YMMV / Black Panther

• Badass Decay: In the late 2000s/early 2010s. Panther had gone from outwitting Tony Stark, Mephisto, and pulling off repeated impossibly complex and brilliant schemes, and going to toe-to-toe with heavy hitters like Namor and the Hulk to getting yelled at by Luke Cage for not being as good as Daredevil. Al Ewing corrected this, though. Six issues into The Ultimates, and Panther's already dealt with little things like "Galactus" and "How do you get outside of time and space?" without blinking.
• Broken Base:
  • Some people really, really hate Reginald Hudlin's run on the comic, finding the T'Challa/Storm marriage forced and seeing Hudlin portraying Wakanda as too perfect. Some people love it for the Panther/Storm marriage, cool victories for T'Challa, external villains instead of the endless Wakandan coups and civil wars of the McGregor/Priest years, and a lighthearted, fun tone.
  • Jack Kirby's run can come off as either fun or mediocre, depending on the reader's tolerance for its anachronistic use of fantastical, lighthearted Silver Age tropes.
  • The Hickman years. Hickman fans usually love it, Panther fans usually hate it. People who were already fans of both can go either way. Some feel Hickman did a good job bringing back T'Challa's intelligence and scientific knowledge, and appreciate his portrayal of Wakanda. Others feel he made T'Challa too much of an Anti-Hero ruled by his emotions.
  • Wakanda itself is similarly subject to both abject praise by fans who love its strong Afro Futurism theme and the fact it has never been conquered in its history, and to derision by people who see it as a too perfect to be realistic.
  • Perhaps the biggest Broken Base to come in the Panther fandom was the marriage - and subsequent divorce - of T'Challa and Ororo Munroe. An avid fandom absolutely loved the idea of wedding Marvel's two oldest and most famous African superheroes and were saddened when they broke up. An equally avid hatedom despised the idea, citing it as a case of Strangled by the Red String (as explained under its entry) and reeking of tokenism, and were ecstatic (or at least thought it was the most natural result) when T'Challa divorced Storm and she made it plain afterwards that it was over.
  • Ta-Nehisi Coates' run. Some like the questions it raises about whether or not Wakanda truly is an advanced and progressive country while others find it poorly paced, a poor portrayal of T'Challa as an ineffective Pinball Protagonist and an undermining of the Afrofuturism elements that are vital to the Black Panther story.
• Cant Unhear It: Chadwick Boseman and James C. Mathis III have both become fan favorite choices for T'Challa's voice. Mathis in particular became one of the few cast members of The Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes to reprise his role for Avengers Assemble^note Fred Tatasciore also reprised the role of the Hulk, but with years of experience from projects predating and following EMH, and even attended the premiere of the first live-action Black Panther movie (to promote Avengers, Assemble!).
• Complete Monster:
  • Comic:
    • Ulysses Klaw, inheriting the malice and ambition of his Nazi war criminal father, came to Wakanda to steal its Vibranium. Killing hundreds, including King T'Chaka, Klaw was driven off by the young T'Challa before killing him as well. Returning to rule or destroy Wakanda and its people constantly, Klaw uses his mastery of sound to torture others on the regular, eventually becoming a being of living sound. Klaw helps kick off a war with Wakanda and tries to launch superweapons through the world to bring an "end of days" out of spite for T'Challa. Later turning a woman named Joya into a twisted cyborg to harness his sound powers, Klaw intends his masterpiece to be "The Scream", a blast of sonic power over the world to destroy the minds of humanity so Klaw can rule them, with Klaw vowing to T'Challa's sister Zuri that he will hunt down and kill everyone she loves as the price of defying him.
    • Reverend Doctor Michael Ibn al-Hajj Achebe, while allegedly having had his wife cheat on him and the rebel leader she ran off with having burned his farm to the ground, goes far beyond any reasonable actions. He started off by allegedly murdering everyone who'd ever met his wife—up to and including a merchant who once sold her shoes. Next, he went around starting race wars for fun. That was before he made a deal with Mephisto to try and destroy Panther just because, murdered a child as a diversionary tactic, and started a race riot in Washington, D.C. while trying to manipulate Panther into accidentally killing his own ex-girlfriend. Since then, he's mostly limited himself to starving animals to death, torture, and just generally doing whatever will cause the most harm, taking sheer glee in his actions.
