Ta-Nehisi Coates' Storm: a wishlist

I am so stoked for this series. Storm is one of my favourite characters, she has such a deep and rich history to draw on and so, with all respects to Ta-Nehisi Coates

#1: a twelfth issue

Ah, yes, Ta-Nehisi Coates spinning off a title from his Black Panther run, we all know how well that usually goes, don't we? I admit, I didn't bother with World of Wakanda but I did my part for Black Panther & The Crew. I just hope that this issue can somehow find the audience it needs to keep going because just based on Storm's appearances in Coates' other work he has so many ideas for her that it would be a crime for this series to get the “one arc and then chopped” treatment.

Also on this subject...

#2: bitch ass manbabies to shut the hell up

Attention, cretins! This is Storm we're talking about here: she's not a new character and she's not taking a precious bloody name away from any fictional white men you might be emotionally invested in. Could you please, just this one, shut the bloody hell up about “forced diversity” with this one. Go back to crying into your cornflakes about how the Hulk is now an Asian kid and/or a woman.

We cool? Moving on.

#3: Cairo

One of the really interesting parts of Black Panther & The Crew was exploring Storm's relationship with Harlem, her parents' home that she only experienced as an adult. The previous Storm ongoing had a lot to say about her relationship to Kenya (if I'm wrong about it being Kenya, I apologise, I remember it being Kenya that she lived in between Cairo and meeting the X-Men). One part of her life that hasn't been touched on in some time is her childhood on the streets of Cairo where she was a pickpocket.

#4: The Further Adventures Of The Crew

A man can dream. But if not the whole tea, then maybe just...

#5: Misty Knight

I was wrong, it turns out. When I was reviewing Black Panther & The Crew I completely forgot that Misty and Storm know each other really, really well. Back in the olden days of Chris Claremont's original run, Misty was Jean Grey's roommate in New York city and so she and Storm interacted quite a lot. This throws that relationship I enjoyed so much in The Crew in a whole new light.

#6: Special Agent Ororo Munroe, FBI

I am sure this was brought up recently in some X-title or other but once upon a time, in a much later Claremont run, Storm and several other X-Men were deputised to the FBI as the XSE (yes, it was really called that, Xavier's Security Enforcement). She is, or was, a legitimate agent of the government. Food for thought.

#7: Doom

So there was this very odd arc in the Claremont days where Doom captured the X-Men and subjected them to all sorts of trials and tortures but in the end he lets them go in exchange for a dinner date with Storm. It sounds like I'm making this up but I swear its true. There was a similar situation with Dracula.

#8: Bruno from Ms. Marvel

He's in Wakanda, Storm spends a lot of time in Wakanda and what's more Storm is a teacher so she could easily be brought in to lecture at his polytechnic on mutant rights or agriculture or something. This is the most fannish idea on the list and that's why its last, a little whimsy to go out on, but just think about how cool it would be. 

It's The End, But... Black Panther & The Crew

This has so much promise and there's a sad irony in the series premature finale dropping the same day as Secret Empire's extended ending.

I don't doubt that some time down the line Ta-Nehisi Coates might find room for these characters in the main Black Panther series (as he has before, especially Storm) but one can't help but wonder what this series might have achieved given more time.

There are few places in the world that feel so real even if you've never been there as New York. London, perhaps, and definitely Paris. New York is the setting of so many comics, movies, novels, documentaries... there's no escaping knowing some of its history and setting a story in that history gives it such resonance, especially when one of the authors (I don't know Harvey's biography, I'm afraid) happens to be a historian. Coates' and Harvey's Harlem is so vividly brought to life and the mixture of reality and Marvel Universe lore is expertly judged. Butch Guice's art helps, of course, but so much of it is delivered through the little details of language and character that I feel I have to give the lion's share of the credit to the authors.

Then there's the team that we barely got to know: Black Panther, Storm, Luke Cage, Misty Knight and Manifold. As I said before when reviewing earlier issues, one of the highlights for me was seeing Storm and Misty interact. I don't doubt they did back in the day, Misty was Jean Grey's roommate back during Chris Claremont's run on Uncanny X-Men, but I know of little if anything since. The two women worked so well together in this series and I don't see Marvel really finding much excuse for them to interact in the near future, even if Storm is now based in the city now the X-Men have started squatting in Central Park.

Then there's Manifold, veteran of the Secret Warriors and one of those characters that never got enough time to shine during his run with the Avengers. He was with the team for a whole two issues. It was interesting seeing him written with such affection for Harlem as an adopted home, not a terribly common angle in anything I've read set in there. Storm, similarly, comes to Harlem as an outsider, though she shouldn't be. She speaks of her connection to the place, her parents' home, the place she should have grown up in if they hadn't died in Africa leaving her stranded.

