Reginald Hudlin

As will become more and more apparent as I make my way through these Civil War comics, I'm not a fan of this crossover. That being said, I LOVE Reginald Hudlin's Black Panther, and he does an amazing job with these issues. He takes a bad editorial remit and fits his characters into it as well as I think anyone could, even bringing up some of my own problems with the concepts of Civil War.

McGruder (Boondocks) and Hudlin (House Party) teamed up for a movie script that turned out to be unproduceable, and so turned it into a graphic novel.

We begin with the voter disenfranchisement of the 2004 U.S. presidential election (except all veiled-like and names-changed, except not THAT veiled, because the illustrator didn't attempt to disguise Bush, Powell, Rice, Cheney, et al). Illinois is the pivotal state in this version of the election, which makes the voter disenfranchisement in show more East St. Louis the determining factor in the election's outcome. (That reveal-sequence was visceral and powerful---goosebumps, I had.) The Mayor of East St. Louis takes the matter to the Supreme Court and gets a can't-stop-losing-for-winning ruling (yes, disenfranchisement happened; no, it's not worth doing anything about). East St. Louis responds by seceding from the United States.

What follows is a breakneck roller-coaster ride of intrigue, power, money, politics, double-crossing, back-stabbing, chickening-out, and stepping up. Plus a lot of affectionate satire about the people of East St. Louis. Teh awesome.

I quibble with the final page---I think that Blackland would become another Taiwan---but hey, I think that the final ten minutes of most movies should be skipped. Some reviewers also charge that there's a sexism problem here, which, yeah, there is: the book has a bad case of the suspense/thriller genre's double-crossing sex-diva. But Kabilah, our spunky college activist---who, in trio with our spunky guerrilla-activist Nala and the power-brokering sex-diva herself, manages to save the day several times over---makes me all kinds of happy. Which is all to say that while I had my doubts about the portrayal of women during the first third of the book, McGruder and Co. had made me happy again by the final third. show less

T'Challa returns home to Wakanda in a coma and Ororo and his family must figure out if he can be saved and how to hold the country together in the mean while. Another nation takes advantage of Wakanda's difficulties and unleashes a totem killer to try to decimate the Black Panther.

I really liked the in depth cultural view we got of Wakanda in this story. I thought the magical aspects of the story were really interesting. I liked the art style although occasionally it seemed a little bit show more inconsistent. show less

Storm and the Panther as a c0uple never really worked for me. It seemed forced, and I don't envy Reginald Hudlin's remit in making it work. Other than that, these issues are much better than the last trade, because Hudlin has slowed down and is spending time to develop characters and their personalities. If not for the horrible editorial fiat that these two characters be forced into a marriage, I think it would work better.