Ultimate Black Panther: Gods and Kings / Darkness and Light by Bryan Hill, Stefano Caselli, and Carlos Nieto

Ultimate Black Panther: Gods and Kings

Collection published: 2025
Contents originally published: 2024-25
Read: January 2026

Writer: Bryan Hill

Artists: Stefano Caselli & Carlos Nieto

Color Artist: David Curiel

Letterer: Cory Petit & Joe Caramagna

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

Collection published: 2025
Contents originally published: 2025
Read: January 2026

Volumes 2 and 3 did nothing to dispel this impression. Even when there is action, it seems pointless and goes nowhere. T'Challa will be like, "Now, I'm doing something!!" and in the next issue will be back to sitting around reacting to the machinations of others. The interpersonal dynamics are boring, largely the characters saying the same stuff to each other again and again. Are the mysterious cultists manipulating T'Challa? Yes of course so why is it taking him months upon months to do something about it.

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! 

ACCESS AN INDEX OF ALL POSTS IN THIS SERIES HERE  

Ultimate Black Panther: Peace and War by Bryan Hill, Stefano Caselli, and Carlos Nieto

Ultimate Black Panther: Peace and War

Collection published: 2024
Contents originally published: 2024
Read: December 2025

Writer: Bryan Hill

Artists: Stefano Caselli & Carlos Nieto

Color Artist: David Curiel

Letterer: Cory Petit

Since the end of Eve L. Ewing's Black Panther run, there has been no ongoing Black Panther series... sort of. Though the "616 universe" Black Panther lies fallow, there is an ongoing set in Marvel's alternate continuity, the "Ultimate universe." I don't know much about the broader continuity of the Ultimate universe, so I can only judge the comic on its own merits, as a reboot of the Black Panther concept. We're back to the beginning here, with Wakanda in splendid isolation from the rest of the world, a Black utopia cut off from the rest of Africa. At the start of the series, T'Challa is already king of Wakanda, though his father T'Chaka is still alive, having stepped down. But pressures are conspiring to bring T'Challa and Wakanda into the outside world; two mysterious godlike figures are taking over Africa, and they are not going to leave Wakanda alone.

I thought this started strongly, with well-defined characters in interesting configurations. T'Challa is actually married to Okoye, former head of the Dora Milaje; I felt like there was sexual tension between Shuri and Okoye; Killmonger is romantically involved with Storm and T'Challa is sympathetic to his arguments. Wakanda is being rocked by terrorism, and the new king does not know who to trust.

Unfortunately, what is the status quo at the end of the second issue is pretty much still the status quo at the end of the sixth, the last one collected here. It seems to me that T'Challa mostly sits around and thinks a lot about what he should do; more than once I turned a page on my Fire tablet and was surprised to discover I had finished an issue, thinking there was no way that twenty pages could have gone by. I don't mind comics without nonstop action; in fact, I wish more superhero comics writers would spend time on character and dialogue and mystery. But the attempts at such here by writer Bryan Hill (Killmonger: By Any Means) go in circles without interest. 

T'Chaka always gotta die, I guess.
from Ultimate Black Panther #1
(art by Stefano Caselli)

Partially I think the issue here is that (if I am correct) the series is being told in real time, with a month passing between each issue. But that means not much of significance can happen between issues, so T'Challa can't do much between them... but then he doesn't seem to do much in issues, either, and thus he ultimately spends six months dithering. Potentially interesting conceit but poorly implemented. Such an approach requires a lot of done-in-one issues, I think, more plots shaped around individual issues. This is very much a "written-for-the-trade" plot. Well, except that even by the end of the trade little has happened. Written for the omnibus?

I enjoyed the art of Stefano Caselli, who draws the first four issues. It was much better than his work on Civil War: Young Avengers & Runaways... but then that was twenty years ago! I found the work of new-to-me Carlos Nieto on the last two inferior; an artist for a series with this much dialogue needs to have a better command of facial expressions, and some of the compositions were confusing. (When Storm and Killmonger make out in issue #6, I at first thought it was Storm and Shuri!)

ACCESS AN INDEX OF ALL POSTS IN THIS SERIES HERE