MYTHCOMICS: "THORNS IN THE FLESH, THORNS IN THE MIND" (JUNGLE ACTION #15, 1975)

As I stated in my review of THE GOD KILLER, Don McGregor's Black  Panther saga "Panther's Rage" was not unified enough to qualify as a mythcomic. However, "The God Killer" was a segment of the sage that possessed a complex unity, and so does the segment that followed two issues later, "Thorns in the Flesh, Thorns in the Mind."

Following the title, the first word in "Thorns" is "insecurity." Much of "Panther's Rage" revolves around the internal struggle of the Black Panther, a.k.a. T'Challa, King of Wakanda. Since the feature was a mainstream Marvel comic, the hero also had an external struggle, as he returns to his native land from an American sojourn and finds Wakanda in chaos, thanks to the activities of the revolutionary Killmonger and his many followers. Stan Lee and Jack Kirby had conveived Wakanda as a technologized jungle, but McGregor placed less emphasis on technology and more upon Wakanda as a patchwork of exotic, hostile terrains-- deserts, snowy wastelands, swamps, a "lost world" full of dinosaurs, and, in this story, a "forest of thorns" dominated by cacti and brambels.

The story could be said to start off with a literal bang. T'Challa pauses in the thorn-forest during his pursuit of Killmonger to quench his thirst, and a Killmonger henchman, Salamander K'ruel, fires an explosive arrow at the hero. Though the main villain sports a number of underlings with super-villain names and even weird powers, K'ruel seems to have a name modeled on the odd cognomens of Ian Fleming, like Auric Goldfinger and Pistols Scaramanga. I have no idea what the apostrophe in the name "K'ruel" is supposed to signify, though as I recall apostrophized names were a big thing in the seventies, possibly due to the influence of Robert E. Howard and H.P. Lovecraft. As for the "Salamander" part of the name, McGregor later provides a loose connotation, if not an explanation.

When the Panther engages in combat with K'ruel-- who looks like an ordinary native, albeit with strange welts all over his body-- the hero finds that K'ruel is a seeming incarnation of the forest itself. The welts contains thorns, and by grappling with K'ruel, the Panther is stricken unconscious by overwhelming pain.

When he awakens, all of the thorns that had covered his costumed body are gone, and since it's not likely that the villain removed them, one may hazard that they simply dissolved on their own. K'ruel, like innumerable villains before him, chooses not to slay his unconscious adversary, but puts the Panther in a death-trap, the better to make the hero suffer. For once, the villain has a good reason to leave the premises, since the death-trap consists of tying T'Challa to a pair of cacti and allowing one of the local pterodactyls the chance to have a panther-dinner. It's in K'ruel's farewell speech that he draws a loose comparison to himself and the real salamanders of the forest, saying that by the time he returns, "the salamanders... will have swarmed over your body." This doesn't seem like much a threat compared to that of the pterodactyl, though once T'Challa is alone, the hero does find that even a swarm of one proves daunting to his sense of self-worth and security.

In this one-page sequence, one single salamander, of the newt species, starts clambering over the Wakandan king's bound form, and McGregor's prose, however purple, is never better than in his exposition of the utter strangeness of this experience.

The salamander goes its way, and then the Panther is obliged to face a more immediate physical threat as a living pterodactyl comes for its dinner. T'Challa is caught between the flying devil and the deadly thorn-forest below him, but he manages to clamber onto the reptile's back, banishing "self-doubt" as he somehow steers the creature in pursuit of his enemy-- resulting in a most satisfying comeuppance for Salamander K'ruel.

I should note that McGregor interrupts this struggle between the jungle-hero and a living incarnation of the jungle's mysteries with three segues into the lives of the feature's supporting characters. Though all three sequences also deal with "insecurity," none of them are especially mythopoeic. McGregor ends the story not by entirely banishing all insecurity from the hero, but by having him realize that "purpose and self-doubt hover over him as if gamblers waiting for the outcome." Arguably this part of the sage foregrounds the hero's only partial triumph at the end of "Panther's Rage," in which T'Challa makes his last stand against Killmonger, though he is not solely responsible for the evildoer's defeat.