Black Panther: Klaws of the Panther by Jonathan Maberry, Gianluca Gugliotta, et al.

In Doomwar, T'Challa destroyed all Wakandan vibranium worldwide in order to prevent Doctor Doom from using it for nefarious purposes. Of that move, I wrote, "this happens at the very end of the story, so we get no implications of his choice. This isn't so much an issue for Doomwar itself [...] but one that I am afraid future Black Panther stories will not really engage with. I guess we'll see!" Well, I was wrong, because the very next in-continuity Black Panther story is all about the worldwide vibranium shortage.

Klaws of the Panther continues writer Jonathan Maberry's focus on Shuri as the new Black Panther; in this story, she travels to the Savage Land to obtain some vibranium to replace Wakandan stocks. (Apparently "S.L.V.", an abbreviation you will read way too much in this series, is different from Wakandan vibranium.) What she finds, though, is that someone got there ahead of her—longtime Black Panther nemesis Klaw (he killed her dad) has teamed up with the mad scientists of A.I.M. to do... um, something vaguely nefarious with vibranium and sound.

from Klaws of the Panther #2

While I enjoyed Maberry's Doomwar, this miniseries continued some of the trends I didn't enjoy from Maberry's run on Black Panther volume 5. A bit too much going on about Shuri's inexperience and anger and propensity for using violence. This bothers me for two reasons. The first is that it feels like the kind of thing you do with a female hero specifically; I don't think men are as likely to continually get storylines about how they are bad at superheroing because they are inexperienced and their emotions get in the way. Second, I just don't think the character of Shuri from the comics is (thus far, anyway) as interesting as the one played by Letitia Wright in the movies! Give me the warrior-scientist who can bring her brother up short. I am wondering if at some point the comics character will become more like her film counterpart.

Anyway, as my brief synopsis above perhaps hinted, I didn't care much for the story here. I don't really care for Klaw—no offense, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, but what does it mean for a person to be made of living sound... especially if they just seem to be a person still?—and all the stuff about "S.L.V." got too abstract and complicated. On top of this, each issue sees Black Panther teaming up with a different hero: Shanna the She-Devil, Wolverine, Spider-Man, and the Black Widow in turn. The team-up with Shanna is natural enough given the plot, and the meet-up with Wolverine is fun enough (and also makes sense if you buy the series's conceit about Shuri needing to manage her anger better), but the inclusions of Spider-Man and the Black Widow seem kind of pointless and random.

from Klaws of the Panther #4

On top of all this, I didn't care for the art by Gianluca Gugliotta with assists from Pepe Larraz. Like too many superhero artists drawing stories about women, he always makes sure to include perfectly round breasts and butts even if he has to contrive the angles to make it happen... but weirdly his faces are kind of ugly. The action is decent enough if you ignore that, and I do find José Villarrubia an above-average colorist.

Unfortunately, though the story's events spin out of the choices T'Challa made in Doomwar, I don't think the implications are meaningfully explored here; there's little from Wakanda in this story. The hunt for "S.L.V." could basically be any maguffin. The strength of Black Panther as a concept is in Wakanda itself and its politics, both internal and international, and Klaws of the Panther doesn't have that. I'm curious how the loss of vibranium and Shuri's tenure as Black Panther will both shake out in the long term, because while this series finished in 2011, there wouldn't be another Wakanda-focused Black Panther run for another five years! That's an eternity in comics time, and I feel pretty certain the changes set up in Reginald Hudlin and Jonathan Maberry's runs will be forgotten by then.

Klaws of the Panther originally appeared in four issues (Dec. 2010–Feb. 2011). The story was written by Jonathan Maberry, illustrated by Gianluca Gugliotta (#1-4) and Pepe Larraz (#3-4), colored by José Villarrubia, lettered by Albert Deschesne, and edited by Lauren Sankovitch.

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Black Panther: Doomwar by Jonathan Maberry, Scot Eaton, Robert Campanella, Andy Lanning, et al.

