My weekly mission to read as much Black Panther comics until the movie comes out continues. Our latest stop takes us to a pretty important stop in T'Challa's history. BACKGROUND:
I've only read a couple of issues from this run, so this is as good as new to me. SUMMARY: This complete collection has a whopping 20 issues in it, so I'll break it down by arc. The first six issues chronicle Klaw's grand attempt at taking revenge on T'Challa. Here, he enlists the help of various supervillains in hopes of finally conquering Wakanda. Both the Nigandan government (a neighboring country with a shitty dictator for a leader) and a rather underhanded US military operation that involves an army of Deathloks join the fray as well. Shit gets quite chaotic, though as you may expect, Klaw's plans do not succeed. Along with the main plot, you get flashbacks to T'Challa's early life, which includes a change to the exact circumstances T'Chaka ends up dead by Klaw's hands. You also get a few scenes with US government officials plotting to take over Wakanda for their vibranium (which feature Everett Ross in a consulting role). The team of villains Klaw recruits for his cause is quite the ragtag team: Rhino (classic Spider-Man villain), a version of the Radioactive Man (no, not the guy from The Simpsons), Batroc the Leaper (everyone's favorite loser villain), and a Vatican-sanctioned version of the Black Knight (who is, for some reason, super obsessed with converting people to Catholicism). There's also this body snatcher known only as the Cannibal who joins their ranks, and their whereabouts in the aftermath make for a fun dangling plot thread that they tease in later story arcs. Another fun result of this arc is that by the end, Black Panther has possession of the Black Knight's Ebony Blade (and he actually gets to use it at least once in this book). We then get one House of M-adjacent issue where Magneto makes a play at taking out T'Challa. He calls in some help from fellow monarchs Namor, Storm, and Black Bolt to fend off an attack by Sabretooth and Apocalypse. The moment with Black Bolt is awesome. Next, we get the Wild Kingdom arc, which spans four issues (two of which are actually X-Men titles and not Black Panther comics). The events of the first arc caused the nation of Niganda to plunge into chaos, and this happened to release what appear to be heavily mutated animals. A team of X-Men (Havok, Storm, Rogue, Gambit, Polaris, Iceman, Wolverine) come in to investigate, and they are surprised to find T'Challa already on the scene. The mutated animals wreaking havoc are apparently the doing of Doctor Paine, a geneticist who worked under the Nigandan dictatorship by experimenting on humans, turning them into mutates, and enslaving them. Paine is working alongside the Red Ghost, a Soviet scientist (and a decently obscure villain) with intangibility powers and a squad of sentient apes working under him. The sentient apes have a Planet of the Apes-style agenda of their own, because why not? Anyway, the X-Men and T'Challa team up to take all the villains down, though not without a bit of misunderstanding at the start. Even from the first arc, the comic is fully establishing that there is romantic tension between T'Challa and Storm. Storm mostly tries to blow off T'Challa's attempts at courtship, while he is busy worrying about competition from other would-be suitors/trying to find the words to reconcile with her. We'll get into more detail about that a little later. After Wild Kingdom, T'Challa is badgered by his mother Ramonda to go find a wife. For some reason, he decides to go to America to find someone suitable despite it being obvious to him that he only wants one person. He tries to reconnect with his old flame Monica Lynne, and when that doesn't go well, he... goes clubbing? He ends up running into Luke Cage at the club, and that somehow leads to the two getting attacked by ninjas. They are taken to the lair of "Han", who is Shang-Chi's criminal father, and he abducted T'Challa because.... he wants to arrange a marriage with T'Challa and his daughter? It's weird in a really funny way. And yes, Shang-Chi shows up briefly to kick some ass, and Falcon makes an equally brief appearance that has no real impact on what's happening. I liked the hilarious reference to "Han's".... controversial comics history. This team-up with Luke Cage goes on for two more issues, as T'Challa recruits him to help out with Hurricane Katrina survivors in New Orleans. Turns out evacuation isn't the only trouble down in Louisiana, as the hurricane has caused a band of vampires to come out of hiding and take advantage of the disaster. Cage and T'Challa team up with Blade, Brother Voodoo, and Monica Rambeau to eliminate the threat. I liked this little team, and it was cool to see the heroes be heroes in a real-life crisis. The last arc covered in this book features a defining moment in T'Challa's history. After the events of Wild