Hudlin, Reginald
AVERAGE REVIEW SCORE:
3 out of 5
(1 book)
Black Panther: Who Is The Black Panther?
(Art by John Romita Jr. and Klaus Janson)
2005's relaunch of Black Panther's solo adventures. Everett Ross delivers a briefing on the history of the mysterious and isolationist African nation of Wakanda shortly before a party of mercenaries, tacitly supported by jealous world powers, invades the kingdom. As an army, led by the supervillains Klaw, Rhino, Batroc and Radioactive Man, bears down on his country, the newly-crowned King T'Challa has to take whatever measures are necessary to protect his people.
As relaunches of (somewhat) lapsed characters go, this is a pretty good one; giving us a potted history of Wakanda and the Black Panthers to bring us up to date and onboard with the current Panther, although I have to say that the flashback to WWII where the Black Panther of the time beats Captain America was a bit too on-the-nose. We then follow T'Challa as he tries to preserve the sovereignty of his nation in the face of super-powered enemies and world powers that would happily see Wakanda divided up between them. Again, it's a little on-the-nose, but the clear parallels of colonialism by powerful nations is something that history has proved just keeps happening time after time.
Unfortunately this book has one big problem: a lot of its elements were used to make the brilliant 'Black Panther' movie starring the late, great Chadwick Bozeman. It's certainly not the fault of Hudlin that his story elements were so compelling that they were used for the title character's solo movie in the MCU, but as a reader it meant that those ideas were dilluted here due to already being familiar from having seen the movie. If you've not seen the film and you want an introduction to Marvel's No.1 black superhero (sorry Luke, sorry Sam, sorry Rhodey) then this would be an excellent place to start. For me, sadly, it just didn't have the impact it should've.
But speaking of impact, I did love that Klaw's plan for invading Wakanda begins with just having the Rhino smash through the country in a straight line to the capital.
3 out of 5
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Marvel Comics (here)