Marvel Action: Black Panther by Kyle Baker, Juan Samu, Vita Ayala, Arianna Florean, et al.

Marvel Action: Black Panther is a six-issue miniseries; I think the idea of the "Marvel Action" line is that it's made up of continuity-light stories aimed at younger readers. (I previously read a Marvel Action story featuring Elsa Bloodstone.) The League of Comic Geeks website tells me it's set on "Earth-18157," though most of the details (particularly its depiction of Shuri) seemed pretty consistent with the main Marvel universe as of The Intergalactic Empire of Wakanda, aside from the fact that T'Challa isn't in space; I wonder if it could fit in somewhere after that storyline is resolved.

from Marvel Action: Black Panther #3

Anyway, this is really two separate three-issue stories. The first, by Kyle Baker and Juan Samu, is about T'Challa and Shuri dealing with increasing amounts of bad weather around Wakanda. I found it a little too light to be interesting, and not very much tapping into the things that make Black Panther comics interesting; it mostly focuses on generic superheroics. Some things happen fairly quickly in a way that I found frustrating, and the villain seemed to gain too much ground too quickly to be plausible. (It must be hard to write stories where someone can plausibly take on a king on a regular basis, to be fair.) I found the humor pretty cheeseball and forced.

from Marvel Action: Black Panther #4

The second story, by Vita Ayala (who wrote a two-issue fill-in on Shuri) and Arianna Florean (who I predominantly know as a colorist on Titan's Doctor Who comics, but who also drew the diary extracts for the tenth Doctor's companion Gabby), is more three one-shots with some gentle links; as T'Challa and Shuri prepare for a scientific conference in Wakanda (nicely tying into what Nnedi Okorafor was doing in Shuri), T'Challa must first undergo a Wakandan tradition where he lives as a laborer for a day, and then Shuri learns a lesson about traditional Wakandan folkways versus science, before the story culminates in the conference itself. 

The stories do a good job of being rooted in ideas specific to Black Panther and Wakanda: what makes for a good king, how to accommodate tradition alongside new discoveries, why it's important to share your success with others. T'Challa having to work as a common laborer and deciding to single-handedly take on corruption was great; so was Shuri teaming up with a warthog to collect traditional medicines. The humor is light but effective; I particularly felt like Ayala and Florean had a good handle on Shuri. I'd gladly see more Black Panther work from them.

Marvel Action: Black Panther originally appeared in six issues (Apr.-June 2019). The stories were written by Kyle Baker (#1-3) and Vita Ayala (#4-6), illustrated by Juan Samu (#1-3) and Arianna Florean with Mario Del Pennino (#4-6), colored by David Garcia Cruz (#1-3) and Mattia Iacono with Sara Martinelli (#4-6), lettered by Tom B. Long (#1-2, 4) and Shawn Lee (#3, 5-6), and edited by Denton J. Tipton.

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