☰

Top

Black Panther: Tales Of Wakanda

by Jesse J. Holland (ed.), 2021

Published: 2021.06.03

Home > Book Reviews > Marvel > Tales Of Wakanda

 

Photo by Wil C. Fry

★★★ (2.7 of 5)

(* 490 pages does not include About the Authors, but — weirdly — does include the introduction, table of contents, title page, and copyright page.)

 

Summary

This is a collection of short stories, by authors of African descent, about the Marvel character Black Panther (King T’Challa) and the kingdom of Wakanda. Since I like the character and the premise behind these stories, but don’t read comic books, this seemed like a good way to enjoy more Black Panther stories while I await the next movie.

(Unlike almost everyone else, I first heard of the Marvel character Black Panther [as opposed to the Black Panther Party] in 2016 when I watched Captain America: Civil War. In that film, the character seemed only mildly interesting to me, though I was glad the Marvel Cinematic Universe had finally included another Black main character other than Samuel L. Jackon’s Nick Fury [who was conspicuously absent from that film, reinforcing the trope that there can only be one black main character]. But by the time Black Panther the movie was released two years later, I had done some reading on the character and why he was so important to non-white comic book fans. And the movie itself blew me away. Unable to wait for the planned sequel to that film, I saw this beautiful hardcover book in Target and bought it.)

The book is “lovingly dedicated to our Forever King Chadwick Boseman, Long May He Reign”.

 

★★ Kindred Spirits, by Maurice Broaddus

This was a poor choice of opening story. The plot seems to be that Chinese corporations are attempting to “colonize” African nations via infrastructure loans, and Black Panther defeats them (through a buyout? — this is very unclear). The author also forgot he was narrating in first person and one character “stared at her” (should be “stared at me”) — page 22. In another place (page 33), there is an outdoors fight but one combatant gets kicked “across the room”, as if it was originally an indoor fight but then got sloppily edited. Much of the rest of the story was unclear. It felt very like the problems I had with Broaddus’s book, Pimp My Airship, which I grudgingly awarded three stars last year.

★★★ Heart Of A Panther, by Sheree Renée Thomas

The magical Heart-Shaped Herb that gives the Black Panther his power (of which only enough exists to crown the next king of Wakanda) is dying in its secret groves. The Black Panther goes to Mississippi (?) to find out why. Apparently, an American slave had brought some seeds with her a long time ago and there is another grove in Mississippi, which the Panther can use to replenish the Wakandan supply. It’s never clear what went wrong with the original Wakanda plants, nor how the Black Panther decided to look for more in Mississippi. Like the first story, this one had a couple of spots that looked like editing errors. For example, when breaking and entering the hidden Mississippi location, the Black Panther scales the wall (pg. 55), but then two paragraphs later uses super Wakanda technology to disarm and open the gate so he can enter (pg. 56).

★★★★ Killmonger Rising, by Cadwell Turnbull

Erik Killmonger, one of the supervillians of the Black Panther universe, is here portrayed as a professor at MIT who goes by the name Erik Stevens (so named by his adoptive parents), though he seems to have a split personality, part of it called N’Jadaka (his birth name) and part of it Killmonger (his supervillian name). These three personalities struggle against each other. When Professor Stevens is wrongly pulled over by white Boston cops and subjected to an illegal search and detention — and mild verbal abuse, the Killmonger personality gains the upper hand. The scene with the cops was chilling — perhaps because it felt plagiarized from a hundred news stories about Black men getting pulled over by police.

★★ I, Shuri, by Christopher Chambers

It was never clear to me exactly why, but King T’Challa’s sister Shuri flies in a high-tech Wakandan aircraft to Baltimore to kidnap an old Black woman. On the way back, they are attacked by a giant sea monster and then kidnapped by an Atlantean (just like Aquaman, but in the Marvel universe) and then escape with the help of the aquaman’s sister, to arrive back in Wakanda. A lot was unclear in this story, including a magic tooth.

