Black Panther: The Man without Fear! by David Liss, Francesco Francavilla, et al.

So after the events of Black Panther volume 5 and Doomwar saw Shuri enshrined as the new Black Panther, Marvel did something weird with T'Challa. I don't know anything about the behind-the-scenes of this era, so I don't know how this decision was arrived at, but he became the new main character... of Daredevil!? After Daredevil: The Man without Fear! #512, came Black Panther: The Man without Fear! #513, T'Challa inheriting the numbering and setting of Matt Murdock's comic. This would last for around eighteen issues, the title changing again after #523 to Black Panther: The Most Dangerous Man Alive!

from Black Panther: The Man without Fear! #518

Going in, I was skeptical. Very skeptical. I love mid-tier comics characters, but if you read a lot of mid-tier comics characters, it quickly becomes clear that publishers are always jerking them around trying to figure out what works. Now, this is part of what makes me love them; DC will put, say, Green Arrow or Power Girl through some weird permutations over the years, and that itself is a fascinating story. But it can also be very frustrating when a character you enjoy gets jerked into an unproductive or even, frankly, stupid new status quo.

The beginning of issue #513 did little to allay my misgivings, as it works very quickly to establish why T'Challa would take over for Matt Murdock as the protector of Hell's Kitchen, giving up his nation, his technology, and his marriage to do so... and I did not buy it. Not at all. T'Challa, even at his lowest moment, is a very confident man. I don't buy for a minute that he needs to "find himself"... nor do I buy that if he did need to find himself, that he would do so by giving up everything that makes him who he is. He knew what he was doing when he destroyed Wakanda's vibranium; he would not brood over his decision and retreat from his country.

from Black Panther: The Man without Fear! #515

But getting through this improbable decision quickly turns out to be the right call on writer David Liss's part, because that just lets him get on with doing what it is he wants to do, which is tell a violent, street-level crime story. I don't know why T'Challa has been put in one, but accepting that he is in one, Liss and artist Franco Francavilla do a fantastic job with it. It's very much a story of its era, about damaged men doing bad things, like The Sopranos (which ended in 2007) or Breaking Bad (which began in 2008). It's a bit tropey in that way, but it's a satisfying example of the tropes, and the moral certainty of T'Challa himself keeps things working well, not swinging too far in glorifying toxic masculinity, as his dedication to ordinary people is what saves Hell's Kitchen. There are good twists and turns here, especially in the opening arc about T'Challa ingratiating himself into the community (he owns a diner) and coming up against an Eastern European crime family and a serial killer and a victim of experiments to create superpowers.

from Black Panther: The Man without Fear! #523

Certainly, Liss is aided by the excellent art of Francesco Francavilla, one of those cases where the artist assigned to a comic complements what it's trying to do completely perfectly; even if the scripts wouldn't work at all, I think this art would sell them! The art is character driven and moody, but also the action is clear. I know of Francavilla's work (most famously, he drew the zombie comic Afterlife with Archie, and he also had an acclaimed run on Detective Comics), but I'd never actually seen it outside of previews and reviews before, and it truly is excellent stuff. He does his own coloring here, and the colors are beautiful, too. The fill-ins are by Jefte Palo, whose work I enjoyed on the Secret Invasion story arc during Black Panther volume 4, and does a solid job here, aided immeasurably by one of my favorite colorists, Jean-Francois Beaulieu (cf., Doomwar, Marvel's Oz comics).

After the opening six-issue arc, we get a two-issue story about Kraven the Hunter pursuing T'Challa, who obtains unwanted help from his wife, Storm. This is solid, though the scientist antagonist makes a hard villain turn I didn't totally buy. Finally, there's a three-issue Fear Itself tie-in; I don't really know what Fear Itself was, to be honest, but you don't have to. Liss's take on it is that a mystical force stokes anti-immigrant sentiment in Hell's Kitchen, forcing T'Challa to battle a former Fantastic Four villain called the Hate-Monger and a knock-off of himself called the American Panther. Like too much popular culture from the early 2010s, it's depressingly prescient of our current moment, but it's very well done.

So do I think T'Challa needed to be the vehicle for gritty urban vigilante stories? Well, to be honest, I'm still not convinced. These stories seem to have little to do with what makes Black Panther work as a character or a premise. But if it had to be done, it's hard to imagine that it could have been done better than this, and first half of the first issue aside, I enjoyed nearly every panel of this run.

Black Panther: The Man without Fear! originally appeared in issues numbered from #513 to 523 (Feb.-Nov. 2011). The series was written by David Liss, illustrated by Francesco Francavilla (#513-15, 517-18, 521-23) and Jefte Palo (#516, 519-20), colored by Jean-Francois Beaulieu (#516, 519-20), lettered by Joe Caramagna, and edited by Bill Rosemann.

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