Marvel Knights: The World to Come Review
In order to understand The World To Come, one must look at the past that came before it. While this is a central tenet at the heart of the recent miniseries Marvel Knights: The World To Come from creators Priest (formerly the artist known as Christopher Priest, formerly the artist known as Jim Owlsey), Joe Quesada (the former editor-in-chief and former Chief Creative Officer of Marvel Comics) and Richard Isanove, it’s also an important rule to follow to enhance your enjoyment of this title.
Despite having been in the comics industry since the 80s, Priest will always be best remembered for writing the Black Panther run of the late 90s through early 2000s, a part of the Marvel Knights initiative that helped pull Marvel out of bankruptcy alongside the Quesada-drawn Daredevil series. With this in mind, TWTC is not only a celebration almost 30 years after that initiative started of everything that made it work, but it also serves as a coda, a final word on some of those characters that reshaped the public view on the Marvel Universe.
Priest wastes no time throwing you back into the world and scattered brain of his main protagonist of his Black Panther run, Everett K. Ross, who continues to sound like a White version of Katt Williams if his standup was pro-government. Ross is now old, and when the Dora Milaje arrive to pick him up and take him to Wakanda for the King’s funeral, he recants the story to that point. While Priest uses many of his strengths as a writer, gone are the “black title box at the start of a new page to mark a chapter in the issue,” in favor of massive cinematic location markers, and a recurring threat by way of a countdown clock to The World To Come. Even though this reader found the payoff of that world’s coming not completely satisfying, readers who read the Marvel Knights: Black Panther run should not miss this. TWTC serves as a great follow up project, not just in tone but in action and words, feeling like scripts written and drawn in 2003, harkening back to a way that stories aren’t told in mainstream Big Two comics anymore. This book is patient, and strings you along, and repeats story points not because it’s afraid you missed them but because of character quirks. And that’s not even getting into the art.
Joe Quesada first rose to prominence as an artist, going on to work at DC and Marvel on large titles, and most of this book will remind you of why he’s one of the best of that era. His pencils are beautiful, and mixed with the digital colors of Richard Isanove, create a style that showcases how much these characters have aged and grown. While the art does slip in the final two issues, due to delays and time constraints, this is a beautiful book to leaf through even before you make the purchase. Each line in the characters’ faces tells a story in their own right, and you feel the depth of time and experience across them all, or lack thereof in certain characters.
This brings me to the big selling point of this book, and what everyone in the comics world who didn’t read this book will label this book with: the White Black Panther. Yes, this is the story of Ketama, the child of T’Challa, who is white. Yes, this is the story of that child growing up and becoming the Black Panther of Wakanda, and their de facto ruler. However, what Priest does is use this as a commentary of our obsession with nepotism and the greater concept of the “nepo baby.”
Ketama is a young, arrogant man who feels he’s earned the right to become the Black Panther through his lineage. Priest and company take us along with that character in an effort to showcase the real cause of nepotism as an attempt to correct the mistakes of our past and the sins of the father; that our failures are what bring The World To Come to our door. As with a large portion of Priest’s run on Black Panther, and on other titles he wrote such as the Rebirth-era Deathstroke, T’Challa’s own arrogance and failures are what come back to bite him in the tush, and we get to enjoy the fallout of all his sins in six fun issues.
With the story ending with a further threat of more stories to come from The World To Come, one may be left skeptical. However, if this creative team is game to continue on with their story, I’m hoping that World To Come is sooner rather than later.
Marvel Knights: The World to Come / Priest, Quesada, Isanove, Starkings, Smith / Marvel Comics
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