Ultimate Black Panther: Gods and Kings |
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Collection published: 2025 Contents originally published: 2024-25 Read: January 2026 |
As I said in my review of its first volume, I thought Ultimate Black Panther started with a lot of potential that it ultimately squandered. The real-time gimmick of the series works against it; what initially seems to be a complex setup turns out to just be, like, four people. There was a lot of dithering because the pacing of the series means T'Challa can take action once a month at most... but he doesn't even seem to do that!
Ultimate Black Panther: Darkness and Light |
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Collection published: 2025 Contents originally published: 2025 Read: January 2026 |
One of the big mysteries of the series is "what is the agenda of vibranium?"... and I can't think of a mystery I care less about. Is a rock alive? Quite frankly this series has done nothing that would make that question seem like an interesting one. Like, can a rock have an agenda? If it did, why would it be relevant to Wakanda? I barely care about Wakanda in this series, so why should I care if a rock is going to do something to it?
By the end of volume 3, I was completely bored. I think this series has been cancelled, though, so volume 4 will be the last, and I guess I'm willing to give it a read when it turns up on Hoopla.
It was September 2020 when comiXology had a sale where they reduced all their Black Panther comics to $0.00, and I scooped them all up. It was December 2022 when I began reading them. It was October 2025 when I finally read the last of the comics I got from that sale, but I was able to carry on for another year-plus thanks to additional ones I borrowed from Hoopla. But with these two volumes of Ultimate Black Panther, I am finally done. There are no more free Black Panther comics available to me; I've read nearly every story about him from 1966 to 2025. Sixty years of comics in four years.
I always enjoy doing things like this. You couldn't do it with Batman, it would take too long. But Black Panther is at that sweet spot: nearly continuous publication, so you get to see the character evolve over the years, but not an overwhelming amount of content, popular enough to come back whenever he's cancelled, but unpopular enough to need continual reinvention to stay relevant. In this case, it's been particularly interesting to see a character originally invented as a supporting one shift into being a lead himself, and to see his milieu evolve into a coherent setting.
What were the best ones? Well, clearly Christopher Priest's run. The character has never been more powerful or more interesting; the jokes have never been funnier; no one else ever quite figured out how to write a comic about a king not a superhero. Other than that, I highly recommend Don McGregor's first run, The Man without Fear! by David Liss and Francesco Francavilla, and Rise of the Black Panther by Evan Narcisse and Javier Pina. (Highly disrecommended: anything by Ta-Nehisi Coates, everything by Nnedi Okorafor that's not Shuri, and Killmonger by Bryan Hill and Juan Ferreyra.)
I do see that on Hoopla there's now the Panther's Prey Omnibus, which it looks like contains some stuff I haven't read, so I imagine I'll make my way back to Wakanda eventually... but not yet!
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