Three Stories from Black Panther Adventures by Marc Sumerak, Ig Guara, Jay Leisten, Elliott Kalan, Christopher Jones, et al.

Black Panther Adventures

Collection published: 2017
Contents originally published: 1968-2013
Read: October 2025

This collection of Black Panther comics was recently added to Hoopla; it consists of six stories from non–Black Panther books (mostly Avengers, with one Fantastic Four story), mostly not set in the "main" Marvel Universe. In original release order (which is not the order the stories are collected here), they come from The Avengers #52 and 62, Marvel Adventures: Fantastic Four #10, Marvel Adventures: The Avengers #22, The Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes #1, and Marvel Universe: The Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes #8. Of these six, I'd already read three of them: the two regular Avengers stories were collected in Mighty Marvel Masterworks Presents The Black Panther, Volume 1 and the Fantastic Four story in Marvel-Verse: Black Panther. 

Thus, I'm just reading and reviewing the three new-to-me stories collected here.

Writers: Jeff Parker, Marc Sumerak, Christopher Yost, Elliott Kalan, Roy Thomas

Pencilers: Manuel Garcia, Ig Guara, Patrick Scherberger, Christopher Jones, John Buscema

Inkers: Scott Koblish, Jay Leisten, Patrick Scherberger, Pond Scum, Vince Colletta, George Klein

Colorists: Andrew Crossley, Ulises Arreola, Jean-François Beaulieu

Letterers: Dave Sharpe, Clayton Cowles, Sam Rosen, Art Simek

I think that far too many Black Panther stories released prior to the character's MCU debut feel the need to introduce him by making him the ruler of this mysterious land our heroes know nothing about. That was the approach taken in Marvel Adventures: Fantastic Four #10, collected here, among other stories, and it's also the approach taken in Marvel Adventures: The Avengers #22 ("Wakanda the Wild Side!" by Marc Sumerak, Ig Guara, and Jay Leisten). I guess it's a perfectly valid approach to introduce the character... but it also makes for a pretty boring story in this particular instance, as the Black Panther is thus mostly a side presence. Which I guess is okay, this is an Avengers comic, not a Black Panther one... but then why put it in a Black Panther book? Anyway, I didn't think this one had much going on. Also, what a weird Avengers line-up: Captain America, Wolverine, Storm, Spider-Man, the Hulk, and Giant-Girl (nee the Wasp)... can you even have X-Men on the Avengers? It doesn't seem right.

The other two stories are, thankfully, ones where Black Panther actually is in the Avengers. The Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes #1 ("Trust" by Christopher Yost and Patrick Scherberger*) is a six-pager about Black Panther teaming up with Hawkeye. It's fine, though I didn't find the bickering terribly believable.

Next panel: Black Panther getting overwhelmed, of course.
from Marvel Universe: The Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes #8

I did find the bickering believable in Marvel Universe: The Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes #8 ("Mayhem of the Madbomb!" by Elliott Kalan, Christopher Jones, and... Pond Scum!? I guess not everyone's parents can be good at naming kids), where Black Panther is forced to team up with the Hulk when literally no other Avenger is available to stop terrorists from setting off a "madbomb" on the Empire State Building. Never were two superheroes less well-matched, and both story and art are fun. Clearly the best of the three new-to-me stories.

 ACCESS AN INDEX OF ALL POSTS IN THIS SERIES HERE 

* On the collection's credit page, the artist is given as Scott Wegener, but in the actual story, Patrick Scherberger. As far as I can tell from the GCD, Wegener did the art for the main story in The Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes #1, not the back-up, which is what's actually collected here.

Doctor Who: Operation Volcano by Andrew Cartmel, Christopher Jones, Ben Aaronovitch, et al.

  Doctor Who: The Seventh Doctor: Operation Volcano

Collection published: 2019
Contents originally published: 2018
Acquired: March 2020
Read: November 2021

Writers: Andrew Cartmel, Richard Dinnick, John Freeman, Paul Cornell
Artists: Christopher Jones, Jessica Martin, John Stokes

Colorists: Marco Lesko, Charlie Kirchoff

Executive Producer: Ben Aaronovitch
Letterers: Richard Starkings and Jimmy Betancourt

This is Titan's first and last The Seventh Doctor volume (they have by this point stopped optimistically putting "Vol 1" on every title page), collecting a three-issue miniseries. The miniseries is written by Andrew Cartmel and illustrated by Christopher Jones (who illustrated Titan's Third Doctor series); Ben Aaronovitch is credited as "executive producer" but there's no indication of what this might actually mean even though he gets first billing on the cover! Anyway, I went into this not quite sure what it would be like. On the one hand, I suffered through Cartmel's attempt to recapture this era in his execrable Big Finish Lost Stories; on the other hand, I recently read Cartmel's early 1990s DWM comics for the first time, and found them really interesting and striking.

