Is This Your King?: Black Panther #10 Review

Writer:Ta-Nehisi Coates / Artist: Kevin Walker / Marvel Comics Welcome back, to the stage of history! Or the future. You know what I mean. Black Panther #10 is on the scene with an intergalactic warrior lean. Hot off the heels of well-designed double-cross in issue #9, T’Challa and Nakia were behind enemy lines but are now allies with the formerly misunderstood enemy, who revealed themselves to be the real rebellion all along!

The plot is not only thickening but adding strings from previous issues and creating a space odyssey with Blackness square in the center of it all. This Black Panther arc is revealing Coates’ design for storytelling. His past writing has made the general public aware of his analytical abilities, but the scaffolding of this narrative is a comic book fan’s dream. In the same way that Jason Aaron liberated Thor from the MCU using the extremes of time, Coates is walking readers into an uncharted aspect of the lore. With no fan-person pushback, Ta-Nehisi has free rein to use anything and everything in Marvel’s vault to support this world. *Spoiler Alert* So when we see the Wakandan pantheon of deities in conference and conflict with N’Jdaka in issue #7, he reveals that he has added the Klyntar to the empire by rocking a black and gold symbiote! That level of development and preparation shines in the payoffs which, by design, are few and far between but always impactful. The last few panels of issue #10 bring some of the lesser remembered moments together to…