It’s a long-held axiom that “all art is political.” Making history in his debut as the first Black super-hero, T’Challa, the Black Panther, has always been a political figure. But beyond the colour of his skin, he is also the monarch of an African nation; he’s suited to stories centered on politics in a way characters such as the Hulk or Spider-Man are not.

The Black Panther is also a foreign monarch of a fictional nation written principally by Americans, a nation whose founding principles included the rejection of monarchies. Consequently, from Stan Lee to Christopher Priest and beyond to Ta-Nehisi Coates, the Black Panther’s status as a monarch tends to be either lionized or deconstructed.

During Christopher Priest’s run, Black Panther received a favorable write-up in Entertainment Weekly, declaring, “Christopher Priest has turned the saga… into a swashbuckling political thriller.” Priest indicated that this write-up helped prevent Black Panther’s premature cancellation. (The quote appeared on the cover of Black Panther #28). For his part, Priest frequently referred to the series on his website and in online forum conversations as “West Wing in a Kitty Suit,” referencing the popular 1999-2006 television political drama.

Of course, the comparison to The West Wing was not entirely accurate – Black Panther fell more into the genre of political thriller than drama, more similar to films such as Three Days of the Condor (1975) or even the action-thriller Executive Decision (1996), whose plot of a terrorist plane hijacking can be glimpsed in Priest’s own plane hijacking story in Black Panther #13-14. There was little of The West Wing’s emphasis on forming coalitions and passing legislation.

“The Client” – Christopher Priest’s first storyline in Black Panther – opened on Everett K. Ross of the U.S. State Department as the narrator, but quickly turned its eye on the Black Panther’s own politics. It’s established that just prior to the start of the series, T’Challa had opened a refugee camp in Wakanda for people fleeing from an ethnic conflict in two neighboring countries, Ghudaza and Ujanka. Soon, the refugees brought their conflict into Wakanda and fought each other, while the xenophobic Wakandans likewise turned on them. As Ross described the situation: “The client [T’Challa] was too noble a guy to cut the refugees loose. He determined that all of Wakanda would learn to accept one another and help their neighbors. In other words, he wasn’t much of a politician.”

The situation would be familiar to 1990s audiences, reminiscent of the 1994 Rwandan genocide and subsequent flight of the accused killers into the Congo as refugees, which brought the conflict across the border. T’Challa leaving Wakanda in the midst of the refugee crisis was the first element; as would quickly become clear, one of the supposed refugees was one Reverend Doctor Michael Ibn Al-Hajj Achebe, the apparent architect of the genocide which had precipitated the crisis and whose attempt to perform a coup and depose T’Challa would engulf the first 12 issues of the series. As a contrast to Ross’ summation of T’Challa, Achebe was depicted as a career politician; in Black Panther #4, Achebe appeared on television to the Wakandans presenting himself as a “neutral arbiter” in T’Challa’s absence and holding up a dog in a cloying attempt to win their sympathies (and perhaps invoke a notorious 1952 political speech by Richard M. Nixon).

But the crisis set in motion by Achebe was exacerbated – not only because he’d made an alliance with the demon Mephisto – but because T’Challa’s adopted brother Hunter (alias the White Wolf) used the occasion as a means by which to attempt to compel T’Challa to reinstate him and his secret police, the Hatut Zeraze. By issue #9 (during the storyline “Enemy of the State”), it became clear the United States had helped arm Achebe’s people to commit the genocide in Ghudaza by selling the weapons through the Russian mafia and the South American nation Volcan Dumoyo, so Volcan Dumoyo could bring the weapons to Achebe – a situation similar to real-life plots such as the Iran-Contra affair. T’Challa added his own fuel to the problem by addressing the United Nations in Black Panther #10 and declaring the United States’ actions constituted “an act of war.” This caused President Bill Clinton to order Ross to obtain a retraction from T’Challa, but T’Challa refused to accommodate Ross, as everything he said to the UN was true.

Indeed, as stated in the UN Charter (Article 2.4): “All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations.” With Wakanda and the U.S. as fellow members, it was the U.S. who had first violated the charter.