★★★ Of Rights And Passage, by Danian Darrell Jerry

Set in the latter 1700s, during the American Revolution, this story has then-King of Wakanda T’Swuntu in Boston looking for his nephew N’Sekou, known to the Americans as Crispus, the first person killed in the Boston Massacre. When T’Swuntu learns of the death, he recovers the body and performs sacred Wakandan rites. It was an interesting attempt to place a Wakanda story in a historical context.

★★★ And I Shall See The Sun Rise, by Alex Simmons

The Queen of Wakanda (wife of T’Chaka), pregnant with T’Challa, is a scientist working on some of the hidden country’s supersecret tech, when she is waylaid by a cabal that doesn’t think she is fit to be queen — due to her heritage (poor). She fights to survive, but later begs the King to show mercy to the criminals.

★★★ Faith, by Jesse J. Holland

Told in the “tale within a tale” format, this one starts with T’Challa attending a wedding reception in Wakanda, at which the bride’s father (an American preacher) sourly refuses to participate due to the “pagan” trappings (Wakandans, having never been colonized, are not Christians or Muslims, but instead worship the panther god Bast [a manifestation of Bastet], if not others). T’Challa takes the reverend aside and tells him a story of when he met Bast in person, and Bast’s daughter Nefertiti (not the same person as the real-life 18th Dynasty queen of Egypt). Somehow, this story was supposed to put the reverend’s mind at ease — and in the story it does — though I can’t imagine why.

★★★★ Ukubamba, by Kyoko M

This was a straightforward story of warrior Okoye working to find a kidnapped girl and return her to her mother. There is a competent fight scene and an emotional final scene. I’m not sure where the title came from; I don’t think that word is in this story. (It’s a Zulu word with various meanings that include restrain, retain, catch. Perhaps here it is used to mean “arrest”.)

★★★ What’s Done In The Dark, by Troy L. Wiggins

A former NYPD cop is employed by King T’Challa for special missions, provided with his own Vibranium laced suit and sent to the U.S. to track down some white supremacist terrorists who have kidnapped Wakandan diplomats.

★★ The Underside Of Darkness, by Glenn Parris

This one felt like the author had planned a novel and then was surprised to learn his story had to fit into 28 pages. There were far too many named characters, plot points, twists, and themes for a short story. The effort to include it all resulted in too-abrupt transitions, nonsensical dialog (as if the characters were discussing things that happened in the now-cut rest of the novel), and action scenes that made no sense. The gist of the story, as I caught it, is that Wakandan Prince T’Kayla (some time in the 1910s, maybe?) tries to stop some French explorers — who have a rudimentary submarine — from discovering Atlantis.

★★★ Return Of The Queen, by Tananarive Due

While investigating suspicious activity in the nearby fictional African nation of Canaan (unrelated, apparently, to the real-life Canaan where mythical Hebrew heroes in the Bible carried out multiple genocides), King T’Challa becomes trapped and is rescued by his former wife Osoro — also known as Storm from the X-Men franchise. Storm and T’Challa rekindle their love as they defeat Canaan’s enemy.

★★ Immaculate Conception, by Nikki Giovanni

This story doesn’t match the timeline or background used in other stories (though all of them play fast and loose with the fictional history of Black Panther). In most of them, as in the Marvel film, T’Challa doesn’t ascend to the throne until the 2020s, but in this story, T’Challa is already King of Wakanda in 1978 when he visits an elementary school in Oakland to tell a story. The fictional children (unbelievably) pay rapt attention for an hour as T’Challa recounts the myth of his origin in a magical eagle’s egg found in a California lake and raised by the unmarried woman who found the egg. The story uninterestingly details T’Challa’s development from a child to teen and then young man, at which point he is tricked into visiting Africa, where the Wakandans surprise him by telling him he came from the ancient DNA of a former Wakandan king and is expected to take over the secret nation soon. He does so, but then leaves Wakanda to return to California where he gets married and has a child (though he was already married in Wakanda).