  • In Black Panther: Sins of the King, Viper, aka Madame Hydra, is the leader of Hydra, who wants to take over Wakanda's resources for herself. She teams up with Dr. Miremba Angom, health minister to Waknada's neighboring nation Rudyarda, who secretly has a grudge against Wakanda. Viper tells the supervillain Graviton that Rudyarda is developing a particle bridge, and Graviton kills thousands in Rudyarda's capital to try to obtain it. Then Viper takes the guise of Jennifer Lancaster, director of an NGO called Ruby that promises to rebuild Rudyarda with Wakanda's help. Viper lures Black Panther into a trap and captures him, taking him to a lab where Hydra has captured hundreds of superhumans, experimenting on them to reproduce their powers. Viper has Black Panther tortured, but the latter escapes, later returning to learn that Hydra has invaded Wakanda. Black Panther and his allies defeat the Hydra army, but Viper has been working with Miremba to destroy Wakanda's population, with Miremba bringing back fallen Hydra soldiers as zombies, planning to use them to kill everyone in Wakanda. When the Avengers try to help Black Panther, Viper forces the supervillain Thunderball to attack them, threatening to blow up him with a bomb she placed on Thunderball if he refuses.
• Designated Hero: Depending on the interpretation. Played deliberately when Killmonger technically became the Black Panther, and insisted on joining the Avengers, despite being a villain and the guy who took the previous Panther out of action.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Everett Ross, T'Challa's best friend. His demotion to extra in Hudlin's run is still a sore point for fans. Naturally, they were pretty ecstatic when the Marvel Cinematic Universe made him a major character.
• Fandom-Enraging Misconception: Fans utterly hate it when anyone accuses the comic of being created as a mascot for the Black Panther Party. Not only did his comic book come out before the party was founded, but Marvel actually changed the hero's name to Black Leopard for a while to avoid any associations with the political organization.
• Fanon Discontinuity:
  • So much of Hudlin's and Liss' plot points are Wall Bangers for some that were big fans of the Priest run, although this isn't always the case. However, pretty much everyone agrees that Doomwar never happened... except, unfortunately, for Marvel themselves.
  • Panther's involvement in Secret Wars is a whole lot of this for many of his fans.
• Fridge Logic: Whilst comic books have never let scientific accuracy get in the way of a good story, the Retcon of Wakanda to having always been generations ahead of the rest of the world on a technological level really flounders when you consider one simple question: how did an Iron Age culture figure out how to even begin to interact with what is literally the most Nigh-Invulnerable metal on the planet? They can't melt it down, they certainly can't beat it into shape, so where do they even begin to experiment with it? Justified in issue #13 of 2020's ''X-Men: Marauders" line, where it's stated that, like its Adamantium knock-off, Vibranium can be made malleable by extreme heat, and the first man to figure out how to work it did so by setting up a forge on the rim of an active volcano to use lava to soften the metal.
• Genius Bonus:
  • Coates' run features characters discussing the likes of John Locke, as well as obscure poems by Henry Dumas, and generally features a lot of Allohistorical Allusion to real-world political struggles in the present and in history.
  • The Dora were introduced as wives in training for Black Panther. T'Challa has no interest in that, unlike other Wakandan kings. Then the creators made them an Amazon Brigade based on the Agojie, warrior women of Dahomey, for the movie. This was to remove some of the grosser implications of the tradition. But the historical Agojie are, in fact, technically all the wives of the king.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • The Kimoyo Cards that Wakandans use, especially Black Panther. The things are basically smart phones, complete with the same same-y design... first appearing in 1998, almost a decade before smart phones actually existed. Apparently Wakanda really is years ahead of the rest of the world!
  • The influence of Vin Diesel on Kasper Cole's appearance might now seem like unintentional foreshadowing of Vin playing a Marvel character. However, it doesn't foresee him playing someone else, or that he'd only do so as a voice over.
  • The beginning of Hudlin's run had a Wakandan suggest bartering the cure for cancer to the U.S., a notion which someone else dismisses because, "They'll just take the gift and turn it into a weapon, like they do with everything else". In Dark Reign it's revealed that Norman Osborn had weaponized a cancer cure for use against people like Deadpool.
  • The Jungle Action series had T'Challa fight against villains named Venomm and Lord Karnaj. Years later, Spider-Man got two villains with similar names.
• Iron Woobie: T'Challa does not have an easy life, but he almost never angsts about it.
• Jerkass Woobie: White Wolf. He just wants to help Wakanda, but is constantly insulted and rejected, driving him into villainy.
• Memetic Badass: Kind of inevitable given that Black Panther has canonically PUNCHED OUT SATAN.
• Mexicans Love Speedy Gonzales: For all the occasional slips in depicting Africans in the series, the series has many black fans who like the setting of Wakanda for being an ancient African civilization with a highly advanced technological economy and Afrofuturist themes.
• My Real Daddy:
  • Don McGregor's run in Jungle Action in The '70s is now regarded as something of a forgotten classic, with T'Challa returning to Wakanda after a long absence and dealing with his country's feelings of desertion, and new villain Erik Killmonger. It used to be really hard to find, but thankfully the film has changed that.
