Black Panther #7

Writer: Ta-Nehisi Coates
Pencils: Chris Sprouse
Inks: Karl Story
Color Artist: Laura Martin
Letterer: Joe Sabino
Publisher: Marvel

This month, Black Panther finishes this 2-issue mini arc drawn by Sprouse and Story. It's an action packed finale as this issue introduces The Crew, a group of black superheroes that came together at the behest of T'Challa to fight Zeke Stane.

This isn't a group of characters who have a lot of backstory together but Coates quickly establishes a rapport between them. Opposite The Crew is a really great group of villains including Kirby/Lee creation/Silver Age communist supervillain The Vanisher and the von Strucker twins, of Thunderbolts fame (at least to me). Stane has been a really smart addition to the book, his quippy dialogue forms a great contrast with the elaborate speech of the Wakandans. This issue is probably the one where Coates' fandom is clearer, and it's always cool to see groups of characters such as this one.

While the fight scene is a lot of fun, some of the characters seem superimposed on the page, it just doesn't feel as if they belong there physically. Particularly Stane, who gets dropped by T'Challa and then stands in an awkward pose in the immediate next panel. I think the jump from one panel to the next is too long but the main problem is just the position that Sprouse and Story's art puts him on. Generally, the movement is too stilted between panels.

This issue is not entirely focused on The Crew, we also see Changamire talking to The People and a scene with Shuri and Ramonda on the Djalia. Coates' prose is great in both of those scenes. The latter reverses similar scenes from recent issues of this run where Ramonda told Shuri Wakandan stories while they ran through the Djalia. Now, it is Shuri's turn to tell her mother a story but unlike Ramonda, she doesn't know the meaning of it. As she understands the story more deeply, she also becomes more powerful. It's a simple beat but it really lands. The art is much more fluid than in the rest of the book and Sprouse cleverly builds the image of Shuri running to mirror the one from the boy in her story.

The conversation between Changamire, Tetu and Zenzi is more complex. At face value, it's just Tetu and Zenzi's heel turn but it expands on the themes of protes and its relation to violence that Coates has dealt with for the whole run. Changamire rejects “the sword” in inner monologue and the rest of the scene has a sense of inetavibility, with The People being set on their path. I'm generally tired of stories where radicalism is portrayed as unequivocally wrong but Coates relies on his cast of characters to tell a nuanced story, with T'Challa and Ramonda (the Jambazi!), The Midnight Angels, Changamire and The People all having different outlooks and relationships to their country. I'm particularly interested to see what Ayo and Aneka do next, seeing as The People are planning to "burn down the house". On a technical level, I think Sprouse and Story's art here is again a bit too stilted to be effective. This scene is really decompressed, it relies a lot on Tetu and Changamire's expressions but the art isn't obvious (so to speak) enough to make those scenes feel meaningful.

Black Panther continues to be one of the more interesting books out there, it is really engaging thematically and recently it has managed to couple that with being more consistently fun. However, I found the art to be a bit lacking in this issue.