The first 12 issues of Black Panther featured critiques of T’Challa’s politics from Ross and Hunter; although the actual coup was carried out by Achebe, Achebe’s ultimate goal was to utilize Wakanda’s power to engulf the region in a bloodbath. He evinced no long-term political savvy, just the immediate goal of obtaining and using power. The mostly unseen operatives assisting Achebe (the Russians, Volcan Dumoyo, and the U.S.) wanted to diminish Wakanda’s power and saw installing Achebe as the means of disgracing the country.

Compared to its real-world counterparts, Wakanda would be a model of strength and stability. An outsiders’ view of the continent sees each African nation as a series of revolving-door would-be strongmen (as in the animated program The Simpsons, whose 2001 episode “Simpsons Safari” depicted the family’s tour guide seizing power in Tanzania by the end of the half-hour). This perception of African governments as weak and constantly overthrown came from the period of the various nations’ independence, such as Martin Meredith described in his book State of Africa in discussing Ghana’s history (being the first African nation to obtain independence from its colonial conquerors): “In the first two decades of independence, there were some forty successful coups and countless attempted coups. In 1967, a 27-year-old Ghanian army lieutenant, Sam Arthur, finding himself in temporary command of an armoured car unit, decided on an attempt to seize power because, he later confessed, he wanted to ‘make history’ by becoming the first lieutenant successfully to organise a coup.”

Wakanda, of course, not only had never been a colony, but had maintained its monarchy for at least several hundred years. If Wakanda appeared to be a utopia in the stories of Stan Lee, Jack Kirby and Don McGregor, one can understand why nations such as the U.S. would want to dominate them, why a citizen of a poorer nation like Achebe would resent them, and why T’Challa might appear in the eyes of Everett K. Ross to be “not much of a politician.”

In the eyes of Hunter, however, Wakanda was a powerful nation that had been held in restraint by T’Challa’s weak leadership. Hunter, raised as an adopted son, saw himself as the true successor to T’Chaka. Priest himself drew a contrast in writing about T’Challa and T’Chaka in a Usenet post: “Under T’Chaka’s iron glove, the tribes were unified by virtue of T’Chaka’s Kick Your Butt policy. T’Challa’s Live And Let Live policy actually creates more conflict among under educated or stridently religious ethnic groups. A dictatorship tends to keep the peace a lot better.” Hunter can be seen as seeking to re-establish what Priest called the “Kick Your Butt policy.”

Priest’s second lengthy political thriller in Black Panther was his Erik Killmonger story, which ran from issues #13-24. With Killmonger, Priest set up an economic peril for T’Challa, explaining to Monica Lynne that “the Wakandan economy is based primarily on a single export commodity—Vibranium. Under tribal law, the king is the nation’s attorney—in fact, and he unilaterally controls all Vibranium sales. Ergo, the king literally is the Wakandan economy. All the wealth in the kingdom belongs to him, making him one of the richest men in the world.” Killmonger’s plan, therefore, was to devalue T’Challa, causing public relations problems for him that would crash Wakanda’s economy. “What if the Wakandan coin were suddenly worthless?” Killmonger mused. “How fast would those cheering crowds turn to riot? The king would ultimately be forced to defend the nation against its own people.”

Killmonger was attempting to bring down his enemy without ever having to throw a punch at him (despite Killmonger’s repeated reminders to other characters that he’d previously never lost a fight against T’Challa). However, T’Challa proved more than adept at facing Killmonger’s threat, first dismissing the Wakandan parliament, then nationalizing all the U.S. companies in Wakanda which Killmonger had been forging financial partnerships with. As Monica Lynne observed, T’Challa had called Killmonger’s bluff – causing a worldwide financial crisis in order to preserve his rule in Wakanda. “Destroying Wakanda’s economy just to spite me–?” Killmonger wondered. “Do you really hate me that much–?”

Unable to defeat T’Challa politically, Killmonger had to resort again to violence, eventually defeating T’Challa in a hand-to-hand fight. As a consequence, Killmonger was awarded the identity of the Black Panther, but he quickly discovered his victory had been unsatisfying. He was the veritable dog who had caught a car and didn’t know what to do with it. Of course, this epic once again made use of Hunter, using T’Challa’s crisis as a piece of leverage. This time, Hunter helped provoke a solution to T’Challa’s problem by needling Killmonger into completing the Rite of Ascension, in order to truly become the Black Panther. This involved ingesting the Heart-Shaped Herb, which had given each Black Panther their powers. The herb proved to be toxic to Killmonger, resulting in his death.

