What the Hell Is Marvel Doing with the Black Panther?
? April 2008: BET announces it’s going to air a Black Panther cartoon, based on the Marvel superhero.
? January 2010: Australia airs the Black Panther cartoon. It looks pretty cool.
? June 2010: Neither BET nor any other channel in America has aired the Black Panther cartoon.
? Also June 2010: Marvel debuts a shitty Black Panther motion comic on Entertainment Weekly.
What the fuck? They have a perfectly good Black Panther cartoon that’s already been made, and has real animation and every thing. No seriously — watch the opening to the cartoon:
…and now go over to EW to see the trailer for the motion comic (it’s not embeddable, or I’d put it here; but it sucks so I’m kind of glad to have the excuse to run the cartoon intro again). You don’t have to be a comic fan to discern the superior product here.
So why aren’t they releasing the cartoon instead of spending time, effort and money on a goddamn motion comic? It makes no sense whatsoever. I mean, if there weren’t a Black Panther cartoon already made, a motion comic might make sense. But there is. So it doesn’t.
About The Author
Robert Bricken is one of the original co-founders of the site formerly known as Topless Robot, and its first editor-in-chief, serving from 2008-12. He brought the site to prominence with “nerd news, humor and self-loathing” as its motto, raising it from total internet obscurity to a readership in the millions, with help from his savage “FAQ” movie reviews and Fan Fiction Fridays. Under his tenure Topless Robot was covered by Gawker, Wired, Defamer, New York magazine, ABC News, and others, and his articles have been praised by Roger Ebert, Avengers actor Clark Gregg, comedian and The Daily Show correspondent John Hodgman, the stars of Mystery Science Theater 3000 and Rifftrax, and others. He is currently the managing editor of io9.com. Despite decades as both an amateur and professional nerd, he continues to be completely unprepared for either the zombie apocalypse or the robot uprising.