Keith's Reviews > Black Panther, Vol. 1: A Nation Under Our Feet, Book One

Depending on how well you know Black Panther -- and I mean not just the character, but every run on the character and every time he appears in another Marvel comic and, in fact, every time a reference has been made to any element of the character's world, forever -- A Nation Under Our Feet is either subversive and brilliant, or an unfathomable mess.

I know nothing about Black Panther. I, like most left-leaning white comics nerds who like Batman, was just super-pumped to get a monthly comic drawn by Brian Stelfreeze -- partially because Stelfreeze is a black artist, but mainly because he's friggin STELFREEZE -- and I was super-pumped to get a book about a black superhero from a black writer. Of course, since I did not actually know anything about Black Panther, I did not know that Black Panther comics have been given to black writers for some time now, but this is part of what I'm saying -- the announcement about the new Black Panther had just enough of what I understood to be cool, and enough of what sounded like a socially progressive and exciting thing I didn't know anything about, to make this comic the thing I have been most excited about all year.

If you read, for example, an interview with Coates (like this one at io9), what you will get is that Coates has thought about Black Panther more deeply than you. In fact, I think he's thought about BP more deeply than a lot of writers think about their characters. He has woven together every small inference to the character, along with each of the character's main story arcs, as if they are very, very present for the reader. It's not that Coates is thinking like a "black writer" that is excluding (or not writing for) a wider audience. Coates is thinking like a novelist. There's an assumption in his writing that he's got a lot of room to provide context, backstory, and necessary histories for his characters that will bring the average reader up to speed, but because this is a comic book series and not a novel, he really doesn't.

This is not necessarily a bad thing. There has been something fun about reading a bunch of comics that are really well-researched and deeply developed but that do not spend much time (if any) letting the reader acclimate. Grant Morrison does this all the time -- the difference being, of course, that he does them with properties I know a lot about (X-Men, Batman), and properties whose histories, I would cautiously suggest, are generally more well-known to comics nerds than that of Black Panther.

Which is where it gets interesting. My knee-jerk response to the narrative structure of Black Panther is that it doesn't really work. It relies heavily on things you probably do not know, and even its scene-to-scene transitions form a story that's almost too big for what a comic has room for. Imagine the first book of Game of Thrones packed into a highlights reel and smashed into four 22-page comic books, without footnotes of any kind. That's sort of how this book reads. As a novel-reader and a comics-reader, it's actually kind of fun to reread the book several times (5 times at this point?), look up references to old characters and old plotlines on Wikipedia, and piece together what Coates is trying to do. But that doesn't mean that the workload placed on the reader in order to make it through this comic feels intentional (as it often does with Morrison). It feels more like a very, very smart writer who just can't see the forest for the trees.

But the real interesting-ness here is the fundamental question of whether or not a comic like Black Panther even owes me what I'm asking of it. I'm used to reading either A) well-established superhero titles starring characters whose histories are practically a matter of public record or B) esoteric 'alternative' superhero titles resurrecting some long-gone character that do a lot of pandering, and/or throw out the rulebook so completely that there's really nothing you need to know, going in. Black Panther does neither of these things. It just starts going and demands that you sink or swim.

I will maintain that certain elements of the book just aren't explained well -- brand-new characters thrown into the back of a panel that might be important twenty pages later, or they might not, so fuck it -- but I think there's also a larger political question that Black Panther raises. White people (specifically white male people) are currently going through a cultural moment in which it is being made abundantly clear that not all culture is "made" for them, that in fact there are whole worlds of media, history and expression that do not, shock-of-shocks, exist solely (or at all) for white (male) people to enjoy.

As a left-leaning white dude, I think that living through this cultural moment is a great thing. That doesn't mean that it's not also a little bit weird to be reminded of when I'm just sitting on my couch in my undies trying to veg out with some comics.

I guess here's a list of the things I'm getting at:

1) Black Panther is an intensely nerdy, deep-cut comic that has been marketed as a great jumping-on point for new readers. It is, in fact, not.

2) UNLESS IT IS. Unless the experience of being totally alienated and finding your way into a world you do not understand is exactly would should happen.

3) Even if you are a total Black Panther historian, I have come to understand that this book will completely trip you out.

WHICH BRINGS ME TO THE POINT THAT I HAVE NOT EVEN REVIEWED THIS BOOK YET.

Black Panther is (apparently) usually written as a brilliant scientist who rules over a perfect city, like if Batman were allowed to build his own version of Gotham. What Coates has done, however, is copiously read through every BP appearance or reference ever and realized that, taken together, that is really not the story of Black Panther at all.

In A Nation Under Our Feet, Coates takes stock and realizes that if an adventuring mad scientist actually DID ever rule a country, probably that country would fall apart in about five seconds. Then Coates points out that, considering the history of the character -- the number of times his country has been invaded, destroyed, or flat-out neglected because their king was off being an Avenger -- Black Panther is actually a totally shit ruler who's got a lot of things coming to him.

All of which makes me glad I know nothing about Black Panther, because i have a feeling that any reader who actually loves the character enough to be able to follow all this book's threads would be insanely pissed off by what Coates is doing with him.

Because Coates is not, in fact, using his stint on Black Panther to write some kind of BLM-Afrocentrist-Afrofuturist-empowerment action feature (which, being real with you, is exactly what I wanted to read). He is, instead, writing a book that questions every structure of power Black Panther comics usually champion -- science, masculinity, military 'peace,' and the general ethics of superheroism.

All of which makes TOTAL SENSE in our current cultural moment, and is yet something it never even occurred to me that I would see in this comic.

This book makes me realize that I'm never actually going to know what I'm talking about regarding this book. I'm going to continue to read the shit out of it. The art is gorgeous and super weird-sciencey, and whether or not Coates actually knows how to write a comic, he sure as hell knows how to write a book. The series is called Black Panther, but it's really an ensemble title about a nation of people with clearly-etched motives and desires that feel both connected to a shared history, and completely disparate from one another.

Maybe one could argue that there's too much talking, and not enough punching. Maybe that's the point of what's being challenged here. Either option is possibly true.

I dunno. I don't know whether or not it's even good, but I do know that it's pretty fucking metal, you guys.