One result of the financial crisis was the stock for the Wakanda Design Group (the U.S.-based corporation that sold Wakandan technology, such as the Avengers’ Quinjets) going into freefall. Tony Stark quickly bought up the shares, ostensibly to protect the company from other predatory businessmen – but due to Stark’s own personal fallings-out with T’Challa, it became another point of contention between them both. “It is unlikely Panther would ever put a majority of the stock on the block,” Priest said on the Black Panther Message Board, “so Wakanda retains a controlling interest in WDG, but Stark is fully vested as the major stockholder, and they can’t do anything without his OK.”

Priest explained on Usenet, “I’d hoped Frank Tieri [at the time, the writer of Iron Man] and I could do a thing with this, but our timing wasn’t right.” Looking back a few months later, Priest regretted setting up the financial crisis because no other Marvel titles reflected what should have been a global problem. “I quickly realized nobody else in the Marvel U was going to play along. Two things I wish I hadn’t done: the economics bit and Tony Stark buying of WDG. Both bits of business have not been picked up elsewhere in the Marvel U. I kind of realize now that we are pretty much on our own, continuity-wise, which isn’t a dig at anybody, it’s just the way things are. So I just put the economy back.”

The series’s next political thriller was the story “Sturm Und Drang” (Black Panther #26-30). Priest described the story for Comic Book Resources: “’Sturm Und Drang: A Story of Love and War’ is a political drama about military brinkmanship between Wakanda and the Deviant Lemurians that ends up escalating to military conflict between Wakanda and Atlantis and Wakanda and the United States and threatens to escalate to world war,” Priest said. “It is, possibly, one of the first times war is presented as the political chess match most wars are, and we see how fragile peace on earth in the Marvel Universe is.”

Within the larger context of his goals for the series, Priest stated, “I think the ultimate goal of the series is to re-position T’Challa within the Marvel Universe, away from the bland, passive, generic Kitty Man standing in the back row of the Avengers, and more towards an inscrutable, enigmatic guy who does things in his own way and for his own reasons. It may seem preposterous to some that Panther could demand a summit with Doom, Namor and Magneto; I’d like to change that net impression among fans and make Panther somebody to be feared and respected and in the same league, in the mind of the fan, as the Marvel heavyweights; somebody Magneto would respect, if not fear.”

In this story, Hunter formed an alliance with Ulysses Klaw, the man who had murdered T’Chaka – the figure Hunter had so often claimed as his own father, denigrating T’Challa’s status as T’Chaka’s son by blood. Using Klaw at all took some effort on Christopher Priest’s part; while Klaw looms large in Black Panther stories because he figured in T’Challa’s origin and slew his father, Priest disliked how often the villain had been matched up against T’Challa. “I didn’t want to use him right away because that’s what everyone does– they use Panther and they pit him against Klaw, usually to lame results,” Priest explained on the Avengers Message Board. “So, we relegated Klaw to a Year Two villain, but then he showed up in CAPTAIN AMERICA, and I really wanted him to _not_ be seen for awhile before he popped up in PANTHER. So we went with Killmonger, and intended to have Klaw around for the issues leading up to #25 (as our Year Three opener). But then the Killmonger thing ran long, and we had other things to do like the DEADPOOL crossover (which HAD to happen in #23 if it was to happen at all), and, well, it’s a really long story.”

Hunter’s great plan was to have Klaw assault a U.S. aircraft carrier, the U.S.S. Roussos (named for the Marvel colorist), making it appear Wakanda was responsible. Hunter’s timing was impeccable, as the Black Panther was then in a standoff against the undersea nation of Lemuria, with an entire fleet of Wakandan warships (‘N’Yami-Class’) surrounding Lemuria.

Not only was Wakanda incorrectly blamed for the Roussos’ destruction by the media, but the media entirely misrepresented why the Roussos had been near Wakanda. It was there to support operations in rounding up stray extraterrestrials from the recent line-wide Marvel crossover, Maximum Security, but the media intimated it was there specifically to act against Wakanda because of the tensions that had existed between the U.S. and Wakanda since the book’s first year. “The point with ‘Sturm…’ was how global politics and wars are actually played,” Priest wrote on the Black Panther Message Board. “Everything is a misinterpretation of something else. Hint: whenever you read a news report or some such in PANTHER, regard it with suspicion. It is not, typically, a narrative tool for my use, but is part of the story: the news report being subjective and often interpretive.”

