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A review by unladylike
Black Panther: Long Live the King by Aaron Covington, Nnedi Okorafor
1.0
I don't know what the deal was with this series, but I am now suspicious of the sticker on the front saying, "FIRST TIME IN PRINT." That phrase is meant to advertise it as special or limited in some way, but I think now that it's akin to converting a made-for-TV movie to VHS and hoping to eventually sell the stockpile because of the title accumulating fame and influence.
I wanted to like this. I've been getting more and more into Ta-Nehisi Coates's ongoing run of Black Panther over the past few years, and have thoroughly enjoyed the two other spin-off titles I've read (Go check out [b:Black Panther: World of Wakanda|32498369|Black Panther World of Wakanda|Roxane Gay|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1493249101s/32498369.jpg|54918434] and [b:Black Panther & the Crew: We Are the Streets|34380218|Black Panther & the Crew We Are the Streets|Ta-Nehisi Coates|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1508102694s/34380218.jpg|55468375] instead!). It seems appropriate for a Nigerian-American woman to write Black Panther, and I appreciated some of the authenticity in dialogue that challenged me a bit (e.g. I had to figure out what "mscheeew" means; Still not sure how it's pronounced typically but it's a sort of sigh-hiss that's commonly written this way by Nigerians).
Nnedi Okorafor might be a fantastic writer in other realms, but it was painful to get through her comic book script writing. Here, T'Challa is a mostly-incompetent king who goes everywhere with two top guards that do not behave at all like any of the Hatut Zeraze I've come to know. They speak like bad teenage actors in an ABC After School Special (or just-fine teenage actors performing lines written by a room of boring adults?). Okorafor can't seem to remember the name of one of the main characters even, as she calls one of the two immature, disrespectful Hatut Zeraze warriors Jidenu in the first issue or so, and then in the middle of the arc, his name becomes Jinadu instead. (I had it confirmed by a Nigerian friend that both names are of the same Igbo tribe that Okorafor hails from, but they're not used interchangeably, like Michael and Mike, or Richard and Dick, for example.)
As bad as the writing is, the art is somehow worse. I think this illustrator must have turned in fairly impressive action samples that look approximately like a scene out of most typical modern superhero comics, but most of the main stories in this collection are of the characters unmasked, walking around talking to each other. At this, André Lima Araújo plainly sucks. Certain panels of his resemble the familiar work of Erica Henderson from my beloved Squirrel Girl comics. But any time the intensity of a scene is reduced, every character on the page looks like an inanimate paper doll. I get that the irony is they ARE inanimate paper dolls, but the magic of good animators and comic illustrators is giving them life within their own world. This world feels far inferior to the Wakanda I have been coming to know better and better. I'm guessing this was a digital-only experiment to see how much juice Marvel could press out of the Black Panther title within the year of the successful movie release, and I respect where they sought this out, but it's really just not a good comic by any means.
The best part of this collection is the brief look at an alternate Earth character Okorafor created previously (which I had never heard of), where the Venom symbiote has attached itself to a teenager from Nigeria, who for some reason gets to become the interim Black Panther of Wakanda. The worst part of this book is that Marvel might wrongly react to its floppishness by hiring fewer Africans to helm their titles (fewer meaning going from one to zero, I think). I want to see MORE creators of color, especially from outside the U.S., but I don't think comic books are the best place for this particular crew.
I wanted to like this. I've been getting more and more into Ta-Nehisi Coates's ongoing run of Black Panther over the past few years, and have thoroughly enjoyed the two other spin-off titles I've read (Go check out [b:Black Panther: World of Wakanda|32498369|Black Panther World of Wakanda|Roxane Gay|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1493249101s/32498369.jpg|54918434] and [b:Black Panther & the Crew: We Are the Streets|34380218|Black Panther & the Crew We Are the Streets|Ta-Nehisi Coates|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1508102694s/34380218.jpg|55468375] instead!). It seems appropriate for a Nigerian-American woman to write Black Panther, and I appreciated some of the authenticity in dialogue that challenged me a bit (e.g. I had to figure out what "mscheeew" means; Still not sure how it's pronounced typically but it's a sort of sigh-hiss that's commonly written this way by Nigerians).
Nnedi Okorafor might be a fantastic writer in other realms, but it was painful to get through her comic book script writing. Here, T'Challa is a mostly-incompetent king who goes everywhere with two top guards that do not behave at all like any of the Hatut Zeraze I've come to know. They speak like bad teenage actors in an ABC After School Special (or just-fine teenage actors performing lines written by a room of boring adults?). Okorafor can't seem to remember the name of one of the main characters even, as she calls one of the two immature, disrespectful Hatut Zeraze warriors Jidenu in the first issue or so, and then in the middle of the arc, his name becomes Jinadu instead. (I had it confirmed by a Nigerian friend that both names are of the same Igbo tribe that Okorafor hails from, but they're not used interchangeably, like Michael and Mike, or Richard and Dick, for example.)
As bad as the writing is, the art is somehow worse. I think this illustrator must have turned in fairly impressive action samples that look approximately like a scene out of most typical modern superhero comics, but most of the main stories in this collection are of the characters unmasked, walking around talking to each other. At this, André Lima Araújo plainly sucks. Certain panels of his resemble the familiar work of Erica Henderson from my beloved Squirrel Girl comics. But any time the intensity of a scene is reduced, every character on the page looks like an inanimate paper doll. I get that the irony is they ARE inanimate paper dolls, but the magic of good animators and comic illustrators is giving them life within their own world. This world feels far inferior to the Wakanda I have been coming to know better and better. I'm guessing this was a digital-only experiment to see how much juice Marvel could press out of the Black Panther title within the year of the successful movie release, and I respect where they sought this out, but it's really just not a good comic by any means.
The best part of this collection is the brief look at an alternate Earth character Okorafor created previously (which I had never heard of), where the Venom symbiote has attached itself to a teenager from Nigeria, who for some reason gets to become the interim Black Panther of Wakanda. The worst part of this book is that Marvel might wrongly react to its floppishness by hiring fewer Africans to helm their titles (fewer meaning going from one to zero, I think). I want to see MORE creators of color, especially from outside the U.S., but I don't think comic books are the best place for this particular crew.