Killmonger: By Any Means by Bryan Hill and Juan Ferreyra

As I have been chronicling, Ta-Nehisi Coates's Black Panther run was accompanied by a wide variety of tie-in miniseries. The next of these is Killmonger, a five-issue story by writer Bryan Hill and artist Juan Ferreyra filling in the backstory of Erik Killmonger, the son of Wakanda cruelly abducted to the outside world by Ulysses Klaw who returned to Wakanda to rule it. Obviously this was originally chronicled in Don McGregor's Panther's Rage, but the more salient reference points here are probably the Black Panther film, where we got an MCU version of that story, and Rise of the Black Panther, where Evan Narcisse and Javier Pina briefly retold the story for the modern era.

from Killmonger #2

I thought this take was incredibly disappointing. This takes place after Erik graduates from MIT (where he sleeps with his "guidance counselor" in a cringey scene) before he returns to Wakanda. There is surely a very interesting story to be told about how Killmonger gets radicalized, how he decides to go back to Wakanda and take it over and possibly even use it to change an unjust world.

Unfortunately, this story mostly focuses on Killmonger running with a gang doing crimes. Killmonger is angry, he's a misogynist, and that's about as deep as his characterization goes. There's no engagement with the political ideas that made Killmonger so interesting on screen, there's no real sense of why he might want to take over a country or why he thinks he can do it. Just lots of action scenes where people get brutally killed. Like, I'm not even sure what anyone involved in this was thinking, it seems so incredibly off-beam from what you would want out of a Killmonger comic that it ought to have been rejected at the outline phase. Boring and dull.

(There is a prominent character who I initially thought was Misty Knight: she's called "Knight," she looks similar. She very much is not. I don't know if this was a deliberate wrong-footing by Hill and Ferreyra, or if I just don't know very much about Misty Knight.)

By Any Means originally appeared in issues #1-5 of Killmonger (Feb.-May 2019). The story was written by Bryan Hill, illustrated by Juan Ferreyra, lettered by Joe Sabino, and edited by Wil Moss.

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