Rich Buckler

Spinning out of Ta-Nehisi Coates' groundbreaking Black Panther comes The Crew, a new series co-written by Coates and his World of Wakanda collaborator, Yona Harvey, with art by the legendary Butch Guice. The team consists of Black Panther, Luke Cage, Storm, Misty Knight, and Manifold, who are investigating the death of a Harlem activist.

If you listed every comics publisher based on how much you associate them with superhero comics, Fantagraphics would be somewhere near the bottom. The prestigious indie publisher has been around since 1976, publishing underground comics as well as beautiful collections of classic comic strips. But in spring 2017, Fantagraphics is getting in the superhero game with All Time Comics, a line of shared-universe books spearheaded by brothers Josh and Samuel Bayer.

One of the major misconception that informs this idea is that, prior to 1986, there were no serious superhero stories. That's emphatically untrue. The late Silver Age and Bronze Age were full of dark, mature superhero stories ---"The Death of Ferro Lad," "The Night Gwen Stacy Died," etc, --- but there's one in particular that stands above the rest for how much it foreshadows the current mood of superhero storytelling; "Panther's Rage," a 13-part epic that ran bimonthly in the pages of Jungle Action from 1973-1975. Written by Don McGregor and pencilled by Rich Buckler, Gil Kane and Billy Graham, with inks by Klaus Janson, P. Craig Russell and Bob McLeod, and colors by Glynis Wein, "Panther's Rage" was the first great Black Panther story, combining a thrilling saga with a series of great stand-alone tales.

On this day in 1966, in the pages of Fantastic Four #52, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby introduced the world to Wakanda, the most technologically advanced civilzation in the world, hidden in the heart of the African continent. At the head of this great nation was its king, T’Challa, who had recently assumed the throne from his father, and with it the title of the Black Panther.

Many of comics’ most popular heroes have been around for decades, and in the case of the big names from the publisher now known as DC Comics, some have been around for a sizable chunk of a century. As these characters passed through the different historical eras known in comics as the Golden Age (the late 1930s through the early 1950s), the Silver Age (the mid 1950s through the late 1960s), the Bronze Age (the early 1970s through the mid 1980s) and on into modern times, they have experienced considerable changes in tone and portrayal that reflect the zeitgeist of the time. With this feature we’ll help you navigate the very best stories of DC Comics’ most beloved characters decade by decade. This week, we’re taking a look at the best Captain Marvel comics.

If you were a child in 1990, then you wanted to be a ninja. I actually suspect that this is true for literally every child of every era who has known what a ninja was, but I can really only speak from my own experience, and that experience had a lot to do with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. There were other ninjas of course, but while Snake-Eyes never really did much on TV and Sho Kusugi required a trip to the video store, the TMNT were swinging katanas and nunchuks around everywhere you looked. They were everything my eight year-old self wanted to be, and since growing a shell proved difficult, ninja training was obviously the next step. Sadly, I never had a copy of 1986's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Authorized Martial Arts Training Manual, or else I probably would've grown up into a life of silent assassination and smoke-bomb escapes, rather than just sitting in my office making jokes about comic books. But with a new theatrical movie and ninja interest returning to an all-time high, it's worth looking back now, to see if we can't find out a few ninja tricks to apply to our day-to-day lives. Spoiler warning: Unless your day-to-day life involves the proper handling of a sai, we will not.