Priest delighted in placing the politics of Lemuria’s Deviants – the monstrous, genetically-unstable creatures from Jack Kirby’s Eternals – into a real-world context. In Black Panther #27, Lemuria’s leader Ghaur went on the television program Nightline to confer with host Ted Koppel and offer his perspective on the conflict with Wakanda. “Our own weapons of war are far superior to the puny Wakandans,” Ghaur claimed, “but we seek a more merciful, diplomatic solution! Our allies, the Atlanteans, have a mutual defense pact with Latveria and Genosha which will force a global confrontation!” It was similar to Achebe’s acting in front of the cameras during “The Client,” but Ghaur being a blue-skinned man with a large cranium, the scene verged into the surreal.

“See, I figured, ‘Why not?’” Priest wrote on the Black Panther Message Board. “Why not have everyone playing politics? The first thing world leaders do is get on American TV, and that means Nightline or Meet The Press or This Week.”

Hunter and Klaw’s partnership ended swiftly in Black Panther #28 when Klaw had Hunter poisoned then set off for a face-to-face confrontation with T’Challa. Asked about Klaw on the Black Panther Message Board, Priest compared him in an unflattering light to the Archie Comics character Reggie Mantle. “Klaw is stupid. The White Wolf was his meal ticket: Wolf’s brains and Klaw’s powers made them a terrible threat, the only thing in the arc that even gives Panther pause. But, as I see him, Klaw is just plain stupid. Headstrong, arrogant, lead around by his emotions. And he drops the one guy who could have helped him win.” Priest did grant Klaw one smart move, when he used his sonic powers to imitate Ghaur’s voice and order Lemuria to launch its weapons against Wakanda.

Priest found the actual fight between the Black Panther and Klaw in Black Panther #29 to be the least interesting part of his own story: “Klaw’s main problem, I think, is that he’s Klaw. If the White Wolf had Klaw’s power, and could somehow divorce himself from his intense loyalty to Wakanda and Panther’s father, now THAT would be one nasty guy. Or, if Klaw was LESS STUPID, he’d be a much more dangerous guy.”

“The only thing that bothered *me* about Klaw’s historical feud with Panther,” Priest elaborated, “was the absence of a singular emotion: *rage.* This is the man who *slaughtered* hundreds of Wakandans, including their revered king and Panther’s father. Panther *hates* Klaw. *HAAAAAAAATES* him. Panther probably dislikes Killmonger and Hunter, and likely has not much personal stake in any other enemy. But he wants Klaw dead. Dead, dead, dead. And, if I’d had a [little] more space, I’d have Panther kill him, bring him back to life, just so he could kill him a few more times.”

As Priest detailed on Usenet, the real problem Hunter had created for T’Challa was forcing him into a scenario where the rest of the world might learn just how powerful Wakanda was:

Wakandans are not nice people. By and large, they are aware of the outside world, they are reasonably free to visit the outside world, but they do not like or respect the [outside] world, what with all of that racism and Monica Lewinsky and so forth. They are what the French [have] been accused of for years. They are nice, in the sense that they’d give you a cookie, but they are a race not unlike the ancient Mayans: their culture is hundreds of years older than ours and us largely [undiluted], an unconquered race that has, until very recently, lived in total isolation. We, and [include] African Americans in this, are mongrels to the Wakandans. Undeducated and barbaric. A land of David Letterman.

They don’t give a flying damn about whether or not Wakanda makes the world at large nervous. I believe Panther’s basic understanding of global politics is what drives him to be such a good poker player. Does he only have 6 N’Yami ships, or 600 or 6000, stationed in hidden grottoes all over the globe? Could Wakanda, literally, become Nazi Germany and conquer the continent? Europe? The globe?

Probably not. The real ‘stress’ part of Sturm Und Drang is not Namor or Magneto or Doom or Ghaur or Kro– it’s Ted Koppel. It’s the *really* scary possibility that nations, seeing this demonstration of Wakanda’s power, will act out of fear. Panther is being forced to play some choice cards that he’s kept hidden for a lot of years– THAT’s the real peril, here.

This peril described by Priest was defined by political scholar John H. Herz as the security dilemma:

The heartbreaking plight in which a bipolarized and atom bomb-blessed world finds itself today is but the extreme manifestation of a dilemma with which human societies have had to grapple since the dawn of history. For it stems from a fundamental social constellation, one where a plurality of otherwise interconnected groups constitute ultimate units of political life, that is, where groups live alongside each other without being organized into a higher unity.

