Black Panther vol. 4: Avengers of the New World, Part One

Ta-Nehisi Coates’ first arc on “Black Panther” didn’t really live up to my expectations.  Having an extremely talky twelve-issue story to tell where the talk wasn’t especially interesting will do that.  It wasn’t bad enough to get me to give up on the series, so here we are now with vol. 3 and Wakanda is facing an all-new crisis.  While the country was saved from Tetu’s rebellion by the intervention of its ancestors in the previous volume, it leads to a new question in this volume.  Namely, where were Wakanda’s gods in that conflict?  It looks like they’ve disappeared and left the door to their realm open, allowing the monstrous Originators to come and try to reclaim the land.  Fortunately the Black Panther is on the case and this time he’s got none other than his ex-wife Storm backing him up here.

The good news is that while there’s still plenty of talk in this volume, what’s being said is more interesting and even funny at times.  Helping matters immensely is the slick and eye-pleasing art from Wilfredo Torres and Chris Sprouse.  There’s also more action in this volume, which helps to keep things lively and break up all the exposition.  Of which there is enough to hold this volume back from becoming genuinely entertaining.  The biggest problem with the volume is that there’s plenty of talk about the gods and the fact that they’ve disappeared, but very little action to find out why that happened and how to bring them back.  Then you get to the final few pages and find out that this situation might be one giant piece of misdirection on the part of one of the Panther’s oldest foes.  I hope that’s not the case because any twist which teases the idea that everything you’ve been reading up to this point is not a good one.  We’ll see if Coates has a plan for making it a good one in the next volume.