  • While it didn't sell particularly well at the time and it got complex to the point of near-parody, Christopher Priest's run on the character in the late 1990s is one of the most well-regarded runs in Marvel's recent history, and is one of the big reasons why so many fans were upset with Reginald Hudlin's run, albeit not by Priest himself who was friends with Hudlin, and who pointed out that Hudlin's run sold better than his, and introduced the Breakout Character Shuri. A lot of the movie was directly inspired by Priest's work.
  • Jonathan Hickman is also credited as one of T'Challa's best writers by Ta-Nehisi Coates. T'Challa was featured in a major role in his epic run on Fantastic Four and The Avengers (Jonathan Hickman), where he was Deuteragonist to Reed's protagonist. Hickman made T'Challa and Wakanda into a major corner of the overall Marvel Universe and many of the events in Infinity War, the Black Order's attack on Wakanda in particular is based on events from his Infinity in addition to heavily focusing on the heavy burden of being King and superhero on T'Challa's shoulders.
• Narm: Indonesian-speaking fans (applies to both comics and film) can't take M'Baku's name without laughing because it sounds similar with Indonesian (or rather, Jakartan/Javanese) equivalent of "my older sister" (Mbakku).
• Never Live It Down: Wakanda withholding the cure for cancer has never stopped being a source of mockery at best, a source of contention at worst.
• Older Than They Think: The comic book character actually preceded the similarly-named real-world African-American militant group, and wasn't, as many later fans think, named in reference to it.
• One-Scene Wonder: Solomon Prey only appeared in the Panther's Prey miniseries, but proved himself to be a very formidable foe to the Panther.
• Pandering to the Base:
  • The abrupt ending of the T'Challa/Storm marriage in Avengers vs. X-Men has been interpreted as a present for detractors of the Hudlin era.
  • As of 2018, after the movie was released, Black Panther and Wakanda as a whole are given a more active role in the comics continuity such as the Avengers (2018) series. A lot of fans felt that it's simply an attempt on Marvel's part to ride on the movie's popularity to draw in more readers.
• Salvaged Story:
  • Former Power Man and Iron Fist scribe Christopher Priest used a story in his Panther run to give Iron Fist his powers back.
  • Hudlin's Captain America/Black Panther: Flags of our Fathers miniseries retconed a short WWII flashback in the first issue of Hudlin's run that had Captain America losing to an unnamed WWII Black Panther in a Curb-Stomp Battle. The mini gave the context behind the fight while leaving the result ambiguous. It fleshed out the Black Panther, now identified as Azzuri T'Challa's grandfather, and had him team with Cap against the Red Skull.
  • Jonathan Hickman's Fantastic Four run (that led into his Avengers run) had Reed offer to help T'Challa find a fix for inert Vibranium. T'Challa laughs it off, questioning why Reed thinks he himself hasn't already solved it, and also noting that he's smart enough to have contingency plans for his country's economy. Basically it's a quick fix for Doomwar.
  • Ta-Nehisi Coates is using his run to resurrect T'Challa's sister, Shuri.
• Strangled by the Red String: T'Challa and Storm. Hudlin basically built the marriage out of a two-issue cameo from Priest's run where their "romance" was treated as an unrealistic-but-cathartic childhood fantasy that would never actually work in any real way, and included Storm explicitly comparing Panther to Magneto. This was either alleviated or exacerbated (depending on your point of view) by the Storm flashback miniseries which came out around the same time and established that Storm and T'Challa did have an earlier romantic relationship when they were teenagers.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: Many believed that the death of Shuri acted as emotional angst for T'Challa instead of any real conclusion to her role as Black Panther in the "End Times" storyline. The 2016 comic corrects this by following Shuri's adventures in Djali, the plane of ancestral memory, and bringing her Back from the Dead soon after.
• Tough Act to Follow:
  • Christopher Priest's run essentially redefined Black Panther in every way and is almost universally loved. Reginald Hudlin's work was tolerated only as long as it reworked Priest's ideas; the second he went in his own direction, sales tanked.
  • It's likely a testament of his writing skills that Don McGregor's run turned out to be one for Jack Kirby himself.
• Vindicated by History: At the time it was being written, the David Liss run was disliked by fans for having T'Challa serve as a replacement hero for Daredevil in Hell's Kitchen. However, some fans (especially those dissatisfied with the Ta-Nehisi Coates and John Ridley runs) have developed some appreciation for Liss's story for maintaining T'Challa's Guile Hero skills and showing how he can retain his awesomeness in a different environment.
• What Do You Mean, It's Not Political?: Black Panther was created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby in 1966, almost at the same time of the creation of the Black Panthers party. But Lee and Kirby were first. Marvel even attempted for a short time to rename the character to "Black Leopard", to avoid the misunderstanding, but returned soon to the original: they created it first, why should they give it up?
• The Woobie: Kasper Cole. Even before he became a superhero and had to deal with supervillains trying to ruin his life, he was constantly harassed and mocked by his peers for being mixed race.

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