It was an exciting moment for many of us when it was announced that Ta-Nehisi Coates would be headlining a major Marvel comic book. Coates has emerged as one of the most prominent cultural critics of a generation, and as the recipient of MacArthur Fellows Genius Grant, “Black Panther” became the superhero book it was cool to recommend to college professors. Coates was contacted by Marvel to write “Black Panther,” but it’s immediately obvious that “Black Panther and the Crew” is his pitch, the superhero comic he’s burning to write.
Written by Ta-Nehisi Coates
Penciled by Butch Guice
Inked by Scott Hanna
Colored by Dan Brown
Lettered by VC’s Joe SabinoBlack Panther, Storm, Luke Cage, Misty Knight and Manifold band together to take on a dangerous wave of street-level threats in this new ongoing series by co-writers Ta-Nehisi Coates (New York Times best-selling author of Between the World and Me and Marvel’s Black Panther) and Yona Harvey (Black Panther: World of Wakanda) and legendary artist Butch Guice! The death of a Harlem activist kicks off a mystery that will reveal surprising new secrets about the Marvel Universe’s past and set the stage for a big story in the Marvel Universe’s near future. Fear, hate and violence loom, but don’t worry, The Crew’s got this: ‘We are the streets.’ Rated T+
The setup of “Black Panther and the Crew” is relatively simple, but by the end of the issue, it quickly snowballs into a dense conflict with lots of nuance to it. Ezra Keith was an activist in Harlem, and also a superhero called the Lynx, running a team called the Crew. They were at their peak in 1957. Flash forward to today, and Ezra Keith is arrested and found dead in his prison cell two days later. Harlem rises up to protest, and Misty Knight is on the case.
Despite the international assemblage of black superheroes on the cover of the book, this issue is almost 100 percent a Misty Knight book. The nuance is found in Misty’s precarious position as a member of two conflicting communities. After coming to disagreements with the police Misty says, “they’re still the law, they’re still my tribe.” Misty is black, a former police detective, and a Harlem native. What should she do when those different identities conflict? Misty remembers the Harlem of 70s and the 80s; she remembers the crack epidemic. Is gentrification worse than crime?
These are the questions at the core of this first issue. By the end, Misty has only teamed up with one other member of the Crew on the cover. They have a single, brief throwdown, but most of the issue is talking in restaurants, talking in police stations, talking on buses, walking and talking. It’s very wordy. That talk isn’t boring, but it’s dense.
Which brings me to my criticism of Coates’s comic work thus far. Coates is coming from long-form article and book writing, and sometimes his writing can go on, whether in narrative caption boxes or in dialogue. Sometimes, his “Black Panther” book describes what the art already shows. The descriptions are beautiful, but redundant. It’s not great comics writing, even if it is great writing. “Black Panther and the Crew” is a step up from that earlier work, and Butch Guice manages to convey a lot through art, even if the comic is wordy. Most impressively, Coates has a great command of character voice. His Misty Knight sounds like Misty Knight, and not like any of his other comics characters. She narrates her thoughts through a great film noir pathos, different than his ponderous epic poem voice his uses for T’Challa.
Guice’s artwork is very good, and he captures his New York setting well, which is totally my jam. I would level a similar criticism, that Coates’s script doesn’t give Guice much room to act as a storyteller, but he compensates by making the setting of Harlem a character in and of itself. I lived in Harlem for years, and Guice totally nails the projects in South Harlem and the old residences in the hilly 140s. Misty dines at Londel’s on Frederick Douglass in the upper 130s, and if you know good Harlem eating, you recognize it instantly. I love stuff like that, and it’s clear that Guice does too.
Continued belowSimilarly, Guice recognizes the high aspirations of the book, and reflects them in his artwork. The heavily militarized and privatized police (“the kind of hardware you needed for ISIS”) are robot foot-soldiers, with blank mirrored faces. As the heartless, mechanized law-enforcement infantry attacks American citizens, all they can see is their own reflections. That’s great discussion fodder right there!
Coates is improving as a comic writer, and his highbrow aspirations give this book lofty goals. Guice and the art team are well matched, finding room to express themselves around Coates’s extremely dense (for superhero comics) writing. Hopefully, Coates will continue to develop greater skill within the comics medium, and hopefully when the rest of the cast gets here, they will be as awesome and individual as Misty is. I’m extremely optimistic that they will be.
Final Verdict: 8.1 – The book never quite lives up to its enormous ambitions, but I’m definitely going to be picking up issue 2.
