn some things you never even considered before!

• A few years ago, Dr. Walter Greason of Monmouth University began something he called The Wakanda Syllabus as a way to use Black Panther as "an opportunity for global audiences to study the traditions of black nationalism, Pan-Africanism, and the variety of African indigenous cultures."
• You know what a lot Black people asked after watching Black Panther? "How'd they get everybody's hair to look so good?!" (White people, don't laugh! You probably didn't hear them ask, but they did! Trust me!) Ashley Weatherford talked to Camille Friend, head of Black Panther’s hair department, to get what all when into everybody's locks.
• Ryan Parker talked to Jack Kirby's family, who say that Jack would've love the film.
• Jamie Broadnax and Abraham Riesman have a short chat with Florence Kasumba about the lack of LGBTQ representation in Black Panther.