DAREDEVIL #245 (August 1987)
“Burn!”
Writer: Ann Nocenti
Penciller: Chuck Patton
Inker: Tony DeZuniga
Letterer: Joe Rosen
Colourists: Christie Scheele & George Roussos
Editor: Ralph Macchio

The 1980s was not a great time to be a Black Panther fan.

His last solo series ended in 1980. He made a few other appearances later that year (including the Marvel Team-Up back-up strip that would later be used to justify pairing him up with Storm), but in 1981, he didn’t appear at all. He made a single appearance in 1982, and that was in Marvel Graphic Novel #1, which had everyone in it. In 1983, he didn’t appear at all. In 1984, he was in the Assistant Editors Month issue of Avengers and had a back-up strip in the Marvel Team-Up Annual. In 1985, he didn’t appear at all. In 1986, he was in West Coast Avengers Annual #1. And in 1987 he was in this issue of Daredevil.

Things picked up for him in 1988, when he got a four-issue miniseries. But as of Daredevil #245, his Marvel Knights series was still over a decade away, and the shift towards a more Afrocentric interpretation was further away still.

Aside from the Panther, though, the focus of this story is Wheeler, a Hell’s Kitchen resident heavily in debt through his gambling habit. At one point, he worked for the government of Wakanda as one of a group of guys in flying suits of armour, who were heroes of some sort. Wheeler isn’t Wakandan himself. “What a rich little African empire that was,” he muses. “I sure got paid well to protect that place.” There’s no explanation of how he ended up there, but in 1987, Wakanda was still the sort of place that would bring in some American mercenaries to prop up the military.

Wheeler was so good at his job that he got to marry the king’s cousin M’Koni, or “Mary”. Somewhere along the line he lost interest in heroism, and he and Mary moved to New York. They have a son called Billy, but Wheeler’s gambling habit stops him providing for the kid properly. And Mary is now locking herself in her room in protest at his behaviour. Wheeler still has his armour, though it’s seen better days. No explanation is given for why he was allowed to keep it – it’s played as if the Wakandans just let you keep the toys when you resign. Perhaps Wakanda is full of retired pilots with a fighter jet in their garage.

Come to think of it, you might also query the whole bit about a Wakandan royal winding up in Hell’s Kitchen, for that matter. But then again, T’Challa himself has a history of improbable stints posing as a New Yorker, so maybe this is just the sort of thing Wakandan royals do. Particularly if they’re marrying an American commoner.

The Black Panther is in town on business, so Billy lets him know about the family problems. The Panther duly shows up to lecture Wheeler about his failings, and threatens to take Mary back to Wakanda if she’s unhappy. The Panther doesn’t particularly care about Wheeler’s personal problems, but strongly hints that if he can’t get himself in order, he should do the honourable thing and abandon his family rather than dragging them down with him.

So Wheeler decides to sort out his financial problems. He puts on the suit and robs a bank. Daredevil steps in to stop him, to the Panther’s tremendous disappointment – for some reason, the Panther seems to think that Wheeler is doing something honourable and should be allowed to get on with it. Nonetheless, the Panther helps to subdue Wheeler, and then reveals that he’s paid off Wheeler’s gambling debts so that he can start a new life. When Wheeler points out that gambling addiction doesn’t really work that way, the Panther tells him to “go” and not see his family ever again. Wheeler interprets this as advice that he should kill himself, and the Panther doesn’t seem to have any particular difficulty with that.

All this leads to a fight between Daredevil and the Black Panther, as they debate whether Wheeler is doing the honourable thing. Meanwhile, Wheeler winds up being shot by the police. Apparently the armour can’t be that great, because a few conventional bullets cause it to start burning up. To be fair, he hasn’t been taking good care of it, but even so, it’s meant to a suit of hi-tech armour. Maybe the Wakandans let him keep it because it was cheaper than taking it to the dump. Anyway, Daredevil saves Wheeler from the burning armour, and the Panther reluctantly joins in at the last minute, musing that Daredevil has more faith in Wheeler’s ability to change than he does. The story ends with Wheeler starting to turn his life around with his family and being accepted back by his wife (who we never actually see).

It’s an odd issue, especially with hindsight, because it really doesn’t fit with the modern take on the Black Panther. But there are other issues. The whole idea that a former American mercenary working for the Wakandans has been allowed to take a minor royal and a suit of battle armour back to his apartment in Hell’s Kitchen is odd. And the moral debate that anchors the story is one-sided – it requires us to take “you should kill yourself in shame at your failure to provide for your family” seriously as a reasonable, honour-based cultural diference. To be fair, it’s the sort of arbitrary honour-compulsion story that you used to get about Japan in the 1980s, and at least here it’s anchored to a more recognisable shame and humiliation in Wheeler’s failure to provide for his family. But it doesn’t really work.

Wheeler just about scrapes his way into qualifying as a villain, since he does rob a bank, he does fight Daredevil over it, and he does have some superhero trappings. Those have been largely absent from Nocenti’s run up till now, but that will start to change from this point. In that respect, he’s a minor turning point for the book. But he was clearly never intended as a recurring villain.

If anything, he seems like a viable supporting character for this book, at least in its Hell’s Kitchen iteration. He’s a resident of a neighbourhood that isn’t that large and he has some back story as a hero of sorts. He’s got a redemption arc. The suit of armour, which is incongruous for a Hell’s Kitchen setting , has been taken off the board by the end. It would make sense for him to show up in future crises because he’s literally in the area.

That won’t happen, though. Wheeler makes a single further appearance: in Black Panther #31 (2001), he’s one of the Panther’s minor New York acquaintances who get murdered by Malice. More could have been done with him, but perhaps Wheeler’s problem in the context of Daredevil is that he’s not a Daredevil character – fundamentally, he’s a Black Panther character, and there wasn’t much demand for those in 1987.