Black Panther: Wakanda Unbound by Ta-Nehisi Coates, Daniel Acuña, et al.

Black Panther: The Intergalactic Empire of Wakanda, Part Four

Collection published: 2021
Contents originally published: 2020-21
Read: October 2025

I finally made it to the end of all the Black Panther comics I got in a comiXology sale to commemorate the death of Chadwick Boseman, but those only go up to 2020... and obviously there are five more years of Black Panther comics after that! So I'll be continuing to discuss them, switching from single issues on comiXology to collected editions on Hoopla. That begins with the fourth and final part of The Intergalactic Empire of Wakanda, branded as "Wakanda Unbound" on the original issues, though not in the trade.

Writer: Ta-Nehisi Coates

Artists: Ryan Bodenheim, Daniel Acuña & Brian Stelfreeze*

Color Artists: Michael Garland, Daniel Acuña, Chris O'Halloran & Laura Martin

Letterer: Joe Sabino

Anyone who's followed my reviews of Ta-Nehisi Coates's Black Panther run will not be surprised to hear that it fizzles out instead of coming to any kind of interesting climax. Part one of this storyline was gripping if confusing, part two raised lots of interesting ideas, part three returned to the meandering slow style that is Coates's typical approach... and then part four throws away any interesting ideas in favor of endless superhero punchups. I think the idea of Wakanda as an empire in itself is one that could have really had T'Challa questioning his own principles, but we just get a big battle here. Wakanda is a byword for freedom across the galaxy now! But how can it be that easy? Can a formerly oppressive regime just become a force for good? Interesting questions that a writer could ask, but this story just dodges them all in favor of a totally unearned Big Win.

For some reason, a bunch of non-Wakandan superheroes show up for the final battle, but I think only Black ones.
from Black Panther vol. 7 #24 (art by Daniel Acuña)

In the end, I think Coates bit off more than he could chew time and time again. These are superhero comics, fundamentally they must be about punching bad guys in the face, but the very best superhero comics manage to do more than that. Coates was interested in Big Ideas, which I appreciate, but his run consistently failed to marry those Big Ideas to the conventions of the superhero genre, meaning almost every arc had Big Ideas that were discussed a bit but went nowhere, and boring, tacked on action. (Particularly tedious here is the largely dialogue-less, all-action issue.)

ACCESS AN INDEX OF ALL POSTS IN THIS SERIES HERE

* Note that the cover gives credit to Chris Sprouse and Karl Story, but they have no work collected in the volume. I'm assuming someone copied over the cover template of part three, which they did contribute to, and failed to change the names.