The Ruination of Black Panther
Before going into how he fucked up Black Panther, let’s see what exactly made Black Panther good.
When Christopher Priest was writing the book he took a character that was a token black (one created with good intentions, but still a token black) & created something unique. The book managed to be funny & thoughtful It had complex, involved plots, that did not insult the reader’s intelligence & sometimes required you to RE-READ several issues in order to fully understand everything going on rather than simply ignore the (often bad) writing of the character in the past, Priest found ways to make the old stories WORK. He created a rich cast & a complicated hero, a man that was the political & religious ruler of a unique country, a country that is rich, powerful, & technologically advanced, a country that is the sole source of a unique-metal with near-supernatural powers & rather than treat all those things like stems in Black Panther’s utility belt, to make Black Panther better at beating up bad guys, Priest showed how all of those things were the source of problems for Panther. Not only did his country have a wide variety of enemies, but all the tribes WITHIN his country had their own ancient feuds. He woke up every day knowing the slightest misstep could cause a war. Being a religious leader meant he alone had access to an herb that gave him near-superhuman abilities. It also meant all his country’s religious problems were his to deal with, his country had a unique resource, which attracted all sorts of problems, his country was technologically advanced, his people had become snobby & sometimes dangerously arrogant about it, & didn’t think the rest of the world mattered. He was king & could assemble an army at a moment’s notice & if some idiot teenager broke a moronic tribal law, he might be expected to raise that army to wipe out the kid’s village in retribution.
So, what happened with Hudlin that fucked over Black Panther so bad? Well, Hudlin threw all that out. Hudlin kicked the book off with the Vatican going to war with Wakanda, & the US seizing the chance to “save” the country (with a monstrous zombie-cyborg army – “why wont you give families back their dead children’s bodies, Bush?”) because they want to take it over, because they can’t stand that uppity Black king that’s so much better than them. In the same story, he retconned a LOT of things Priest wrote, & has been continuing to retcon what Priest wrote ever since. Being a king, to Hudlin, is nothing more than a way to show how awesome the character is, just another item in Black Panther’s utility belt. And the people of Wakanda, rather than being a unique culture, are lifted directly from any sitcom on BET – except they’re all the smartest & most talented people in the world, because they’re from Wakanda, the Black Utopia, Black Panther shouts “Power to the People!” in Zulu fairly regularly. Why? Because it’s something people shouted in South Africa during Apartheid, & Hudlin thinks that means it’s something a Black superhero should yell. Even though the character in question is the Monarch of another African nation, one that historically looked at what was happening in South Africa & said “We really don’t care. Black, White, it doesn’t matter. If they’re not from Wakanda, they’re barbarians” One of the problems Priest’s Black Panther faced was that his country was made up of cultural snobs. They weren’t hostile to other countries, they could even be gracious to foreign quests It’s just that every tribe in Wakanda thought their own Tribe was the true peak of humanity. If you were from another tribe you were inferior, & if you were from another country, well, you weren’t even worth mentioning. Hudlin’s Wakanda, meanwhile, is a friend to all Black people everywhere. Even Blacks from outer space. What’s even weirder is that Hudlin’s version of Black Panther isn’t helpful to other Blacks at the same time despite the friendly to all Blacks thing. They’re not racists, they’re xenophobes.
Black Panther x Storm
This is more of an issue with Joe Quesada & one of his non-Spider-Man related fuckeries. Basically, he was smugly bragging about how he had Storm marry Black Panther for no other reason than the publicity that comes from the blatant tokenism. However, this is originally Reginald Hudlin’s fault too, he thought that the 2 most prominent black male & female Black superheroes in Marvel should be together because “muh Blacc Powah” & shit. Reginald Hudlin liked the idea in an obsessively weird way, Black Panther was his favorite superhero & Storm was his favorite superheroine. So he pushed that particular jerk-off fantasy, Marvel “editorial” (under Quesada at the time) caved to the idea, & now we’re stuck with it as canon forever. This is despite Storm having been in a relationship with Forge for decades.
It gets even more retarded later on. The only thing about the marriage that I enjoyed was how T’Challa ditched Ororo once he had a half-way decent excuse. But then later Ororo became Wolverine’s babe for about a year afterwards, which was honestly not bad, but then she cheated on Wolverine with Black Panther a month before he “died” in his run & Ororo moved on. I think I read something a while back that suggested she & BP were back together again, but they were keeping it quiet.
They had zero chemistry & it turned Storm into Black Panther’s sidekick. She literally became just another trinket in his utility belt & was left out of all the X-books except for guest appearances basically. Shit sucked, was creepy as fuck & reeked of wish fulfillment on the part of the writer.
See, there’s SOME history between the Storm & Black Panther due to Claremont, but really very little. Hooking them up & retconning a past between the two… it’s like assuming two people should get married because they’re both Chinese, or both gay, & that’s all that matters. Once married to Black Panther & made part of the book, she basically cut off all ties with her old friends because she was now BP’s Queen. One of the most powerful & prominent women in the Marvel Universe, a warrior in her own right, was turned into a sidekick.
He’s gotten a lot of criticism for his work &, in response, he’s been caught logging onto message boards online, pretending to be different people (haven’t caught him doing that recently. Maybe he found out what a proxy is) defending “Hudlin’s fantastic work” & talking about how Christopher Priest was a bad writer & his fans need to shut up & read Hudlin’s book.
He’s basically a horrible human being & a lousy writer.