★★★ Legacy, by L.L. McKinney

Erika (her age isn’t mentioned but she seems to be a minor child, perhaps in early teens) is on the way to the airport for her first visit to Wakanda, where her late grandmother originated. Accompanied by her younger brother and mother, Erika goes through the TSA line without her metal bracelet (bequeathed to her by her grandmother) setting off any alarms, but then the braclet begins to light up and make an annoying sound. Erika retreats to the bathroom to figure out how to shut the braclet off, where she is attacked by a strange woman and eventually rescued by another strange woman. It turns out both women, and Erika’s grandmother, were part of the Wakanda special forces known as the Dora Milaje. The attacker was a former member turned enemy who tracked the beacon in the bracelet, and the rescuer had been trailing the attacker anyway.

★★★ The Monsters Of Mena Ngai, by Milton J. Davis

Set deep in the past, in the days when Wakanda hadn’t yet figured out what to do with Vibranium, a warrior named Bashenga becomes the first Black Panther, representative of the goddess Bast.

★★★ Shadow Dreams, by Linda D. Addison

A fourteen-year-old girl, training to be a Dora Milaje guardian, is beset with troubling dreams. The dream turn out to be messages from herself another universe, where Wakanda isn’t doing so well and they’re trying to steal DNA from this universe to help their ailing king.

★★ Bon Temps, by Harlan James

T’Challa’s sister Shuri is sent to New Orleans with a magical necklace so it can be looked over by a magic man. She’s accompanied by a small Dora Milaje. During Mardi Gras. There are vampires and werewolves, and a sun goddess, and two good-looking guys who take a liking to them. There are a couple of parties and a lot drinking. Overall, it felt like it was written by a very young person who still thinks partying too much is cool and that all there is to a relationship is meeting a cute guy.

★★ Stronger In Spirit, by Suyi Davies Okungbowa

T’Challa is very sick, and neither the expert medical doctors nor the magic in Wakanda can cure him, so he must seek a secret cure from a stranger god. In Lagos, from a shady character. Though the author tells us the shady business person was “scamming” T’Challa, it’s an odd term to use since the person did as promised and connected T’Challa to the strange god, who provided the cure T’Challa needed. The woman who guided him through the city was stabbed at one point, but she seemed all right a few minutes later.

★★ Zoya The Deserter, by Temi Oh

A young Wakandan named Zoya decides to leave, to see the rest of the world, but ends up under psychiatric care in London, when she mentions that she is from Wakanda — a place they’ve never heard of. But she’s rescued by a nurse, who has secretly heard of Wakanda and wants to send her sick boyfriend there for a cancer cure. They escape the hospital, and it turns out the boyfriend was once Zoya’s boyfriend back in Wakanda. Zoya is about to do a heroic deed and give him her priceless necklace — which will guarantee his entry back into the hidden country — but then changes her mind at the last minute and runs away with it. There are a lot of London-specific terms in here, as if the author is attempting to mimic one of those TV shows where they talk about “council flats” a lot.

 

Conclusion

It’s possible that if I hadn’t come into this with high expectations, I might have enjoyed it more — that’s on me. But I did (have high expectations), and therefore wasn’t as impressed as I’d hoped to be.

Overall, I’m glad the book exists and that I read it. Black readers ought to see themselves more often represented as both characters and authors in every genre, and readers of all colors and origins could stand to broaden their horizons. I only wish the book had been better. Most of the stories fell flat to me, with only a few turning to corner into enjoyable. None wowed me (so no five-stars), and only two felt powerful enough to warrant four stars.

The stories cover a variety of time periods in Wakanda history — though a majority are set during the reigns of the two Wakandan kings we’ve seen in Marvel movies (T’Chaka and his son T’Challa). Many emphasize the inherent moral paradox of the “Wakanda first” policy that was evident in The Black Panther movie — Wakanda can continue to hide itself, isolate itself, and protect only itself, and in doing so ensure a high quality of life for its people — but this means the rest of the world, especially the Diaspora, suffers. Or Wakanda can make greater efforts to use its superior technology and resources to bring about positive change among wider humanity — at the risk of dangerous exposure and depletion. I was startled at how many of them (eight) were set at least partly in the U.S. — though this likely reflects the intended audience as well as the pool of authors (at least 14 of them are from or in the U.S.)

 





comments powered by Disqus