Black Panther: Range Wars by John Ridley, Stefano Landini, and Germán Peralta

Black Panther: Range Wars

Collection published: 2022
Contents originally published: 2022
Read: November 2025

Writer: John Ridley

Artists: Stefano Landini & Germán Peralta

Color Artists: Matt Milla & Jesus Aburtov

Letterer: Joe Sabino

I really enjoyed volume 1 of John Ridley's Black Panther run, finding it a return to form after Ta-Nehisi Coates's. It was interesting, from a character, action, and thematic perspective, surely the best work on the title since Christopher Priest.

So I was very much surprised by how much I thoroughly disliked this. The first few issues here wrap up the "Long Shadow" arc, and I found them dumb. I get that people might be mad at T'Challa having a secret plan of shadow agents... but I found the reactions here entirely disproportionate. The agents didn't even do anything. Can you get mad at the legitimate ruler of a country for having spies? Because that's literally all he did, yet everyone suddenly acts like T'Challa has committed the ultimate transgression. Yet he very much did "worse" things throughout Priest's run! And suddenly he's being deposed, being hunted by Wakandan police. Does it even make any sense? T'Challa is a popular ruler, you can't just politically turn on a guy like that. I didn't buy any of this at all, it made no sense. Clearly Ridley has a long game he's playing, and he's trying to get all the pieces into position for it, but the hand of the author is too obvious. To make all this work, you need to buy what Ridley is selling, and I did not.

A metaphor, you say? Surely not.
from Black Panther vol. 9 #10 (art by Germán Peralta)

The rest of the book contains another story that actually reads much more like an Avengers story in its features, even if I would say it's a Black Panther story in terms of its project. No longer king of Wakanda, a depressed T'Challa is focusing on his duties as chairman of the Avengers when Earth comes under attack by the "Colonialist," an entity from another dimension. This is science fiction in the classic tradition of H. G. Wells's The War of the Worlds: what if the aliens did to the Earth (i.e., specifically white people) what white people have been going around doing to other people? The idea is fun enough, there's a couple good jokes, but I didn't find the actual story did as much with it as you might hope for; there's not really any interrogation on the part of the white characters as to what this says about them. I did like the "Buffalo Soldier" character a lot, though.

I was also glad to see Germán Peralta graduate from one-shot/back-up artist to the series main artist. He's good at action and emotional expressiveness; clear composition and good storytelling.

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