Wherever such anarchic society has existed—and it has existed in most periods of known history on some level—there has arisen what may be called the ‘security dilemma’ of men, or groups, or their leaders. Groups or individuals living in such a constellation must be, and usually are, concerned about their security from being attacked, subjected, dominated, or annihilated by other groups and individuals. Striving to attain security from such attack, they are driven to acquire more and more power in order to escape the impact of the power of others. This, in turn, renders the others more insecure and compels them to prepare for the worst. Since none can ever feel entirely secure in such a world of competing units, power competition ensues, and the vicious circle of security and power accumulation is on.

Despite T’Challa’s belief that his forces would not fire unless fired upon, he discovered in Black Panther #28 that his vessels opened fire on the Atlantean forces, because when Klaw commandeered the forces of Lemuria and ordered a missile launch, the Wakandans saw them flooding their missile silos in preparation for an attack. Unable to attack the silos with the Atlanteans defending them, the Wakandan military opened fire on them first, then the silos. “And that gentlemen,” Magneto advised T’Challa and Namor, “is how wars begin—little steps, anticipatory responses, get them before they can get us. Little breaks in communication.”

“Sturm Und Drang” also offered an interesting reflection on an earlier use of Wakanda in comics that helped buttress Priest’s interpretation. Early in Black Panther #27, Namor cautioned, “This business wlll get out of hand, T’Challa—just like the Kiber Island Incident!” This referred to a moment in Defenders #84 (by writer Ed Hannigan and artist Don Perlin from 1980) in which Atlantis and Wakanda were on the verge of war; the Sub-Mariner’s fellow Defender the Hulk went leaping through the air nearby Kiber Island, a Wakandan protectorate; believing the Hulk to be a missile fired by Atlantis, the Wakandan military launched a nuclear missile at him, which instead destroyed Kiber Island. Witnessing the blast, T’Challa remarked aloud, “It is a shame that most of the world’s first awareness shall be linked with an atomic explosion!” The following issue depicted anti-nuclear activists denouncing T’Challa outside the Wakandan Consulate in New York.

“It was really bad, IMO, made Panther and/or his people seem like idiots,” Priest opined. “But it did reveal Wakanda to be a nuclear power.” Still, nuclear weapons were not an issue in “Sturm Und Drang” and Priest believed “Wakanda to now be a completely nuclear weapons-free state. I think Wakanda’s technology is beyond nukes at this point; Panther does not need weapons of mass destruction, just defensive weaponry to protect Wakanda.”

Priest had been informed of the Defenders story by fan Ian Watson (who received a ‘thank you’ in Black Panther #28), and the incident was described in detail by Magneto during Black Panther #28. “Incidentally,” Magneto snarked, “I pray you’ve updated your targeting arrays enough to tell the Hulk from a ballistic missile…” The scene also revealed that two Atlanteans whom T’Challa had incarcerated in Defenders #84 were still in Wakanda’s custody at the time of the crisis with Lemuria, “refusing my repeated extradition requests,” Namor fumed.

Since the first year of Black Panther, relations between the United States and Wakanda had been thorny, with Ross caught between the two powers – bound by loyalty to T’Challa, yet increasingly rendered a pariah to his own government. This came to a head In Black Panther #30, as the U.S. Senate’s Intelligence Committee held a hearing about T’Challa’s actions, Ross spelled out to them why they were best off continuing to leave T’Challa alone: “We have no leverage – political or economic – over him. If you kick him out of Dodge, it won’t make any difference to him or his nation. We will be the only losers. All of us. … You don’t need this hearing. You don’t need advanced defensive systems to protect us from him. All you need to do is tell him to go home. If you order him to leave and never return to our shores, he will obey. And then God help us all.”

Priest eventually found an opportunity to pick up the state of the Wakanda Design Group during the 5-part “Enemy of the State II” story (Black Panther #41-45). Given permission to use Iron Man, the storyline was also strongly connected to the first “Enemy of the State” (Issues #6-12), as the entities who supported Achebe’s coup were again involved. Stark’s possession of the Wakanda Design Group’s shares was ultimately a small part of the drama, which pitted T’Challa and Stark against each other. At one point, Stark was willing to give the shares back to T’Challa but – as the villains had Stark’s future self working for them – instead T’Challa performed a hostile takeover of Stark Industries, ensuring Stark would have to perform an equitable trade to settle matters between them.