Doomwar is a six-part miniseries (with a double-length first issue) published in 2010; even though it was not branded as belonging to a particular Marvel series, it is clearly a Black Panther story. Despite having guest characters from across the Marvel universe (e.g., the Fantastic Four, the X-Men, War Machine, even Deadpool), the story picks right up from the end of Black Panther volume 5 by the same writer, and the protagonists are definitely T'Challa and Shuri as they struggle to defend Wakanda from an invasion by Doctor Doom.

from Doomwar #5

As a result, I didn't expect to enjoy it very much, having not really enjoyed Jonathan Maberry's "Prelude to Doomwar"... but by the time I was partway through issue #2, I realized I was pretty into this! I had been afraid this would be a big generic Marvel event, but as I said, it's very much a Black Panther story about the characters of T'Challa and Shuri, and about the politics of Wakanda. It would fit right into, for example, Christopher Priest's run without a lot of tweaking. Though I still feel like Shuri isn't a very strong character, mostly just being an angry young woman, I felt Maberry had a good handle on T'Challa here, showing how dedicated he was to his country even in trying circumstances. And while I felt like the populist uprising in vol. 5 was kind of contrived, Maberry does a good job with its consequences here. 

On top of all this, I kind of groaned when Deadpool showed up (especially when they put him on the cover of issue #4, but he didn't appear until the very end, presumably so they could also put him on the cover of #5), but Maberry makes good use of him, and he doesn't derail the book like I was afraid he might.

from Doomwar #4

The story was aided by two other things. One is definitely the artwork; Scot Eaton (mostly inked here by Andy Lanning & Robert Campanella) is the best penciler assigned to Black Panther since Jefte Palo's Secret Invasion story in volume 4, with clear storytelling and good character work. (I think he was doing Ioan Gruffud for Mister Fantastic and Denzel Washington for T'Challa. Of course I approve of the former.) And John-Francois Beaulieu, who I really liked on the Marvel Oz comics, does a great job as the colorist. Bad coloring can muddy the storytelling, but I felt that even with dark colors, everything popped and was visually clear—even though he obviously uses a very different palette here than he did in Oz!

The other is Doom himself. I haven't read many Fantastic Four comics, so I don't have much of a handle on the character, but I really liked Maberry's take on him here, especially when we find out how Doom was able to overcome T'Challa's locks on the Wakandan vibranium vault. It plays out exactly how I expected... but was nevertheless perfectly done. A great depiction of a great villain.

from Doomwar #4

I found the ending both interesting and frustrating. The characters can kill Doom, but don't, so that they're "better" than him. While I believe that, say, Reed Richards would have this philosophy, it doesn't make any sense for T'Challa and Shuri, and surely it only happens this way because Doomwar is part of a wider Marvel universe, and can't be the story that kills off a key character. On top of this, T'Challa makes a very interesting choice: he destroys all Wakandan vibranium rather than let Doom make off with some of it, preserving Wakandan values but perhaps at the cost of Wakandan security. But this happens at the very end of the story, so we get no implications of his choice. This isn't so much an issue for Doomwar itself (though I think the way that the country's rebuilding gets a single panel is) but one that I am afraid future Black Panther stories will not really engage with. I guess we'll see!

Doomwar originally appeared in six issues (Apr.-Sept. 2010). The story was written by Jonathan Maberry; penciled by Scot Eaton; inked by Andy Lanning (#1-5), Robert Campanella (#1-6), Jaime Mendoza (#6), and David Meikis (#6); colored by John-Francois Beaulieu; lettered by Cory Petit (#1-5) and Joe Caramagna (#6); and edited by Axel Alonso. (Note that issue #2 is called "Part 1" and #6 "Part 5" on their title pages.)

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Black Panther: Dark Reign / Prelude to Doomwar by Reginald Hudlin, Ken Lashley, Paul Neary, et al.

