Black Panther: Reign at Dusk, Vol. 1 |
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Collection published: 2024 Contents originally published: 2023 Read: December 2025 |
Inkers: Chris Allen, Craig Yeung, Mack Chater, Matt Horak & Oren Junior
After the conclusion of John Ridley's run, there was a ten-issue Black Panther series written by Eve L. Ewing—to date, the last series titled just "Black Panther." It ran only ten issues and is collected as two trade paperbacks subtitled "Reign at Dusk," but I'm guessing it was originally intended as an ongoing and was curtailed by poor sales. The premise of the series is that following his exile from Wakanda, T'Challa still wants to serve as the nation's protector, and so he sets himself up in Birnin T'Chaka ("Biti"), a city where he has spent little time, far from the capital of Wakanda. In Wakanda, everyone's basic needs are met, but that doesn't stop some people from wanting more, so there is still crime and corruption for the Black Panther to root out. By day, T'Challa dons a holographic disguise to work as a manual laborer at a catering business; by night, he tries to root out the corrupt crime families in the city and tussles with an attractive female thief. (There is very definitely a bit of Batman influence here.)
I thought this had some potential but never totally succeeded. I think at least part of the problem is that Ewing doesn't use her limited canvas very efficiently, as though she thought this series was going to last longer than it did—but because she didn't use it very effectively, it didn't last long enough for her to do much of interest. There's largely one big storyline here, about the crime families fighting each other but also there are disappearances happening, which ultimately turn out to be the doing of a spirit from the early days of Wakanda. Ewing introduces a lot of characters to be an expanded cast for T'Challa's new status quo, but I felt like most of them ended up contributing little of interest, either to the plot or to the characterization of T'Challa, even when I liked them. (In particular, I liked N'Yobi, the well-meaning lawyer.) I feel like what the series would have benefited from is more stories; instead of telling one big one, I wish it had been a series of done-in-ones, putting T'Challa up against situations with clear beginnings, middles, and ends. More and more varied stories would have done both T'Challa and his cast some good. At the end, we're told T'Challa found himself by living amongst his people, but we haven't had enough interactions to make that work... nor do we really get what T'Challa has "lost" about himself that he got back! (I've seen some complaints online that we've gotten subplots like this before, and thus this is repetitive... but the last time was David Liss's run, which almost fifteen years ago. If it doesn't work here, that's on its own merits, not because some other writer hit similar beats a long time ago.)
Black Panther: Reign at Dusk, Vol. 2 |
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Collection published: 2024 Contents originally published: 2024 Read: December 2025 |
In particular, I didn't find the ongoing plot very interesting. The stakes of the crime family dispute are kind of murky, and then the whole thing gets subsumed in an attack by an evil cloud, which is just not and never can be interesting. There are some awkward contrivances, too, such as when T'Challa is trying to figure out a way to get into one of the crime families' weddings, and totally coincidentally, the catering business he works for is offered a job at the wedding that exact day!
This is a shame, because there's a lot of interesting stuff here. Like I said, I like a lot of the characters: I liked N'Yobi in particular, but a lot of the others have potential, like the female thief (a clear Catwoman analogue) or T'Challa's boss at the catering business. I like the setting of Birnin T'Chaka; I think this is the first time in the long history of Black Panther stories that we've actually spent a protracted period of time among the regular people of Wakanda. I appreciated that we got outside of the capital without going into one of the atypical "mute zones" we've seen in other titles. I liked the aesthetic of Biti, which is technologically advanced but different from what we've seen in other Wakanda stories.
On the other hand, I felt like the art let the story down. The aesthetic of Biti is cluttered, which requires good coloring to keep the art clear; some details need to draw the eye, some need to clearly be background detail. But a lot of the time, the imagery here is just one big muddle. Occasionally the storytelling is confusing, hard to track on a panel-to-panel basis. There were even some real amateur hour mistakes, such as a panel in the wedding issue where figures in the foreground are drawn smaller than figures that are obviously further away!
I do feel Ewing was dealt a bad hand, coming off the back of Ridley's run... but I also feel like the basic premise here was a solid one. I wish she and her artistic collaborators had been able to make it work better, because it had real potential.
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