Black Panther #170 Review

Writer: Ta-Nahesi Coates / Artist: Leonard Kirk / Marvel Comics The past few issues of Black Panther have been raising the tension until it’s thick enough to cut with an action-packed Issue #170 sees some action-packed payoff to the slow burn. T’Challa and Co. end up forced to take the fight to Ras the Exhorter and the Originators. Coates has truly found his feet in giving the audience some action and some light comic philosophy. The action beats overlap well with a couple of his own homemade characters playing Dueling Ideologies. The exposition never slows the action down and, in fact, adds flavor and tension to the whole thing as it all ends in a moment that opens up a new obstacle that has some fun possibilities going forward. I’m of the mind that there are two kinds of stories: the ones that ask questions and the ones that answer them. Coates has elected to write the comic that asks big questions and leaves the answers up to the audience to conjure on their own. He writes a comic that trusts its reader enough to keep up with the pace he establishes. Leonard Kirk is an incredibly underrated talent to have on board for this book.

He tries to not break from the overall aesthetic laid out by other regularly rotated Black Panther artists but there’s something that’s so blatantly his own in the shading and linework. He clearly feels right at home with this color palette, never allowing anything to feel plain or “just there” for the hell of it. There’s a couple of pages where…