MARVEL 2002: Black Panther, "Enemy Of The State II"

 

Panther and Iron Man are embroiled in a deadly plot that threatens both of them in this definitive moment of Priest's iconic run!

(This post was originally featured on the Uncanny X-Cerpts Patreon and may be subject to formatting issues)

By Priest, Sal Velutto, Bob Almond, Steve Geiger, Justin Thyme, Paul Tutrone, Dave Sharpe, and Jennifer Schellinger. Edited by Mike Raicht & Mike Marts. Joe Quesada, EiC; Bill Jemas, Publisher.

In 2002, Christopher Priest (or simply Priest) was in his fourth year of stewarding the Black Panther, which had begun as one of the launch titles for the Marvel Knights imprint alongside the Kevin Smith/Joe Quesada Daredevil run, and the Punisher run where it was his job to shoot angel-guns at demons. Running from Black Panther 41-44, this story arc recalled the events of an earlier Priest Black Panther story (handily called "Enemy of the State") in which Wakanda falls prey to a coup by an international cabal known as XCon.

This story begins when a well-connected hip hop magnate called MGM is assassinated. Given MGM's connections (he owns half the police and is in bed with the CIA) he rates as someone who shouldn't just "get killed," and so Senator Kamal Rakim, an old associate of T'Challa's, reaches out to Tony Stark for assistance. Tony, in turn, tags Black Panther, either because he's aware of Rakim's connection, or because he thinks "This is a Black guy thing, I'm going to not get involved." Although slightly put off by Tony's casual racism, Panther agrees to get involved, and follows the XCon trail to Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario.

And since he's in Canada, there's one guy he's got to team up with, and I don't mean Puck.

Wolverine and T'Challa infiltrate an XCon-sponsored casino boat in search of a briefcase containing an item important to XCon's plan, but at the same time, Iron Man gets his dander up when he is informed by Henry P. Gyrich (ugh, that guy) that Panther has been surveilling Avengers' Mansion through their communications infrastructure, further deepening philosophical differences that already exist between the Avengers and the Black Panther, who was recently revealed to have only joined the team just to spy on them.

Black Panther and Wolverine manage to give Iron Man the slip following a tense underwater battle. But Wolverine is more than a little put off when he learns what they risked their lives for at the casino:

Yep! A little ornamental frog.

To backtrack a little bit... 

See, there's this other Black Panther running around. And this Black Panther, who has been confirmed as being 100% genetically confirmed to be T'Challa, is pretty much the opposite of the usual Black Panther. While BP as we know him today (in 2002) is a cool, calculating, distant customer, this other Panther is a laughing, bombastic maniac, and to really highlight the distinction, is drawn and depicted in a pretty capable Jack Kirby pastiche, right amidst the contemporary art and characters.

He, the villainess Nightshade, an eccentric collector of Antiquities named Abner Little (who also happens to be a little person, ha ha ho) and another Kirby-esque refugee named Zanda, along with audience surrogate character Everett K. Ross (you know, the Martin Freeman guy from the movie) mount an attack mission against the mysterious isle of Kiber (wait, that sounds like...) to obtain a matching artifact, the other of King Solomon's Frogs.

The frogs, apparently have the ability to summon warriors from all across the time stream, as well as other kooky time travelling properties.

Meanwhile in Chicago, T'Challa's protege (and fiancee, although she doesn't seem too keen on it) Chanté, who is also known as Queen Divine Justice, has been caught up with a former-XCon agent known as Junta, who seeks her help in returning the currently-misplaced President to where he belongs. and since it's 2002, that President is...

Now who doesn't care about-- erm, nevermind.

Panther quickly enacts a scheme using berry futures (?1) to stage a takeover of Stark Enterprises (he owes Tony one, as Tony is currently a minority stakeholder in the Wakandan Design Group that, among other things, designs the Avengers' jets.) Tony soon learns the truth -- XCon has actually already been destroyed by Black Panther's brother White Wolf (who is, as his name suggests, a white guy.) Wolf has even taken control of XCon's scheme to place a duplicate President in the White House and also wants to kill Tony for his colonialist business interests in Wakanda.

The key to the duplicate scheme? None other than King Solomon's Frogs, which can summon a duplicate person from six seconds in the future, but the trip makes them so loopy they become prone to post-hypnotic suggestion. They've already done it in Canada.

"Do it" Dan?

Panther relinquishes control of Stark Enterprises -- he only needed it long enough to gain access to Stark's vault and obtain an item he wanted to use. That item -- a neutralizer that can ultimately be used to stop Tony's artificial heart -- comes into play at the story's conclusion, a knock-down drag-out fight between Iron Man and Black Panther... which turns out to be between both men's time-displaced duplicates.

Eventually, everything is put back into place, but the story ends with some Solomon Frog shenanigans that sends the Panther crew back to the old west...

But that's for the next story.

