One of his stories was about an African people called the Wakandas. I can't remember which one it was, he basically wrote the same story over and over again so I have a hard time keeping them straight.
I wonder if this was the inspiration for Black Panther
The writings of Edgar Rice Burroughs were the inspiration for so many stories by other authors that I don't see it as too extra ordinary that it may have influenced Lee & Kirby or just Stan Lee.
Robert E. Howard (Conan) which was published by Marvel
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
All were prolific writers, adventurists and scientists whose works inspired or influenced many a comic book writer, consciously or subconsciously.
Plagiarism I say! Plagiarism! Harrumph, Harrumph, Harrumph!!!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man-Eater
I'd guess the similarity in names is coincidence. I'd be surprised if Lee and Kirby would risk a lawsuit when they could easily come up with a different name. Also, the story is rather rare, so it's unlikely they'd have heard of it, much less read it. I was a huge fan of Burroughs as a kid, and read everything he wrote that I could get my hands on. I must have had at least 40 or 50 of his books. I even had some old copies of ERBdom and The Gridley Wave, which were Burroughs fanzines from the '50s and '60s, and until today I'd never heard of that story.
I'd say at most, if one of them HAD read it, they'd forgotten and when Wakanda came to mind they thought it was a new name, not realizing it was one they'd seen in a book some years back.
Coincidences happen.
There's a novel written in 1969, which got the Hugo to the Best Novel, where USSR has fallen, China is the new superpower that faces US, European countries have formed some kind or European Union, there have been conflicts in Israel for decades, terrorism and racial conflicts are daily issues, cars run with electrical engines, Detroit has become a ghost town, people barely get married anymore... and, wait for it, there's a political leader called Obomi XD
What novel is that?
The alleged coincidence I don't think is a coincidence is how similar the online text adventure game Vicious Cycles is to the 2011 movie Source Code. In Vicious Cycles, which was released in 2001, you you play an agent whose mind inhabits the body of a man on a train that is about to explode. You have to find clues as to who has the bomb and where, and each time the bomb goes off, you reset back to the starting point. You continue to relive the same day, each time learning new things that help you identify and stop the bomber. If you haven't seen Source Code, re-read the description of Vicious Cycles and you'll have the plot of the film.
That case, it could perfectly happen that they copied the base idea. But that happens sometimes. Shape of the Water was criticized for having (supposedly) copied another movie. ( https://www.theguardian.com/film/2018/jan/25/shape-of-water-oscars-paul-zindel-similarities ). Who knows.
The plot of Alien, for example, is almost identical to the one in "It the Terror from Beyond Space", including twin scenes like the one with Dallas trying to kill the monster with fire in the ducts, or the one with Ripley getting a space suit and opening the hatchway to throw the monster out of the ship. But still, Alien is far far away from "the Terror from Beyond Space". Indeed, you watch now the old one and it feels like an ultra-low budget B/W 50s-scifi styled version of Alien. So I think it's more about what you add to create something new and different (and worthy). Alien was a masterpiece. And Source Code, well, I think it's an OK movie.
By the way, the novel is Stand on Zanzibar:
https://themillions.com/2013/03/the-weird-1969-new-wave-sci-fi-novel-that-correctly-predicted-the-current-day.html
It does often happen that a new film is criticized as having copied elements of an existing work, and it's usually like The Shape of Water or Alien, where you can similarities, but within a larger work that is noticeably different. When I watched Source Code, I felt like I was watching the unaltered movie adaptation of the game. I was shocked into disbelief when I could later find no credit given to the game. It's as close to the game as The Godfather film is to the book of the same name.
shareWell, to be honest, I haven't watched The Godfather yet... but I read the book, and I liked it so much that I never wanted to watch the movie. But I get what you say.
Shocked with what you say about Source Code. That's copying, period. Interestingly, "Source Code" was the only movie I appreciated from Duncan Jones. "Warcraft" is a mess, and "Moon", well...
If you have read scifi short stories, you can see the movie is the usual scifi short story with some 2001 Space Odyssey look. Not bad, neither great. Focusing in the idea works with written scifi short stories, because it takes 15 minutes to read them and they have to be quick throwing the whole story to you. But when it comes to scifi movies, you need something more. Alien, for example, created an amazing visual new style for scifi, and developed a kind of "truckers in space" universe, which Cameron extended later to "marines in space". If you check great scifi movies, they're much more than one idea. They develop (or at least suggest) some interesting universe around them. Moon didn't. I describe Moon as a "scifi movie for people who don't like scifi movies", similar to Looper which I'd say is a "time-travel movie for people who don't like time-travel movies".
Funny thing, I thought "Source Code" was the only reason to keep track of what Duncan Jones was doing. It seems it's not a reason anymore.
Interesting side note-- as I read the article you linked about Stand on Zanzibar I thought to myself, "I should forward this article to my brother, he'd really enjoy this." When I got to the bottom of the article I saw that it was written by my brother!
shareAs they say in my country: "the world is a handkerchief" (which I think translates to something like "it's a small world") ^^