After Black Panther volume 4 came to an end in 2008, it was almost immediately followed by volume 5. This was a twelve-issue series; I don't know anything about the behind-the-scenes of the era, so I don't know if it was planned as a maxiseries, or if it was supposed to be an ongoing that got curtailed or what. Maybe it was even planned as a six-issue miniseries and expanded?

from Black Panther vol. 5 #4

It has two distinct halves. The first six issues are a Dark Reign tie-in (I don't remember what Dark Reign was even though I have the Young Avengers installment) called The Deadliest of the Species that focuses—in theory, anyway—on Shuri becoming the Black Panther. The series opens with T'Challa injured and missing; in flashbacks, we find out he had encounters with both Namor and Doctor Doom. In the present, T'Challa has abandoned his responsibilities because of his injuries, meaning his mother and wife have to step in as rulers of Wakanda while his sister Shuri has to assume the mantle of the Black Panther. Of course, there's some kind of threat to Wakanda, some kind of ancient mythical bad guy.

To be honest, I never figure out what the bad guy was or why I should care. The story is supposedly about Shuri but I didn't feel we learned anything interesting about her, and the beats of the story are kind of tired. She's too cocky and has to learn to dial it down to be worthy... this seems to me to be the kind of thing that is more often associated with female superheroes than male ones. Has T'Challa ever been rejected by the panther god for his confidence? The charming character of the films has yet to emerge in the comics... if, indeed, she ever will. The rest of the story is pretty forgettable stuff, super-terrible bad guys defeated in super-terrible fights.

from Black Panther vol. 5 #2

The Deadliest of the Species was written by the same writer as volume 4, Reginald Hudlin; Hudlin cowrites the first issue of the second story, Power, with Jonathan Maberry, who then takes over as writer for the remainder of the series. Power jumps ahead a bit, with Shuri now installed as ruler of Wakanda, on a diplomatic mission to the United States, where she's also investigating a threat to Wakanda, particularly whatever injured T'Challa. Meanwhile, there's economic and agricultural failures in Wakanda, and a resurgent nationalist movement that will be familiar to anyone who's paid attention to politics over the last decade. The last three issues of Power are branded as a "Prelude to Doomwar" tie-in, Doomwar being a crossover miniseries that apparently picks up right from the end of Black Panther vol. 5. (It's the thing I will read next in this sequence.)

Anyway, I found this muddled and hard to care about. Maberry gives Shuri a team of advisors, but it's a lot of characters who I didn't really care about, and I don't see why she needs this kind of supporting cast when T'Challa didn't. It takes the characters far too long to figure out that Doctor Doom is responsible, given the readers learned this way back back in issue #2. And I am tired of stories where the people of Wakanda rise up against their rulers for seemingly stupid reasons. (Though I guess this is realistic! And to be fair to Maberry, though this is a story that seems to happen a lot in Black Panther comics, I think it had actually been a fair amount of time since it was last done when he wrote this in 2008. Did it happen during Priest's? If not, then it hadn't happened since the 1990s.)

from Black Panther vol. 5 #11

But really I didn't find a lot to grab onto here as a reader. Probably my favorite part were the two talking heads from Wakandan media that we cut to occasionally. One of the really interesting things Don McGregor set up way back when was the conflict between traditional Wakandan values and the modernizing influences T'Challa was importing, and most subsequent writers haven't done a ton with this.

The majority of the art for this series is done by penciler Ken Lashley and inker Paul Neary. I am a fan of Neary from his Marvel UK days, but here he's just inking over pretty standard 2000s superhero pencils from Lashley. That said, I found them better than Will Conrad, who does the rest of the series and whose art is kind of confusing and does a bad job of depicting Shuri in particular.

The Deadliest of the Species originally appeared in issues #1-6 of Black Panther vol. 5 (Apr.-Sept. 2009). The story was written by Reginald Hudlin, penciled by Ken Lashley, inked by Paul Neary, colored by Paul Mounts, lettered by Cory Petit, and edited by Axel Alonso.

Power originally appeared in issues #7-12 of Black Panther vol. 5 (Oct. 2009–Mar. 2010). The story was written by Jonathan Maberry (#7-12) & Reginald Hudlin (#7), illustrated by Will Conrad (#7-10, 12) and Ken Lashley & Paul Neary (#11), colored by Pete Pantazis, lettered by Cory Petit (#7-10, 12) and Clayton Cowles (#11), and edited by Axel Alonso.

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