Marvel's 'Black Panther': A Review

Before the days of social media, and even before the days when everyone had telephones (let alone a smartphone) it was possible to believe that you had your own discoveries in terms of what you liked and adored - things that ‘no one else knew about’, that belonged to you alone, that were your own ‘secret pleasures’. One of the first of these for me was the long-running BBC TV series Doctor Who; another was the comedy TV series Monty Python’s Flying Circus, and there were many others. These were things which were hardly ever mentioned outside the family - I didn’t even know if others knew of their existence. All I knew was that I loved them. No one ever talked about them; no one shared them, other than the immediate family. They were ‘mine’.

One of them was Marvel Comics. This was back in the 1960s, before comics became part of what they call the ‘mainstream’ and before anyone had invented the word ‘geek’. Comics back then occupied a peculiar twilight zone, known to so few that I could believe that they were known only to me. That special time in the 60s, when Stan Lee, working with other creators like Steve Ditko and particularly Jack Kirby, brought about a renaissance in a medium most people believed was long dead, was a fantastic time to be a c