Kingdom, Storm decided she'll stick around in Africa doing the thing she used to do before she was recruited into the X-Men: serve as the weather "goddess" to the impoverished and taking down slavery rings along the way. T'Challa finds her on one of her adventures, and after a scuffle with a ripoff Arabian Knight (another... interesting comics rabbit hole in the same manner as Shang-Chi's dad), T'Challa finally does it: he proposes to Storm. Spoilers: she says yes. In this arc, we get a decent summary of Storm's backstory (her parentage, her early childhood as an orphan thief, her early relationship with T'Challa when they were teenagers), which is perfect if you're not that familiar with her story. In the issues leading up to the wedding, T'Challa helps Storm reconnect with her surviving family members, announces their marriage publicly (which leads to a wide range of responses from various characters), and gets dragged into a bachelor party by his super-pals. There's also a funny moment where Storm goes shopping with some friends and gets into a fight with Princess Zanda (a seemingly one-off character from the '70s comics that I never thought ever appeared in anything else). The announcement of the marriage is interesting, as the reactions range from excitement, apprehension (some of the X-Men are worried Storm will not fight alongside them as much, for example), and intrigue (the union will be the highest-profile relationship between a human and a mutant, after all). We also get some reactions from T'Challa's ex Monica Lynne (who expresses her feelings in song) and Storm's ex Forge (who only hopes that Storm is happy). My favorite reaction is from SHIELD, whose officials get stressed out at the notion of all the superheroes gathering at the wedding and leaving themselves open for attack. The last issue in the collection is the wedding itself, and it's got quite the guest list. Many big Marvel characters show up (including the fucking Watcher), deep cuts like Isaiah Bradley were invited (and a couple of Black heroes were deeply impressed by T'Challa inviting him because of his history), and many world leaders join in on the festivities. Hell, M'Baku (who was going to go on a ballistic rampage because he wasn't invited) got an invitation, and he was (mostly) chill for being one of the few villains in the party. Doctor Doom (who wasn't present) was even nice enough to send an actually sincere congratulations, too. The ceremony itself was beautiful (Storm had a hell of a dress), and there's also this awesome moment when Storm faces the panther goddess and is accepted as T'Challa's wife. Interestingly, this issue takes place in the early stages of the Civil War event (so there is a bit of tension in the wedding), and T'Challa actually has Captain America and Iron Man face each other in an attempt to have them reconcile (it obviously ends poorly). A multitude of artists worked on the comics in this collection, so I once again have trouble really talking about the style as a whole. I will say that most of the issues have art with great detail, with the variations coming in the form of how such detail is achieved. The early issues employ some hatching for texture, for example, while later issues employ a wider color palette or higher contrast shading. VERDICT: This collection of Black Panther comics has quite the variety of stories, from fun team-ups with other Marvel heroes, another epic defense of Wakanda against a villain team of invaders, and the culmination of T'Challa's most iconic romance. Wakanda itself isn't the main focus this time around, but I enjoyed reading about how Storm and T'Challa finally come together, and I was impressed by both the volume and variety of other Marvel characters who appear in the story (from big Avengers cameos to super deep cuts). I also liked the additional plot threads sprinkled throughout the story (like the Cannibal subplot and the Ebony Blade ending up in Wakanda), and I hope to see those explored in the later issues. The whole marriage with Storm is easily the biggest part of this collection, so if you're interested in T'Challa's decades-long history, I think this is worth reading based on that alone. Other than that, I think many readers would find the many team-ups T'Challa gets involved in entertaining, and in addition, you needn't trouble yourself with prerequisite material to understand everything (except Civil War, I guess, but even then, you just need the gist of it). Oh, and speaking of later issues: throughout this entire month, my Black Panther reads will exclusively cover the comics from this run. Expect Vol. 2 next week, and I'll split Vol. 3 to cover the last two weeks of August. I'm pretty excited to be able to read full volumes from start to finish this time around, so look forward to more ramblings like this. - end -
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June 2024
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