It’s All Coming Back: Black Panther #12 Review

Writer: Ta-Nehisi Coates / Artist: Jen Bartel /Marvel Comics The penultimate issue of this arc has arrived! Black Panther #12 begins the closing out of its first arc with a slow build. Beyond the swashbuckling action and deft use of Afrofuturist concepts, alongside the artful weaving of Pan-African history and aesthetic, beneath the shiny facade of the Marvel Comics banner, a true nuts and bolts clash of the Titans is about to take place. The stage-setting has been borderline immaculate. This arc has given me more insight into T’Challa and N’Jadaka than Coates’ previous run on the Wakandan mythos (and even shines a light on the personified ideologies of the film Black Panther). I don’t know if these characters, if this world, has ever been more distilled. Every character on the ‘heroes journey’ takes their own path. Ta-Nehisi Coates has redefined how readers see T’Challa in this book while redefining T’Challa’s approach to himself. This narrative bleeds ingenuity.

Issue #12 takes us to the moment where the hero gets that last little bit of what they need to take on the ‘big bad’. There are narrative archetypes you gotta hit in order to bring stories to resolution, it’s just part of the craft. I was skeptical of how Coates would lead readers to these archetypical moments — I felt like they would dilute his style. I really enjoyed being wrong about that. We get a moment of the Djalia (the Wakandan spiritual plane) in issue #11, but now we’re all up in it! Using the Djalia to …