Black Panther: Dark Reign / Prelude to Doomwar by Reginald Hudlin, Ken Lashley, Paul Neary, et al.

After Black Panther volume 4 came to an end in 2008, it was almost immediately followed by volume 5. This was a twelve-issue series; I don't know anything about the behind-the-scenes of the era, so I don't know if it was planned as a maxiseries, or if it was supposed to be an ongoing that got curtailed or what. Maybe it was even planned as a six-issue miniseries and expanded?

from Black Panther vol. 5 #4

It has two distinct halves. The first six issues are a Dark Reign tie-in (I don't remember what Dark Reign was even though I have the Young Avengers installment) called The Deadliest of the Species that focuses—in theory, anyway—on Shuri becoming the Black Panther. The series opens with T'Challa injured and missing; in flashbacks, we find out he had encounters with both Namor and Doctor Doom. In the present, T'Challa has abandoned his responsibilities because of his injuries, meaning his mother and wife have to step in as rulers of Wakanda while his sister Shuri has to assume the mantle of the Black Panther. Of course, there's some kind of threat to Wakanda, some kind of ancient mythical bad guy.

To be honest, I never figure out what the bad guy was or why I should care. The story is supposedly about Shuri but I didn't feel we learned anything interesting about her, and the beats of the story are kind of tired. She's too cocky and has to learn to dial it down to be worthy... this seems to me to be the kind of thing that is more often associated with female superheroes than male ones. Has T'Challa ever been rejected by the panther god for his confidence? The charming character of the films has yet to emerge in the comics... if, indeed, she ever will. The rest of the story is pretty forgettable stuff, super-terrible bad guys defeated in super-terrible fights.

from Black Panther vol. 5 #2

The Deadliest of the Species was written by the same writer as volume 4, Reginald Hudlin; Hudlin cowrites the first issue of the second story, Power, with Jonathan Maberry, who then takes over as writer for the remainder of the series. Power jumps ahead a bit, with Shuri now installed as ruler of Wakanda, on a diplomatic mission to the United States, where she's also investigating a threat to Wakanda, particularly whatever injured T'Challa. Meanwhile, there's economic and agricultural failures in Wakanda, and a resurgent nationalist movement that will be familiar to anyone who's paid attention to politics over the last decade. The last three issues of Power are branded as a "Prelude to Doomwar" tie-in, Doomwar being a crossover miniseries that apparently picks up right from the end of Black Panther vol. 5. (It's the thing I will read next in this sequence.)

Anyway, I found this muddled and hard to care about. Maberry gives Shuri a team of advisors, but it's a lot of characters who I didn't really care about, and I don't see why she needs this kind of supporting cast when T'Challa didn't. It takes the characters far too long to figure out that Doctor Doom is responsible, given the readers learned this way back back in issue #2. And I am tired of stories where the people of Wakanda rise up against their rulers for seemingly stupid reasons. (Though I guess this is realistic! And to be fair to Maberry, though this is a story that seems to happen a lot in Black Panther comics, I think it had actually been a fair amount of time since it was last done when he wrote this in 2008. Did it happen during Priest's? If not, then it hadn't happened since the 1990s.)

from Black Panther vol. 5 #11

But really I didn't find a lot to grab onto here as a reader. Probably my favorite part were the two talking heads from Wakandan media that we cut to occasionally. One of the really interesting things Don McGregor set up way back when was the conflict between traditional Wakandan values and the modernizing influences T'Challa was importing, and most subsequent writers haven't done a ton with this.

The majority of the art for this series is done by penciler Ken Lashley and inker Paul Neary. I am a fan of Neary from his Marvel UK days, but here he's just inking over pretty standard 2000s superhero pencils from Lashley. That said, I found them better than Will Conrad, who does the rest of the series and whose art is kind of confusing and does a bad job of depicting Shuri in particular.

The Deadliest of the Species originally appeared in issues #1-6 of Black Panther vol. 5 (Apr.-Sept. 2009). The story was written by Reginald Hudlin, penciled by Ken Lashley, inked by Paul Neary, colored by Paul Mounts, lettered by Cory Petit, and edited by Axel Alonso.

Power originally appeared in issues #7-12 of Black Panther vol. 5 (Oct. 2009–Mar. 2010). The story was written by Jonathan Maberry (#7-12) & Reginald Hudlin (#7), illustrated by Will Conrad (#7-10, 12) and Ken Lashley & Paul Neary (#11), colored by Pete Pantazis, lettered by Cory Petit (#7-10, 12) and Clayton Cowles (#11), and edited by Axel Alonso.

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