This time, the plot was far outside real world politics as the overarching threat was the conglomeration XCON, comprised of various nations’ covert agencies, identified as the same forces who supported Achebe’s coup during “The Client.” XCON sought to take over governments by summoning the future selves of world leaders (using King Solomon’s Frogs, time travel devices from Jack Kirby’s 1970s Black Panther stories) and, while they were disoriented, place them under XCON’s control. At one point, because Canada’s Prime Minister had been compromised by XCON, Panther invoked a long-ago treaty made between his grandfather and the indigenous people of Anishinabe Island in Canada and announced he was annexing the island. T’Challa’s only purpose in doing this was to focus the world’s attention on Canada and help expose XCON’s coup.

“[Blockading] Canada?” Priest wondered on Usenet. “Panther could do it, but it would be a de-facto act of war against the U.S. because Panther would have to deploy some kind of super-satellites to scour Canada’s borders from outer space, zapping any plane, train, or automobile or boat that tries to bring anything into Canada. I mean, c’mon, gang, this is COMICS! Of course it CAN be done, but there’d be huge political fallout.”

Ultimately, however, “Enemy of the State II” proved to be yet another story in which Hunter was manipulating events against T’Challa. In Black Panther #44, Hunter revealed he had at some point killed XCON’s leadership and seized control of their plan as punishment for their earlier coup. Hunter likewise took aim against Iron Man for daring “to place your filthy hands on the jewel of Wakanda—Wakanda Design Group.” As Iron Man listened to Hunter’s tirade, he wondered “if he was saying things you [T’Challa] felt. Feelings you, a king, weren’t at liberty to express.”

Hunter’s presence links all of these thrillers together. Although his primary goal was to return to Wakanda from his exile and be officially reinstated as head of the Hatut Zeraze (secret police), each story featured Hunter delivering pointed criticism of T’Challa’s use of force. Hunter seemed, much like the U.S. Air Force General Curtis LeMay (source of the infamous “bomb them back into the Stone Age” quote during the Vietnam War), to believe in deterrence as an effective use of force. Hunter disdained not only that T’Challa seldom invoked Wakanda’s firepower but that he had kept the nation’s capabilities a secret from the outside world.

In contrast, T’Challa’s use of force recalls the wily samurai Sanjuro in the 1962 film of the same name by Akira Kurosawa, who stated, “the best sword is kept in its sheath.” In Priest’s stories, T’Challa could be accidentally drawn into military conflict (as described in “Sturm Und Drang,” when his forces opened fire on the Atlanteans), but he preferred to hold his nation’s armaments in reserve. In his conflict with Killmonger, he was willing to crash the global economy to defeat his foe, and the conflict only turned into a physical clash between the two men when Killmonger was frustrated by the defeat of his economic theories. Within both “The Client” and “Enemy of the State II,” T’Challa preferred to expose his adversaries’ covert activities on the world stage, humiliating them. In every story, he refused to take the simple road offered by Hunter – to solve his problems by delegating them to Hunter’s purview. T’Challa repeatedly made difficult decisions with long-lasting consequences for him and Wakanda, but he was not one to be tempted by revenge, eye-for-an-eye retaliation, or brinkmanship.

Hunter believed if the world saw how powerful Wakanda was, they would fear and respect his adopted nation – “speak softly, and carry a big stick,” as Theodore Roosevelt put it; Hunter needn’t have looked to nuclear weapons to see how unlikely that was. Richard Gatling believed of his eponymous gun: “It occurred to me that if I could invent a machine gun which could, by its rapidity of fire, enable one man to do as much battle duty as a hundred, that it would, to a large extent supersede the necessity of large armies, and consequently, exposure to battle and disease would be greatly diminished.” Instead, when armies saw what the Gatling gun could do on the battlefield, they wanted to acquire models for their own use. If Wakanda’s weapons were known to the world’s governments, they would simply want to own those weapons, and that’s what T’Challa repeatedly prevented.

From 1998-2003, Christopher Priest’s Black Panther was perhaps the only super-hero comic book where debates on the global economy, security dilemma, and competing theories of deterrence were on display.