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A review by crookedtreehouse
Black Panther by Christopher Priest: The Complete Collection, Vol. 3 by Paolo Rivera, Sal Velluto, Christopher J. Priest, Jon Bogdanove, John Buscema, Jorge Lucas, J. Torres, Ryan Bodenheim
2.0
So we're in the future. And hand puppet guy is back. And the children that you didn't know The Black Panther had, because this is the future, are killed. And Luke Cage is old. And something is wrong with T'Challa besides his dead kids. You should really really care about all of this because dead kids that you never knew about is sad. You can tell because The Black Panther is kneeling with arms outstretched and crying. It's. So. Emotional. Also a Wakandan is in love with The Hulk? Why not?
Then, girls in skimpy uniforms fight. The Defenders are involved for some reason. It looks like Annoying Attorney is now Mephisto, or at least he looks like Mephisto. There's some sort of body switch and more pop culture references, and a dragon who is maybe Mephisto or Immortal Iron Fist. Who cares? This season can not be stopped. It's like being on a shitty rollercoaster that keeps ramping up, but all the drops are four or five feet, and then it's flat forever. How did this not get canceled?
Iron Man shows up after a while. Wolverine, too. Thor. The whole fucken Avengers team. This goes on for about a dozen unreadably convoluted issues. If you keep reading, it will eventually stop, and you can get on with your life, reading Black Panther stories that actually focus on The Black Panther and have plots that make narrative sense.
I think I find this so annoying because there are some good beats in this run, and the story wouldn't be awful if it wasn't told in constantly shifting fashion. It's referenced in the very first issue, but it really does seem like Christopher Priest was a middle schooler who saw Pulp Fiction, and thought "I wanna do that with super heroes!" but didn't have any outline or concept of how to make shifting time and points of view a necessary part of the story, instead of a distraction.
Then, girls in skimpy uniforms fight. The Defenders are involved for some reason. It looks like Annoying Attorney is now Mephisto, or at least he looks like Mephisto. There's some sort of body switch and more pop culture references, and a dragon who is maybe Mephisto or Immortal Iron Fist. Who cares? This season can not be stopped. It's like being on a shitty rollercoaster that keeps ramping up, but all the drops are four or five feet, and then it's flat forever. How did this not get canceled?
Iron Man shows up after a while. Wolverine, too. Thor. The whole fucken Avengers team. This goes on for about a dozen unreadably convoluted issues. If you keep reading, it will eventually stop, and you can get on with your life, reading Black Panther stories that actually focus on The Black Panther and have plots that make narrative sense.
I think I find this so annoying because there are some good beats in this run, and the story wouldn't be awful if it wasn't told in constantly shifting fashion. It's referenced in the very first issue, but it really does seem like Christopher Priest was a middle schooler who saw Pulp Fiction, and thought "I wanna do that with super heroes!" but didn't have any outline or concept of how to make shifting time and points of view a necessary part of the story, instead of a distraction.