Jack Kirby's Black Panther #1.

If you've been keeping your ear to the internet, you may know, from other sources, that I recently had a dream in which Jack Kirby rewrote the Galactus Trilogy in the style of his 1970s' Marvel comics.

In it, the Silver Surfer became Shiny Waverider, a jive-talking brother from the 'hood, the Watcher became Chrome-Dome McGinty and Galactus became Mr Greedy.

I suspect this dream was prompted by memories of the first time I read issue #1 of Jack Kirby's Black Panther.

After having diligently and enthusiastically read all those issues of Don McGregor's Panther's Rage, it was a bit of a shock - not to mention a total let-down - to find my favourite Wakandan suddenly in the middle of an action-packed yarn about a time-portal in the shape of a frog

To be honest, at the time I felt appalled and even betrayed by developments. How could Marvel do this to me? How?

But that was then, and perspectives can change. So, how will my adult mind react to re-reading that tale for the first time since then?

What happens is this. The Panther and Mr Little (who's little) pay a visit to a man, only to find he's been murdered by a knight in shining armour. Refreshingly, the dead man isn't called Mr Dead.

After a brief fight, the Panther and Little depart with a statuette of a frog the dead man had been holding when they'd found him.

It turns out it once belonged to King Solomon and is in fact a time machine, sought by sinister forces who'll stop at nothing to get it.

By the end of the issue, Little has been killed and the Panther captured by Princess Zanda who wants the frog for herself.

That's when someone very strange indeed shows up...

To be honest, in terms of writing, the thing still seems terrible; crudely plotted and full of weirdly inappropriate and clumsy dialogue.

Characters are never developed in any way. We get to learn almost nothing about Mr Little and how the Panther came to be with him.

The murderous knight is left to simply run off into the outside world, with no attempt made to stop him, and the feeling you get is that Kirby could have removed the Panther from the tale and replaced him with Captain America, Kamandi or Ikaris from The Eternals and it would have made barely any difference to how he'd told it. Kirby in this era seemed to have no grasp of the idea of catering a story to suit the persona and powers of the central character, meaning it's basically a string of action-oriented images with no feeling of being an actual story.

On the art front, it's fine. I know I'm in a minority here but, as a kid, I always preferred Kirby's art in the Bronze Age to his work in the Silver Age and, while I appreciate his 1960s stuff a lot more now than I did then, I still like his Bronze Age stuff too.

The truth is that, by the 1970s, Kirby's imagination had simply gone too free-range for a non-super-powered character like the Panther or Captain America, meaning there's a terrible sense of the ill-judged and out-of-place about his writing for them.

I do though like the climax's enigmatic visitor having the ominous words, "Hatch 22," on his forehead. Of just what unknown menace does that phrase hint?