Black Panther: All This and the World, Too by John Ridley and Germán Peralta

Black Panther: All This and the World, Too

Collection published: 2023
Contents originally published: 2022-23
Read: December 2025

Writer: John Ridley

Artist: Germán Peralta

Color Artists: Ceci De La Cruz, Sebastian Cheng & Jesus Aburtov

Letterer: Joe Sabino

While I enjoyed the set-up of volume 1 of John Ridley's Black Panther a lot, I found what was done with that set-up in volume 2 pretty awful, to be honest. The third and final volume is better than volume 2, thankfully... but as it's a direct continuation, it's hard to move past how heavy-handed some of the plot turns in volume 2 were, as the story of volume 3 directly depends on them.

This volume opens with Black Panther operating as chairman of the Avengers, still no longer welcome in Wakanda. The world's Internet infrastructure is taken over, and when T'Challa goes to investigate, it turns out that it's one of his own people who's done it, the very friend whose death kicked the whole thing off in volume 1. His enemy has the power to neutralize the Avengers, so T'Challa must take him down on his own with his own allies.

It's fine. Some of the twists are good, some are heavy-handed; some moments feel earned, some do not. I think overall, Ridley's run had the core of a good idea, an interrogation of the extend to which T'Challa was willing to go to protect Wakanda, but it wasn't done in a good way, because far too many characters judge T'Challa by a weird standard of ethics. One of the best parts of Priest's run (with which Ridley's is very obviously in dialogue) was how it treated Black Panther a king, not a superhero—what would a superpowered king do in a world of superpowers? how would he act to protect his nation and its interests? Ridley's run wonders if there might be ways in which T'Challa thus might go too far... but it doesn't do this interestingly, because everyone judges T'Challa for his choices right away without considering the rationale or consequences of them. To say what T'Challa does is bad because it's not what other superheroes do is a really boring way to criticize T'Challa. At his best, T'Challa was a square peg in a round hole, but instead of exploring how that lack of fit plays out, Ridley's run just asserts he ought to have been a round peg all along. Why do I need to read a fifteen-issue run devoted to telling me the character I'm reading is bad? It's cynical and uninteresting, and I'm worried this all leaves the character in a bad place for future stories as well.

ACCESS AN INDEX OF ALL POSTS IN THIS SERIES HERE