As we come to Part 10 of "Panther's Rage," the 1973-75 story which introduced the character of Erik Killmonger and his attempt to overthrow T'Challa's rule of Wakanda, the Panther remains in Serpent Valley where he tracked and dealt with Sombre, Killmonger's inhuman custodian of Resurrection Altar in the northern region where live the white gorillas of legend, and also learned of Killmonger's plans for harnessing the prehistoric beasts which roam the land. How much success he's having in tracking Killmonger is unclear; but a trio of Killmonger's men, led by the murderous Salamander K'Ruel (himself a product of the transformative rays of the Altar), have been left on their own to guard Killmonger's trail back to his home village of N'Jadaka.
The dangers that T'Challa will face in this particular story are two-fold, and are best represented by the issue's cover as well as its opening page: another prehistoric threat which this time descends on him from the sky, and one that approaches in stealth from the jungle in the hope of ending his life with one clean shot.
Yet the Panther survives the arrow's strike, while the glade presumably blunts the napalm blast from its tip. To K'Ruel's men, the incident happens much too quickly to have them doubt their own eyes, which tell them that the Panther was surely slain; but they're surprised and dealt with by the Panther just as another arrow fired by K'Ruel fails to find its target.
But when the Panther meets K'Rruel in direct combat, this time it's he who is shocked--as well as stuck, in the extreme.
The fact that writer Don McGregor has repeatedly lauded the Panther's "amber eyes" insofar as how he tends to notice things that would elude the eyesight of others makes it a frustrating experience to see the man fail in this instance to notice the sharp quills protruding from K'Ruel's flesh before choosing to clash with him bodily. Despite K'Ruel's arrogance, he must be wondering if the Black Panther is all he's cracked up to be.
Though we could say the same for K'Rruel--a man who had no qualms whatsoever about killing the Panther from behind, but who now provides a slowly-but-surely, time-is-running-out death knell scene for his foe that would do the 1966 Batman television show's cliffhangers proud.
The newt scene is milked by McGregor's narrative for all it's worth before the small creature finally, and harmlessly, moves on--hardly the swarm that K'Rruel led us to believe would materialize.
Or maybe they were all frightened away by the approaching pterodactyl; if so, you can imagine how T'Challa feels about it.
Meanwhile, Killmonger approaches N'Jadaka, or what's left of it--not realizing until now that T'Challa has scored a decisive strike against him, including the capture of those operatives that yet remained at large (with the exception of King Cadaver, who had accompanied Killmonger to Resurrection Altar).
Killmonger has developed a bad habit of being proven wrong whenever he believes T'Challa has died from either his own actions or those of one of his operatives, even though the opposite turns out to be the case. This time it appears he's under the impression that the tyrannosaurus rex he released near T'Challa's position has done the deed; so it likely would have brought a malicious smile to his face if he knew of K'Ruel's efforts on his behalf, and that, even now, his persistent foe might be falling to his death.
Or, he could be wrong in that respect. Again.
It's a scene which, for whatever reason, reminded me of this one from the classic 1964 Amazing Spider-Man Annual:
Like the web-spinner, the Panther turns the tables on his winged foe--as well as K'Ruel, who receives some well-deserved payback, this time absent his arrogant retorts.
Afterward, we see that T'Challa has finally made the trek back to Wakanda, where K'Ruel will no doubt be thrown into a cell alongside Killmonger's other captive operatives. We're told the journey took two days, the Panther dragging K'Ruel all the way--which either means that K'Ruel was unconscious for over 48 hours, or that the Panther knocked him out whenever he began to awaken, over a two-day period. Where's a pterodactyl when you need one?
COMING UP:
in Part 11: The Escape of Venomm!
 | Jungle Action #15 Script: Don McGregor Pencils: Billy Graham Inks: Dan Green Letterer: Karen Mantlo |
3 comments:
I guess McGregor never did any bowhunting. That is in no way a crossbow. There may have been confusion between writer and artist, but I tend to blame the writer here, since McGregor mentions the difficulty of keeping the bow drawn against fifty pounds of weight. Keeping a crossbow drawn takes no strength at all, since the crossbow is locked until the trigger is pulled.
I'm going to guess McGregor never saw a newt or read up about cacti either.
Okay, so as you say, CF, there was no actual swarm of blood-sucking newts, and it's a convenient, generic 'slimy little creature' to disgust T'Challa and the readers; but the concept itself is so left-field that I'm struggling to think about how it came about in McGregor's head. It doesn't help that Billy Graham* referenced an obvious, non-newt, very scaly species of gecko. I'm leaning towards leaf-tailed gecko.
And cacti: new world plants. Not african.
All that can be seen as nitpicking the story. That doesn't need much help from vampiric amphibians or misplaced flora (or confused weapons) to raise an eyebrow. It is an interesting kind of travelogue through Wakanda, if a little disjointed, and the prose is so purple, it looks bruised all over from McGregor beating it up...
Though I do admit that the combined script and art do a good job of creating a sort of fevered feeling to BP's hunt.
* My surname is Beattie. I can sympathise with the guy.
An excellent observation about the crossbow, George. I suppose it's possible that McGregor inadvertently added "cross" when he'd meant to just use the word "bow"--who knows? If he were a Tomb Of Dracula reader, he could have simply recalled Rachel Van Helsing's weapon of choice when writing his narrative for K'Ruel and adjusted his prose accordingly.
As for those cacti, Warren, as long as I'm playing devil's advocate, maybe the rules are different in Serpent Valley? If that area has dinosaurs roaming around, perhaps the plant life there needn't be indigenous to Africa. (Or maybe K'Ruel is responsible for their growth, though frankly that's a line of speculation I'd rather not pursue!)
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