Black Panther has a more intimate link to Vibranium than anyone realized. The Black Panther is the ancestral champion and defender of Wakanda, granted superhuman abilities by ingesting the Heart-Shaped Herb.
The Heart-Shaped Herb is a unique part of Wakanda’s ecosystem, a plant that has been mutated due to exposure to the radiation from Vibranium. Even in the real world, herbs can promote muscle growth, decrease stress, and boost stamina. But the Heart-Shaped Herb has a far more pronounced impact on anyone who ingests it; it transforms an ordinary human into a superhuman with enhanced strength, agility, speed, endurance, and stamina. Black Panther is at least equal to Captain America – as demonstrated in the comics when Captain America fought a Black Panther back in the 1940s.
Rise of the Black Panther #2 adds another ability to the Black Panther’s bag of tricks. The issue opens with T’Challa, the new Black Panther, attacking a group of would-be smugglers who have stolen some of his country’s Vibranium. These Wakandan traitors can’t understand how the Black Panther traced them, but an internal monologue reveals the truth. Ingestion of the Heart-Shaped Herb attunes the Black Panther to the unique energies emitted by Vibranium, meaning he can always sense when some of the precious metal is on the move.
This binds the Black Panther more closely to Vibranium than ever before, in that he has essentially gained a sixth sense that links him to his country’s so-called “lifeblood.” There must be quite a narrow geographical limit to this sense, given there have been prominent occasions where T’Challa has been unable to trace Vibranium – most notably in the Doomwar event, when Wakanda’s entire stock of Vibranium was plundered. There, Black Panther had to work with some pretty advanced tech to track it down.
But just how close is the bond between Black Panther and Vibranium? If he is actually sensitive to the energy radiating from the precious metal, then it is entirely possible T’Challa shares some of Vibranium’s own properties. He has always possessed an admirable degree of stamina and resistance to injury, taking blows that would have felled lesser men; perhaps his body converts the kinetic energy of blows to some extent, one of the properties that makes Black Panther so powerful? Perhaps Black Panther’s mystical potential – his ability to access the Ancestral Plane, and his sensitivity to sorcery – comes from Vibranium, which can also be affected by magical energy? It will be fascinating to see if future Black Panther films from Marvel develop this idea further.
Source: Screenrant, by THOMAS BACON