Black Panther and the Agents of Wakanda by Jim Zub, Lan Medina, Craig Yeung, et al.

This eight-issue miniseries came out in parallel to The Intergalactic Empire of Wakanda, Book 3, but if you've only been following T'Challa's adventures in his main title, it reads very oddly. Far from being lost in space, Black Panther is apparently the chairman of the Avengers!? According to this series, not only that, but he's assembled a special strike force to support the Avengers in times of particular crisis, called the "Agents of Wakanda" and led by the leader of the Dora Milaje, Okoye.

from Black Panther and the Agents of Wakanda #1

I didn't really buy any of this. Why would T'Challa be the chair of the Avengers, particularly at this point in time? If he did think the Avengers needed extra back-up, why would he call the group "Agents of Wakanda"? Surely a group called that would be backing up Wakanda's interests, not the Avengers'? Based on the title, I expected something more like The Crew. How come Okoye is leading this group? Doesn't she have a whole other group of elite warriors to spend her time leading?

If you can get past all this, what's here is fine, sometimes even good. The eight issues are made up of four two-issue stories; each one puts a set of different Agents of Wakanda into the spotlight, which are a mix of prominent Marvel characters (e.g., Mockingbird, the Wasp) and ones I had never heard of (e.g., Fat Cobra). I do like goofy, obscure superhero characters, and writer Jim Zub really leans into that with the rotating line-up here. Of the four stories here, my favorites were the first, with its emphasis on Fat Cobra, a sumo wrestler who can eat his way out of trouble, and the last, which has a big focus on Fin Fang Foom. The goofy stuff on the moon in the second one was also good. 

from Black Panther and the Agents of Wakanda #8

The only one I didn't really like was, predictably, the Deadpool one. Any amount of Deadpool is too much.

So I don't really get why this comic had to be made (its best moments have pretty much nothing to do with the Black Panther or his milieu), but if it did, it was decent enough. I enjoyed it enough that when I got to the end, I was interested to see its threads would be continued in a comic called Empyre: Invasion of Wakanda... but disappointed to discover the comic never actually came out! 

Black Panther and the Agents of Wakanda originally appeared in eight issues (Nov. 2019–Sept. 2020). The stories were written Jim Zub; penciled by Lan Medina (#1-4, 7-8) and Scot Eaton (#5-6); inked by Lan Medina (#1), Craig Yeung (#2-4, 7-8), and Sean Parsons (#5-6); colored by Marcio Menyz (#1-8) and Erik Arciniega (#4-5), with Federico Blee (#3); lettered by Joe Sabino; and edited by Wil Moss.

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