The Black Panther initially appeared to be an African equivalent of Captain America. He shared Cap’s powers of super-athleticism and was, like Cap, a master strategist who could, given sufficient planning, even trap the Fantastic Four.
The fact that T’Challa was also the leader of a secret super-civilization was a new twist.
It’s no coincidence that T’Challa teamed up with Cap to destroy Baron Zemo’s planet-threatening solar ray. It seemed logical that Cap would suggest the Black Panther as his replacement in the Avengers.
And, Marvel being Marvel, T’Challa’s enrollment in the team wasn’t all tea and cakes.
In The Avengers 52 (May 1968), the Black Panther arrives at the team’s mansion only to find Goliath, Hawkeye and the Wasp dead. Blamed for their murders, he escapes from police. He tracks down the real culprit, the Grim Reaper, who turns out to be the brother of the temporarily dead Wonder Man.
Eric Williams was the black sheep of his munitions-enriched family. “Eric was embittered and just a tad guilty,” noted Jeff Rovin in The Encyclopedia of Super Villains. “Eric sought vengeance (for his brother Simon’s ‘death’ in a battle with the Avengers). Getting in touch with the Tinkerer, he had the gadget master build him his scythe and so became the villainous Grim Reaper.”
Luckily, the Avengers were no deader than Wonder Man eventually turned out to be. The Black Panther was able to restore them from suspended animation using the Reaper’s multipurpose scythe.
In fact, this was a variation on the plot idea that had introduced Captain America to the Avengers in the fourth issue. When the other superheroes are frozen into statues by an alien ray, Cap is left to operate on his own to find a way to restore them to life.
“In 1966, Marvel debuted the first black superhero, a cosmopolitan African prince called the Black Panther,” noted Bradford W. Wright in Comic Book Nation: The Transformation of Youth Culture in America. “Marvel’s black superhero was apparently coincidental to the founding of the black militant group, but both clearly chose the name because it evoked an image of black pride. Just as significant, perhaps, was Marvel’s gradual introduction of random African-American citizens into common street scenes, in which they appeared as policemen, reporters or mere passers-by. It was a belated but meaningful comic book illustration of America as a multiracial society.”
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