Black Panther: A Nation Under Our Feet Book 1 (udgave 2016)

I experienced a weird inversion in the process of reading this - I came into it excited to see what Ta-Nehisi Coates would be like writing a superhero comic, and less excited/puzzled by his pairing with Brian Stelfreeze, a guy who had kind of gone under my radar.

This ended up getting reversed along the way, because Coates's work is...puzzling. I'm not sure if I'm not well-versed enough in the history of Black Panther to get what's going on, or if Coates isn't meeting me halfway and filling me in on things that I should know about in order to understand what's going on. There are what seem to be conversations of great weight, but I constantly feel like I'm missing something and it ends up just being two or three people talking at each other. (There is one scene, though, between one of the sometime-villains of the story and T'challa's old tutor, that just about burns the page with how powerful and good it is. Coates has me adrift sometimes, but I'm doing what I can to follow in the wake, if you catch my meaning.)

Brian Stelfreeze on the other hand - BRIAN STELFREEZE. Wakanda was one of those places in the Marvel lore that I was always kind of aware of, but it never had the visuals to go with it like Marvel-New-York or Latveria or whatever-cosmic-place-everyone's-at-this-week did. Stelfreeze creates a whole visual language for Wakanda that's just incredible. There's a tendency when comic book artists draw a place that's "the city of the future" that it ends up looking like some weird Star Trek set that just wouldn't exist alongside other places that we know exist in the world (like Cleveland and stuff). Stelfreeze's designs are distinctively futuristic, but they feel real and natural - I love the bird-cars (are these those ornithopters Frank Herbert was always talking about?) that people ride around in, I love the flying armor-suits that Aneka and Ayo steal (and how it's obviously running off the same technology as the bird-cars!), and I love the way he draws the Black Panther mask "turning on" - it feels like the natural next step onwards from the crazy circuitry designs that Jack Kirby would do.

Overall, this was kind of a shaky start, but I'm willing to put my trust in this team and see where things go from there. ( )

I could barely get through this. Maybe I'm missing something but the action was confusing and the writing was ponderous. ( )

Admittedly read this more for Ta-Nehisi Coates than Black Panther.

Good story, with an impressive balance of politics, political science, action, moral dilemma and mystery. I found following the plot a bit of an uneven road at times, though I'm not sure if that's my own lack of familiarity with the dramatis personae of the Black Panther MCU showing.

Backmatter was very good. The volume also included the first appearance of the Black Panther in a Fantastic Four comic and it is.... extremely 60s. Offensively 60s. ( )

An intriguing and original Marvel comic series that subverts the typical "hero" story and instead gives us threads of a society fomenting dissatisfaction and national anxiety. There are a lot of separate storylines that I believe will converge in the end, so I am definitely willing to give this a few volumes to marinate. ( )

It's not a good start for someone who saw the recent movie of Marvel's, and does know anything else about Black Panther - as I initially thought.

I read that this was supposed to be a relaunched series that’s supposedly aim to appeal to a new audience. Well, if that was the goal, they failed nicely. A new reader like me - I'm referring to Black Panther character - will be somehow confused about what's going on in this volume 1. ( )