Like World of Wakanda, Black Panther & the Crew is a prequel miniseries that ties into Ta-Nehisi Coates's first arc on Black Panther. Partway through A Nation under Our Feet, T'Challa summoned the assistance of "the Crew," reviving the all-black superhero group devised by Christopher Priest, though with a totally new membership roster. While it originally included War Machine, White Tiger, and Josiah X (son of the "black Captain America"), this version is made up of T'Challa, Storm, Luke Cage, Misty Knight, and some guy named "Gates." The first and only story arc, We Are the Streets, reveals how "the Crew" (never actually called that, I think) originally came together.
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from Black Panther & the Crew #1
(art by Butch Guice & Scott Hanna) |
Coates and co-writer Yona Harvey borrow the structure of the original series, which is unfortunate, as I felt that the original series's structure was one of its flaws, with the group not coming together until the end of the arc. Of the first five issues here, each is narrated by a different member of the Crew in turn, focusing on their individual relationships with Ezra Keith, a black activist who recently died in police custody, leading to protests on the streets. This means we get a lot of meditations on the various characters' relationships with Ezra, but not a lot of them actually interacting with each other or, really, seemingly doing much of anything at all; it doesn't feel like there's enough going on in their investigations to justify spending six issues on it, even when it turns out that Hydra is behind gentrification in Harlem (an idea done much better in G. Willow Wilson's
Ms. Marvel, as I recall). Coates and Harvey have a strong sense of voice and character, and I liked the art by Butch Guice and Scott Hanna a lot, but like
A Nation under Our Feet, this rarely has a sense of forward momentum. The ending I found more of a fizzle than a climax: some things blow up, the story ends.
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from Black Panther & the Crew #3
(art by Butch Guice & Scott Hanna)
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Weirdly, while on the one hand the series doesn't seem to be doing enough to justify six issues, on the other hand, it seems to be trying to do more than its six issues can accommodate. Specifically, a series of flashbacks throughout most of the issues show that in the 1950s and '60s, Ezra founded an all-black superhero group with what he thought was assistance from Wakanda, but turned out to be a Hydra plot, and the group ejected him when they started using their violence for less principled reasons, but then he rejoined the group, but then he ended it. Introducing
two new superhero teams is just too much for a six-issue series, and though I found some of this very intriguing, it was too rushed and too fragmentary to really work. The conflicts within the team have to happen very quickly and most off-panel, and ultimately I wasn't sure what Coates was actually trying to say about violent resistance through them.
So, as I have felt about all three stories I've read from the "Coates era" thus far, to me We Are the Streets had a lot of interesting ideas, certainly more than many other comics I have read, but also didn't know how to make those ideas work within the constraints of its format. I would have liked to have seen the Crew come together faster and do more, and to have seen the previous superhero team saved for some other story that could have done them justice.
We Are the Streets originally appeared in issues #1-6 of Black Panther & the Crew (June-Oct. 2017). The story was written by Ta-Nehisi Coates (#1-6) & Yona Harvey (#2, 4, 6); penciled by Butch Guice (#1-6), w/ Mack Chater (#2-3, 5-6) & Stephen Thompson (#5); inked by Scott Hanna (#1-6), w/ Chater (#2-3, 5-6) & Thompson (#5); colored by Dan Brown (#1-6), w/ Paul Mounts (#5); lettered by Joe Sabino; and edited by Wil Moss.
ACCESS AN INDEX OF ALL POSTS IN THIS SERIES HERE
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