This is somewhere in between. Cartmel's not interesting in pushing the boundaries of Doctor Who or comics like he was thirty years ago, but this does a much better job of pastiching his own era than the Lost Stories did. It's a fun, if somewhat underdeveloped and simple story, about the Doctor, Ace, and the Intrusion Counter-Measures Group (of Remembrance of the Daleks fame) dealing with a crashed alien spaceship in the Australian outback. It has a sense of scale tv wouldn't have attempted in the 1980s, but I did feel that something thematically interesting could have been done that didn't happen here. Christopher Jones does a lot to enliven the material; he's a good tv tie-in artist, in that he can do both likenesses and action well.

The collection includes some other things, foremost among them the "Hill of Beans" back-up strip about the Doctor and Ace meeting Mags the werewolf from The Greatest Show in the Galaxy again... with the gimmick that the story is illustrated by Jessica Martin who played Mags! Since her acting days, she had actually become an independent comics artist. It's okay; it's a bit jumpy and incomprehensible at times, which I blame on both writing and art. My guess is that sci-fi action does not play to Martin's strengths as an illustrator. But hey, I do like Mags, and this probably does better by her than her incompatible reappearances in Big Finish's trilogy.

Finally, it contains two things I've reviewed elsewhere, so I won't go over them again: the Seventh Doctor strip from 2018's Free Comic Book Day issue and the First Doctor story "In-Between Times." Except that I will complain that the FCBD issue is a prologue to Operation Volcano but for some reason collected all the way at the end of this volume!

I read an issue of Titan's Doctor Who comic every day (except when I have hard-copy comics to read). Next up in sequence: The Road to the Thirteenth Doctor

Doctor Who Free Comic Book Day 2018

Doctor Who Free Comic Book Day 2018

Published: 2018
Read: November 2021

Writers: Nick Abadzis, John Freeman, George Mann, Jody Houser
Artists: Giorgia Sposito & Arianna Florean, Christopher Jones, Mariano Laclaustra, Rachael Stott
Colorists: Marco Lesko, Carlos Cabrera

Letterers: Richard Starkings and Jimmy Betancourt

This Free Comic Book Day offering contains three-and-a-half stories, only one-and-a-half of which have been collected, so I picked it up. It's a weird artifact, in that when it came out, Titan clearly planned to do some stuff it never actually got around to doing; instead, it massively shrank its output when it began its Thirteenth Doctor comic.

It begins with "Catch a Falling Star," a twelfth Doctor story that picks up from the end of The Good Companion, showing Gabby being picked up out of the time vortex by a later incarnation of the Doctor than her own. Mostly it's recap and set-up, one assumes so that people could jump on with the new twelfth-Doctor-and-Gabby comics that the closing caption promised with its "THE ADVENTURE CONTINUES THIS NOVEMBER!" But November 2018 saw no such comics released, nor did any subsequent Novembers, even though Abadzis wrote the scripts. It's cute, though; I always like it when Florean draws Gabby's diary.

It continues with "The Armageddon Gambit," a slim story that serves as an utterly nonessential prologue to Operation Volcano, Titan's seventh Doctor miniseries... but at least that actually came out! Interestingly, it's by John Freeman, editor and occasional writer of the DWM strip during the era the comic seeks to recreate. This is actually collected in the Operation Volcano trade paperback, so you can read it there.

It ends (kind of) with "Midnight Feast," an eleventh Doctor story that offers some faint amusement. This story ends with "THE ELEVENTH DOCTOR WILL RETURN!" He never really did, appearances in The Road to the Thirteenth Doctor and The Many Lives of Doctor Who aside.

It actually ends with "And Introducing...", a one-page three-panel strip where the thirteenth Doctor gets out of the TARDIS, by the Thirteenth Doctor creative team. Not sure if it really needed a writer, but I guess someone had to write "VWOORRRP" down so the letterer knew to put it on the page.

So, overall, a bit of a curio, but if you were invested in Gabby's story from the Tenth Doctor comics, it's definitely worth a few minutes to read what turned out to be the end of her adventures.

I read an issue of Titan's Doctor Who comic every day (except when I have hard-copy comics to read). Next up in sequence: The First Doctor: "In-Between Times"

Review: Doctor Who: Heralds of Destruction by Paul Cornell and Christopher Jones

Collection published: 2017
Contents originally published: 2016-17
Acquired: June 2021
Read: July 2021

Doctor Who: The Third Doctor, Vol 1: Heralds of Destruction

Writer: Paul Cornell
Artist: Christopher Jones
Letters: Richard Starkings and Jimmy Betancourt

This was a delight. Easily the best of Titan's various Doctor Who miniseries, and probably the best of all its Who comics with the exception of the Eleventh Doctor ongoing. It's really just a loving pastiche of the Pertwee era, but one filled with nice little touches and deft characterization, exactly the kind of thing one (sometimes) wants from one's tie-in comics. Cornell's skill at this kind of writing is far and above most of Titan's writers, knowing exactly how to blend the familiar and the new in such a way as to warm the heart of even readers who aren't Pertwee fanboys. Christopher Jones is new to me as an artist but does solid work; clear likenesses and good action.

At the end, Cornell claims this is his last Doctor Who tie-in, but he's subsequently returned to the fold three times, which seems about right.

I read an issue of Titan's Doctor Who comic every day (except when I have hard-copy comics to read). Next up in sequence: The Twelfth Doctor: Sonic Boom