Into the Heartlands: A Black Panther Graphic Novel |
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Published: 2022 Read: November 2025 |
Illustrated by Dika Araújo, Natacha Bustos & Claudia Aguirre
Layouts by Geoffo
Colors by Cris Peter
Letters by Arianna Maher
This YA graphic novel takes us back to the childhood of T'Challa and Shuri, after the death of their father T'Chaka, before T'Challa ascended to the throne himself. The two children fight and argue, and both seem somewhat ill-prepared for their future responsibilities; T'Challa is a bit pompous, and disdains his younger sister, while Shuri would rather be doing science and thinks she's smarter than anyone else.
Only at a Wakanda ceremony both are ill-prepared for something goes horribly wrong, and people—including their mother, Ramonda—are infected with a mysterious virus. Could the work of T'Challa's birth mother, herself a successful scientist, lead them to a cure in the mysterious heartlands of Wakanda?
The result is a decent book about the two siblings going on a quest together along with a talking jerboa with a mysterious past. Like the flashback story in the recent Long Shadow collection, this leans more into the African storytelling traditions more than many Black Panther stories, and I very much enjoyed that aspect of it. The art is pretty typical for a YA superhero comics, sort of anime influenced, but I particularly enjoyed the vibrant coloring of Cris Peter.
I was a little disappointed in how the character of T'Challa himself was handled. I feel like the story turns much more on Shuri's decisions than his, and would have liked to have seen him project the commanding presence he's more commonly depicted as having.
(Lots of people on the Internet, including the Hoopla catalog, call this book "Shuri and T'Challa: Into the Heartlands," but the "Shuri and T'Challa" part of the title appears nowhere on or in the actual book as far as I can tell.)
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