Black Panther 2B NM Marvel Knights Bruce Timm Cover 1st pri Mephisto Movie 2 MCU

Description

Black Panther (1998 Marvel 2nd Series) #2B

Published Dec 1998 by Marvel
Cover art by Bruce Timm
Background page providing information on the characters in this issue
Script by Christopher Priest
Pencils by Joe Quesada (storytelling) and Mark Texeira
Inks by Mark Texeira and Alitha Martinez (background assists)
32 pgs, full color

Invasion
The Black Panther and his entourage buy Chinese takeout, leading to the theft of Ross’ I.D.; later, Ross entertains Mephisto in a housing project, and Panther continues his investigation.

Featured Characters:
Black Panther (T’Challa)
Queen Mother Ramonda
Niki Adams
Dora Milaje
Okoye
Nakia
Zuri
Everett Ross
Mephisto
Manuel Ramos
Achebe (Mentioned)
Marvin (First appearance)
NYPD
Francis Tork
Marion Vicar (First appearance)

Ross continues recapping the events of his meeting with King T’Challa to Nikki, who’s starting to keep track of his story even though Ross still occasionally gets ahead of himself and is hung up on “the Devil’s pants.”

Ross fills in the events missing from last issue, starting with when he went to pick up T’Challa from the airport and finds him waiting with an 80 plus staff. Since his 2 seater Miata won’t get the job done Ross phones his office inside the airport, desperately trying to both order some limos and clear traffic. Embarrassed by the disrespect of his Miata, he’s also confused by the huge staff: the Black Panther usually visits the United States alone.

Adding to the tension is a Kymiko card call from Queen mother Ramonda that sends Zuri into a rage: back in Wakanda a man named Achebe has taken advantage of T’Challa’s absence during the refugee crisis to seize power, using Wakandan sympathisers to sabotage the main defence grid. While Zuri hurls furniture around T’Challa rages in silence, having always had to keep his emotions in check. Ramonda shoots down his suggestion to return, believing it will only lead to more deaths in the struggle, urging him both to watch his back and to remember what his father taught him besides “all that warrior nonsense.”: how to think.

Ross nervously introduces himself as the king’s State Department attache, apologizing for the delay in transport. Stuck between the impassive T’Challa and the bellowing Zuri calling for blood in the streets, he suddenly realises they are feeling the same thing: anger. Despite this T’Challa remains perfectly collected, urging Zuri to remain patient and focused on the Tomorrow Fun scandal that brought them to the States, accepting transport in Ross’ Miata, despite the aids protests. After all it would be an insult not to accept such kindness.

Ross ferries T’challa, Zuri and Okoya and Nakia of the Dora Malaje down the Van Wyck express way, offering to drop the client either at the rooms he took the liberty of reserving at the Plaza hotel or Avenger’s Mansion. To his surprise T’Challa instead asks to be taken to Brooklyn, and not to just to begin work on the Tomorrow Fund investigation: the king and his entourage intend to stay in the New Lots housing project.

That night, after settling in, Ross takes the four to a nearby Chinese takeout for a massive order to feed the staff that’s moved into the floors beneath them. The owner is incredulous and Zuri making the order isn’t helping. Ross tries to smooth things over by smooth talking the owner in Cantonese, joking that the Wakandan party is “way out of town”. Unfortunately the owner is Filipino and T’Challa speaks both Cantonese and his native Tagalog, clarifying the joke the now mortified Ross was making at their expense.

Adding to the troublesome night is the fact the restaurant doesn’t accept credit cards and when the Dora Malajie produce the large sum of cash to cover the huge order they inadvertently attract the attention of Manuel Ramos and his gang. Ross needlessly steps in, trying to intimidate the gangster with his State Department ID. A grinning Ramos responds by biting the cover off and lifting Ross off the ground by his hair. Before Ross can receive the pummelling of a lifetime a shotgun blast is fired into the air: sardonic NYPD sergeant Francis Tork is on the scene. Ordering a cowed Ramos to “rob someone else” he initially assumes that Ross is a Long Island college boy trying to buy drugs from the dealing Ramos. Things only get worse when Ross realises Ramos has taken his ID and an amused Tork notes T’Challa and Zuri exiting with the take out and Zuri’s enormous hunting spear.

Booking the group, Tork runs the diplomatic plates on the Panther’s limo and releases them. Ross learns that Ramos hangs out in a strip bar with a mud wrestling pit and storms off to get his ID back. It goes about as well as you’d expect. Ramos tosses the ID into the mud pit and, when Ross refuses to play, Ross himself. Zuri lunges onto the scene determined to defend the honour of “he whom his liege has anointed” and begins to brawl with the two wrestlers who’ve been beating the tar out of Ross, stripping him to his undershirt and boxers. As the Panther and the Dora Malaje arrive on the scene to restore calm, Ross snaps and joins in the violence, later admitting to Nikki that he was responding to memories of Natalie McPhail, a girl in third grade who used to beat him up. Tork arrives yet again, this time with uniformed officers, and arrests all of them.

