The Black Panther on the Daredevil art spread

Perhaps the item appearing in the Daredevil Chronicles was an early iteration of what appeared as the cover of the DD Index

Daredevil.ChroniclesComic book connoisseur Alan David Doane, who used to frequent the comic store known as FantaCo, where I used to work back in the 1980s, asked me this on Twitter recently:

“It took me 32 years to wonder — why is the Black Panther in this pinup? Anyone know?”

He asked me because the picture appeared in a magazine called the Daredevil Chronicles, which FantaCo published in 1982. This was a magazine Mitch Cohn edited, while I was editing the Fantastic Four Chronicles. He also asked Klaus Janson, the inker on the piece over Frank Miller’s pencils, the same question.

Truth is, I had never thought about it. In the Daredevil “family”, Elektra (the woman on the top) and the Black Widow (the woman on the bottom) were featured in that comic. But Black Panther, other than being another costumed Marvel character, was not related to DD at that time.

But around that same period, there was a competing product, the Daredevil Index, published by George Olshevsky, which was, oddly, 9B in the series:
Daredevil index9b
Frank Miller also penciled this piece, although Joe Rubenstein inked it. Perhaps the item appearing in the DD Chronicles was an early iteration of what appeared as the cover of the DD Index, which also featured The Black Panther, as well as Shanna, Black Goliath, Human Fly & Dazzler. I no longer have my DD Index, alas.

I should note, for those unfamiliar, that the Black Panther had nothing to do with the political movement of the same name, and in fact, predated the organization. Rather, it referred to T’Challa, an African king, who first appeared in a Fantastic Four comic book, cover-dated July 1966, but released a few months earlier. It was the then-upcoming version of Olshevsky’s X-Men Index that prompted FantaCo to come out with the X-Men Chronicles the year before.

If someone has a more definitive answer to this question, please feel free to jump in. This is merely my best guess.

Civil War cards

At least a plurality of the cards had someone dying by being impaled by something, and the pained eyes of the soon-to-be deceased I always found haunting.


In a discussion on the website of SamuraiFrog, I wrote: “Yeah, just the frickin’ trailer of [the Quentin Tarantino film] Kill Bill 1 put me on edge; I can only imagine how it actually plays out.” To which, somewhere, Mr. Frog asked if it was because of the violence. Well, yeah, but it’s more specific than that.

Of all the forms of fictionalized violence in movies, the type I hate the most involves people getting stabbed or, worse, run through with a bayonet or sword. And I know why.

There were these Civil War Trading Cards that came out in 1962 from Topps, the folks that made the baseball cards. I bought them because they were history, and I was interested in that, but I don’t know why – except for some bizarre sense of completeness – I KEPT buying them.

While there were soldiers shot and run over on some cards, I swear that at least a plurality of them had someone dying by being impaled by something, and the pained eyes of the soon-to-be deceased I always found haunting. The card above is a good, not great, example of this.

So even in PG-13 movie violence, I often instinctively turn away when swordplay is involved.

You know what comic book I found yucky? It was a Daredevil, somewhere in the #160s, I think, drawn and written by Frank Miller, in which Elektra stabs some guy through a seat in a movie theater; that guy, and the terrified guy next to him, had THAT look, too.

In my dorm in college, two guys were sword fighting once; I left right away because I was afraid that someone would accidentally spill blood.

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