Marvel Action: Black Panther by Kyle Baker, Juan Samu, Vita Ayala, Arianna Florean, et al.

Marvel Action: Black Panther is a six-issue miniseries; I think the idea of the "Marvel Action" line is that it's made up of continuity-light stories aimed at younger readers. (I previously read a Marvel Action story featuring Elsa Bloodstone.) The League of Comic Geeks website tells me it's set on "Earth-18157," though most of the details (particularly its depiction of Shuri) seemed pretty consistent with the main Marvel universe as of The Intergalactic Empire of Wakanda, aside from the fact that T'Challa isn't in space; I wonder if it could fit in somewhere after that storyline is resolved.

from Marvel Action: Black Panther #3

Anyway, this is really two separate three-issue stories. The first, by Kyle Baker and Juan Samu, is about T'Challa and Shuri dealing with increasing amounts of bad weather around Wakanda. I found it a little too light to be interesting, and not very much tapping into the things that make Black Panther comics interesting; it mostly focuses on generic superheroics. Some things happen fairly quickly in a way that I found frustrating, and the villain seemed to gain too much ground too quickly to be plausible. (It must be hard to write stories where someone can plausibly take on a king on a regular basis, to be fair.) I found the humor pretty cheeseball and forced.

from Marvel Action: Black Panther #4

The second story, by Vita Ayala (who wrote a two-issue fill-in on Shuri) and Arianna Florean (who I predominantly know as a colorist on Titan's Doctor Who comics, but who also drew the diary extracts for the tenth Doctor's companion Gabby), is more three one-shots with some gentle links; as T'Challa and Shuri prepare for a scientific conference in Wakanda (nicely tying into what Nnedi Okorafor was doing in Shuri), T'Challa must first undergo a Wakandan tradition where he lives as a laborer for a day, and then Shuri learns a lesson about traditional Wakandan folkways versus science, before the story culminates in the conference itself. 

The stories do a good job of being rooted in ideas specific to Black Panther and Wakanda: what makes for a good king, how to accommodate tradition alongside new discoveries, why it's important to share your success with others. T'Challa having to work as a common laborer and deciding to single-handedly take on corruption was great; so was Shuri teaming up with a warthog to collect traditional medicines. The humor is light but effective; I particularly felt like Ayala and Florean had a good handle on Shuri. I'd gladly see more Black Panther work from them.

Marvel Action: Black Panther originally appeared in six issues (Apr.-June 2019). The stories were written by Kyle Baker (#1-3) and Vita Ayala (#4-6), illustrated by Juan Samu (#1-3) and Arianna Florean with Mario Del Pennino (#4-6), colored by David Garcia Cruz (#1-3) and Mattia Iacono with Sara Martinelli (#4-6), lettered by Tom B. Long (#1-2, 4) and Shawn Lee (#3, 5-6), and edited by Denton J. Tipton.

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Review: Transformers: Unicron by John Barber, Alex Milne, Sara Pitre-Durocher, Andrew Griffith, Kei Zama, et al.

Comic PDF eBook, n. pag.
Published 2019 (contents: 2018)
Acquired and read April 2019

Transformers: Unicron

Written by John Barber, with Chris Ryall, David Rodriguez, Brandon Easton, Christos Gage, Magdalene Visaggio
Art by Alex Milne
Additional Art by Sara Pitre-Durocher, Andrew Griffith, Kei Zama, David Messina, Nelson Dániel, Juan Samu, Paolo Villanelli, Fico Ossio
Colors by Sebastian Cheng, David Garcia Cruz
Additional Colors by Joana Lafuente, Alessandra Alexakis, Mattia Iacono
Letters by Tom B. Long, with Curtis Fandango

Though I gave up on John Barber's take on Transformers a couple years ago now, I still had some curiosity about how it would all end, and so I dutifully picked up Unicron, which ties up the IDW continuity that began all the way back in Infiltration-- three-and-a-half years of reading for me, and thirteen years of storytelling for them.

I don't know why Rung of all people would be at the center of Optimus's memories of the fallen, but hey, I love Rung, so I'll take it.
from Transformers: Unicron #6 (script by John Barber, art by Alex Milne)

Anyway, it's about as bad as all post-Dark Cybertron John Barber Transformers comics have been. Too many characters I don't care about, too much ancient Transformer mythology, too many banal human beings, too many shoehorned-in other Hasbro properties, too much indecisive Optimus, too many characters reverting again and again. Why did Starscream undo his progress from Till All Are One? Why am I reading about yet another millennia-long Shockwave masterplan? Didn't the jokes about Thundercracker writing screenplays wear thin years ago?

Why yet another story where Prowl is a jerk and this backfires?
from Transformers: Unicron #5 (script by John Barber, art by Alex Milne)

I guess the biggest point of frustration for me is the title character itself. Say what you will about the 1980s Transformers film, but Unicron is awesome in the original sense of the word. Its coming feels ominous and significant and unstoppable; it is the doom of a universe. Where and why does it come from? Irrelevant. It hungers, and it will have you. Here, though, Unicron never dominates. Neither the writing nor the art give it the immensity it deserves, it always feels squeezed in, instead of dominating. And then to give it an origin story that ties into one of the mediocre Hasbro properties! Visionaries, I think? I've already forgotten. This diminishes Unicron and thus the whole story.

I usually like Alex Milne, but his Unicron just feels really unimpressive. Ooh, it's sucking up some rocks.
from Transformers: Unicron #0 (script by John Barber, art by Alex Milne)

The IDW Transformers universe had a strong start in Infiltration, and despite missteps such as All Hail Megatron, went some very interesting, unprecedented places once the war ended. But John Barber, the same architect of those innovations slowly dismantled them after Dark Cybertron and then piled on the mistakes with the Hasbro comics shared universe-- necessitating the destruction of the entire continuity, because there was no other way to reset things to the way they'd been. But that destruction turned out to be as banal and uninteresting as the writing that made it necessary to begin with.

Next Week: Meanwhile, in another universal stream... the Fall of Cybertron!