"EOTS II" represents some incredibly cerebral and risk-taking comics. Since Priest's T'Challa is a man of few words, the series' POV character and narrator is Ross, the milquetoast white guy who is along for the ride, providing a sardonic and self-deprecating point of view. The book is bordered in black instead of white to give it that ink-soaked, hardline, claustrophobic, even paranoid look, and punctuated by Frasier-like title captions to underscore the dry wit at play.

So much of the book is concerned with incredibly arcane power moves, espionage, corporate intrigue and diplomacy, which makes it feel dense and quite heavy with exposition. Black Panther's fighting style is "think twelve steps ahead of the other guy." Here he is constantly exploiting technical minutiae that is imagined to exist in Iron Man's technology, to the point where him putting pieces into place for an expected future fight provokes other fights that he also needs to be ready for. That, combined with his minimal verbiage, makes for a very interesting approach to a protagonist.  And I think Priest had a ball with it, provided his house wasn't an incomprehensible mess of note cards and string.

Priest was absolutely a writer who knew why he made every decision he did in creating his comics, such as, as he has said in interviews, inventing the character of Everett K. Ross to open the world of Wakanda up to his likely-majority-white readership. The writer flexes hard to establish the stand-apart vibe of the Black Panther as a comic, bringing in esoteric cultural, historical, scientific and geopolitical points. As far as I know this is the only comic ever published with a scene set in Sault Ste. Marie, ON (with its proximity to the States and surrounding Great Lakes Islands as a focal point for political intrigue) and the only one to go into the science behind the suit that lets Iron Man fight underwater. Combining that with the examinations of racial dynamics, it's political both in the way the Daily Show is political, and the way Game of Thrones is political.

The downside of this is that in all the plots within plots, the book seems a little too smart for the room, and a little too cool to just be a comic. It's absolutely visionary, but not likely to connect with huge portions of the audience (and not likely designed to). It reads like a a dense, twist-laden airport thriller as much as a Marvel comic, to the point where a bad guy like White Wolf can appear in a few pages, seem to be the big bad, then disappear unscathed and never even figure into the big climactic issue. It even finds time for Wakanda to annex a small island in Lake Superior thanks to a treaty signed in the 1800s, and to reveal that Tony, in fact, owns the company that makes the Avengers' communications tech, not T'Challa. My head was spinning trying to keep track of who owned what, when, how, and where it fit into the scheme. And yet if you can keep up, you get something exceptional.

The book has a secret soul to it, in that it's also the kind of book where a jokey-jokey Jack Kirby pastiche is going to end up figuring into the big political coup plot, or finding a way to zap the self-serious Black Panther character into the Old West, or where a character like Chanté (a social justice warrior before the term was coined) can spend long digressions in breathless, earnest public policy debates with the sitting President of the United States between the action beats -- imagining a world in which George W. Bush could actually capably describe and defend his policy decisions in political science terms, not reducing them to obnoxious soundbites like "Smoke 'em out."

[[I was later to learn that the Kirby stuff was Priest's way of suturing together some of the wildly divergent takes on T'challa in the past, specifically referencing an earlier Solomon's Frogs story that would seem to be at odds with previous and future interpretations of the character. The book is, in its way, a loving meta-tribute to a character that could be defined in any number of ways by the mostly white creators that had guided him in the past. Check out Douglas Wolk's essential All Of The Marvels for more.]]

Also, not long after this he wouldn't be requesting the Dixie Chicks.

The thesis of the story is to delineate the fraught relationship between supergenius American hero Tony Stark, and supergenius Wakandan hero T'Challa. They're not dissimilar at all, but the relationship is defined by T'Challa's rightful chafing at what he perceives as junior status amongst the Avengers when he is, in fact, a supergenius monarch. This can be read, in a meta way, as a statement on Black Panther-the-title's compartmentalization away from the Marvel Universe proper, and how he has rarely, if ever to this point, been embraced for what he is meant to be. Priest uses every tool in his kit to remind us of Black Panther's status -- second to none.

Part of the story's remit is to situate T'Challa amongst the other stars of the Marvel U. It works well when he's butting heads with Tony Stark, but Logan's appearance here is a bit shoehorned, as though "We're doing Canada, why not bring Wolverine?" Alpha Flight also appears for like two panels.

In the end, "Enemy of the State II" makes a great summary of what this era of comics was for Black Panther. Smart, cerebral, crafty... and goofy (but smart, cerebral and crafty about its goofiness.)  

The book was right in the spirit of the times for 2002 -- and probably a little bit ahead when it arrived on the scene in 1998 which is why it was the unmodified long-runner of that initial Knights run -- as comics were getting to that place where they wanted to try out a little more their academic or creative muscles and test what the audience would go for. Priest serves up an uncompromising format for the Black Panther, an uncompromising character if there ever was one, and that's the book's charm. I'm not sure an audience of millions would quite go for this vision of the T'Challa, but it absolutely proved that if you put out a quality book with this character, there was something special there.