Black Panther/Namor: Doomed #1 Review
More than any shared narrative universe created in human history, the Marvel Universe is bound together by crossovers and tie-in events. This is its greatest strength and its greatest weakness. These kinds of events provide opportunities for characters to impact each other’s lives, allowing multiple narratives to add up to more than the sum of their parts. At its best, it is a kind of storytelling magic that others struggle to replicate. However, crossovers and their spinoff series are at least as much of a sales tactic as they are a feature of the comics. At one point or another, everything from massive universe-spanning events to small tie-in miniseries and guest appearances have been guilty of derailing characters and stories entirely.
So what makes a good tie-in series? How much should it tie into the overarching narrative, and how much doesn’t need to stand on its own as an independent story? The cover of Black Panther/Namor: Doomed (above the actual title of the book) says “from the pages of Avengers: Armageddon and Captain America.” How much does that matter to a potential reader? In what ways should it factor into a review like this one, where I have to make a judgment call on whether or not the book is good (and why)?
Up front, I’m going to tell you that I’m reviewing this comic as a standalone series. I didn’t read Avengers: Armageddon. I’m not reading what’s happening in the pages of Captain America, and I don’t know what Black Panther and Namor had been up to lately outside of the recap page. In one sense, I can’t tell you whether this is a good tie-in at all. I simply don’t have the background knowledge of the ongoing story as a whole. For all I know, this series is doing things that are nonsensical in the greater context of the world these characters have been participating in. But the thing is, most comic book readers are not purchasing Avengers: Armageddon or Captain America. People have a limited budget to spend on monthly comics, and they tend to stick to their favorite heroes and creators pretty closely. Well-executed tie-in stories can make readers invested in what came before and what comes after. At their best, these kinds of tins and crossovers expand their view of the world, the characters, and the stories they’re interested in.
In that way, I think that Black Panther/Namor: Doomed succeeds with flying colors. If you go in with basic knowledge of one of the characters in the title, you will come out interested in the rest. The only background that the story explicitly sets up is delivered in four short sentences. The recap barely takes up one-sixth of the page it’s on. As far as I can tell, this has everything to do with Black Panther’s recent status quo and very little to do with Avengers: Armageddon or Captain America. The rest of the context the reader needs is naturally interwoven throughout, as the events of the story shows the audience why they should care. This comic succeeds because readers will be drawn into the story through the eyes of its characters, rather than vague promises that this tie-in story will influence a larger narrative. T’Challa, the Black Panther, is traditionally the King of Wakanda. The brief recap page establishes that he had lost his kingdom to democratic reforms that he largely supported, and was also exiled thanks to a deal brokered between the Wakandan Parliament and Namor, king of Atlantis, who went on to abdicate his throne as retribution for his own perceived crimes. However, T’Challa has recently reclaimed his title and throne to deal with threats to his nation that he believes can’t be solved by the institutions that had replaced him.
The actual story begins with the illegal harvesting of the rare metal vibranium from the metallic trees of the techno-jungle, a place that the Black Panther would traditionally protect. The criminals are framed somewhat sympathetically, jaded and distrustful of the King who returned himself to power. T’Challa understands where they are coming from – “when your King is exiled and forces his way back to the crown, who in their right mind wouldn’t question him?” At the same time, he needs to stop these opportunists so that his people can regain confidence that their government will protect them. While the illegal harvesting of vibranium is motivated by fear rather than malice, it’s still the role of the Black Panther to step in and prevent this self-interest from eroding the foundations of the country. In other words, as both the King and Wakanda’s traditional protector, T’Challa believes he has a moral mandate to act like a superhero.
He neutralizes the criminals with advanced technology built into a new cape and costume that looks cool as hell, but acting in his people’s best interest isn’t as simple as he wants it to be. His loyal supporters like Okoye and the Dora Milaje are uncomfortable with the fact that he alone decided his return was best for Wakanda, and tell him to his face that he can’t just expect anyone to be excited about flashy new methods of crime fighting. This is the kind of story telling that Marvel does best, playing out endless variations on the themes of power and responsibility and how they should be exercised. Meanwhile, Namor is about as humble as I’ve ever seen him (which wouldn’t be saying much by anyone else’s standards). Still, he isn’t the King anymore, and seems oddly okay with that. While Namor outwardly says he misses the days when he held the kind of power to execute justice as he saw fit, he actually seems more at peace being a hero than a king. Dealing with individual problems has a moral simplicity to it that contrasts with the complex and interminable issues of a monarch. He is too proud to admit it, but Namor was tired of shouldering that burden.
The artwork of Stefano Nesi establishes Namor’s complex internal world within only a couple of pages. This is possible because he is as good at rendering nuanced emotion in faces and body language as he is at dynamic action and superheroics, which is really saying something. Both the artist and the writers of Black Panther/Namor: Doomed, Ethan S. Parker and Griffin Sheridan, are walking a difficult tightrope as they balance establishing the two protagonists and why the reader should care about them, while moving the plot forward in a limited number of pages. It’s something that can be hard to notice for a first-time reader, but having experienced plenty of clumsy storylines in the past, it’s remarkable how much the writers are able to pack in without this comic feeling overstuffed and undercooked.
The pacing of the story feels natural without sacrificing clarity for momentum, thanks to Nesi’s clean lines, expressive characters, atmospheric inking, and the gorgeous color work throughout the book courtesy of Jesus Aburtov. They do such a good job that the one instance where the balance between detail and moving the plot forward wobbles basically serves as the exception that proves the rule. One scene in the middle of the issue suffers from momentary ambiguity about whether it’s taking place on the surface or underwater in Atlantis. I would have appreciated it if Aburtov was able to depict underwater scenes with some sort of light distortion so that they wouldn’t appear to be above the surface when they were suddenly lit by warm colors and molten rifts in the ocean floor, it would be difficult to pull that off in a way that didn’t distort Nesi’s art as well and work against its strengths. So while that scene definitely confused me for a few seconds, in a book this dense with stories and scenery, that one page of ambiguity really highlights just how good the visual storytelling is overall. Frankly, the fact that my biggest with Black Panther/Namor: Doomed was such a small nitpick should read as a pretty glowing endorsement. This story is interesting, well told, and has made me almost as curious about what led up to it as I am in what follows. From my perspective, that’s pretty hard to top.
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