Ross convinces the Assistant District Attorney to release them on diplomatic immunity and the group return to New Lots, where the events of the first issue unfold. While the Black Panther continues to hunt down criminals, marking them with his energy daggers and coercing them to help track down Jamie Robins’ murderer, Mephisto arrives at the apartment and installs himself in the living room on a throne of bones surrounded by fire. Ross, still missing his pants, sits awkwardly on the couch next to the demon. After some fidgeting and attempts at small talk, he lets slip about his pants being stolen. Mephisto uses his powers to conjure a fresh set of pants. Ross’ initial delight wares off the second he realises what that means: by accepting the Devil’s Pants he has inadvertently sold his soul.

Meanwhile, having recruited the city’s underworld as an information network, the Panther breaks into the prison cell of Marion Vicar, the disgraced executive director of the Tomorrow Fund. T’challa demands the name of the man who corrupted Vicar, and when she belligerently refuses, has Okoyo beat and restrain her with a truncheon held across her throat. In reality T’Challa is simply here to confirm what he already suspects, and Vicar’s surrendered name confirms it: the man behind the Tomorrow Fund scandal and the political upheaval in Wakanda is Achebe.

In the present Nikki asks who Achebe is. Ross slams his head on the table and mutters that “that’s is where the fun starts…”

The extent to which T’Challa is aware of his enemies’ plot will be revealed in the course of the series, but his language to Vicar during the interrogation (“Who cast a spell on you, Vicar?” “The name Vicar. The devil who engineered this game–“) hints that he either knows or at least suspects of Mephisto’s demonic connection to events.

Bruce Walter Timm is an American artist, character designer, animator, writer, producer and voice actor. He is best known for his contributions building the modern DC Comics animated franchise, most notably the DC Animated Universe.

Timm’s early career in animation was varied; he started at Filmation, working on the layout of Blackstar, Flash Gordon, He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, its spin-off She-Ra: Princess of Power, and The Lone Ranger (Timm also did background work on G.I. Joe). He also worked for numerous other employers, including Ralph Bakshi, Don Bluth Productions, and attempted to find work at Marvel Comics and DC Comics, but without luck. In 1988 he worked at DiC on The Real Ghostbusters for one season, then joined Warner Bros. in 1989. At Warner, Timm worked on Tiny Toon Adventures.

However, Timm is best known for his subsequent work on the animated series based on various DC Comics superheroes, popularly referred to as the “DCAU” (DC animated universe) and also named Timmverse or Diniverse after both him and Paul Dini. Along with his Tiny Toons partner Eric Radomski, Timm co-created and produced the Emmy Award-winning Batman: The Animated Series, which premiered on September 5, 1992 through which he created the character of Harley Quinn who would go on to become a popular character both in comics and eventual television and film media, and went on to co-create and produce Superman: The Animated Series (premiered in September 1996), The New Batman Adventures (premiered in September 1997), and Batman Beyond (premiered in January 1999), through which he created the character of Terry McGinnis and his supporting cast who like Harley Quinn would also become a character in the comics and later television and film media. He also served as producer on the feature-length Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker before taking the helm as creator and producer of the animated version of Justice League, which debuted in November 2001; the series continued in the form of Justice League Unlimited. Timm was also the producer and creator of Green Lantern: The Animated Series. Along with Paul Dini he created the animated series Freakazoid! (premiered in September 1995).

Although he shared character designer duties on Superman: The Animated Series and Justice League with James Tucker, Timm did virtually all the original character designs for Batman: The Animated Series himself (with the exceptions of Mr. Freeze and the Riddler, who were designed by Mike Mignola and the characters Man Bat and the Mad Hatter, who were designed by Kevin Nowlan).

Black Panther is a 2018 American superhero film based on the Marvel Comics character of the same name. Produced by Marvel Studios and distributed by Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures, it is the 18th film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU). The film was directed by Ryan Coogler, who co-wrote the screenplay with Joe Robert Cole, and it stars Chadwick Boseman as T’Challa / Black Panther alongside Michael B. Jordan, Lupita Nyong’o, Danai Gurira, Martin Freeman, Daniel Kaluuya, Letitia Wright, Winston Duke, Angela Bassett, Forest Whitaker, and Andy Serkis. In Black Panther, T’Challa is crowned king of Wakanda following his father’s death, but he is challenged by Killmonger (Jordan) who plans to abandon the country’s isolationist policies and begin a global revolution.

A sequel, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, is scheduled to be released on November 11, 2022, with Coogler returning to write and direct. Nyong’o, Gurira, Freeman, Wright, Duke, and Bassett reprise their roles, while Tenoch Huerta is set to appear as an antagonist. In August 2020, Boseman died from colon cancer, surprising Coogler, Feige, and other executives at Marvel Studios, who had been unaware of Boseman’s illness. Feige said in December 2020 that the role of T’Challa would not be recast, with Shuri expected to have a more prominent role in the sequel.

Near mint, 1st print. Bagged & Boarded.