And it was all so damn interesting. The Harlem setting, the eclectic cast of characters interacting in unusual combinations, the whole historical perspective...

I promised myself this would be a positive one because this was such a good series. I don't want to rant about the injustice of its cancellation like I did with Unstoppable Wasp. Its a sad reality of the modern comicbook industry that good series like this with unique things to say are given too little advertising so they wither on the vine.

Who knows, though, maybe there's a chance we'll see this Crew sometime down the line. Worse ideas have seen revivals . I mean, there's a Ben Reilly ongoing right now...

Goodbye, Black Panther & The Crew

Patience, they said as they made Captain America a Nazi. Patience, they said as the situation got worse and worse, as they told us Magneto was joining Hydra, too. Patience, they said as more and more context piled moral offense upon moral offense on the road to Secret Empire. Patience, they said for more than a year as they geared up to fill my pull list with unavoidable Nazis.

Then they cancelled Black Panther & The Crew after two issues due to poor sales. The most promising team book I've seen Marvel put out in years, that I did not see one ad for in any of their comics aside from Black Panther, will now run for a single six issue arc.

All this has happened before and all this will happen again, as the saying goes.

This was genuinely the most promising team book I've seen from Marvel since Keiron Gillen's Young Avengers. Its Harlem setting was fascinating and well-researched, Ta-Nehisi Coates' angles on Storm and Misty Knight were interesting even beyond the sheer novelty of having those two very different women working together. It was all tied in with the history, both real and fictional, of Harlem which is just something you don't have reason to learn much about when you're a white bloke from the south of England. All that was great and at the end of the second issue Coates finally introduced Black Panther to his own team book and we were off to the races.

Well, not so much now.

This is a microcosm of something I've been banging on about for a while. You see, as I write this I have Coates' Wikipedia page open and I am wondering how a series written by someone like this, with past work like his, isn't one of the biggest deals in Marvel's publishing portfolio. His second book Between the World and Me won the (US) National Book Award For Nonfiction and was a Pulitzer finalist. He has a television deal developing a series for HBO about Martin Luther King being produced by Oprah Winfrey. Not being American, I don't know exactly how famous these distinctions make him but I think that there would be some potential in getting his name out there to attract new readers...

… if Marvel, or any comics company, actually advertised anywhere other than inside their own publications.

So here we are again, with the insular nature of comicbooks coming back to bite the industry on its arse. Now, I'm as big a supporter of promoting internally and recognising when someone has paid their dues as you'll get but right now a title about a team of African and African-American characters set in Harlem written by a Pulitzer finalist who has written extensively about African-American history and philosophy has died on the vine. Meanwhile, a huge crossover event about Captain America being a Nazi at the worst possible moment in modern history is being handled by a man whose only claim to fame outside comics is a failed political career in Cincinnati and whose Wikipedia page refers to a 2011 one-shot in the future tense gets the lions' share of the company's meagre advertising budget, questions have to be asked.

Questions like: what the hell are you guys doing? Do you want new readers or not? Why did you bring Ta-Nehisi Coates into the comicbook industry if not to use his existing reputation to sell product?

Do you, in short, have any plans to actually grow your business or are you content to allow Disney to act as your life support system until they decide that just having the IP rights means they don't need your niche, barely profitable product cluttering up their portfolio?

Because that's what's going to happen at this rate. 

Comic Reviews

This week, my avoidance of Secret Empire reaches comes to its sad conclusion, Lana Lang and Cass Cain have family moments, Luke Skywalker goes on a date with his father's sidekick, and it turns out Storm is black.

Secret Warriors #1

Oh, its a Secret Empire tie-in. I'm doing my best to avoid this mess but events being events, of course Marvel are using it to launch an ongoing series that they set up in their last damn event. I get the feeling I'd actually appreciate this issue more if I had any interest in the event because otherwise this is a pretty bland “getting the team together” issue with a slathering of green Nazis on top. Its not badly written, its reasonably engaging but I have no context for half of it.

I might actually drop this until Secret Empire is over and this series has a chance to tell its own story divorced from larger context and green Nazis.

Superwoman #10

This title has been hovering on the edge of being dropped for a few issues now and I worried that whatever lay in store after Superman Reborn might be the final straw. Surprisingly, Lana losing her powers a couple of issues ago has made me appreciate the series in a whole new way. I never really got the character. Part of the problem is I'm used to so many different versions of Lana but I didn't follow the New 52 Super-books closely enough to be used to this version.

K. Perkins writes the hell out of this issue, a real character study that goes into Lana's strengths and weaknesses as a person. Also, we get a bunch of background for Natasha and John Henry Irons, again characters whose previous incarnations I'm familiar with but whose current selves escape me.

Detective Comics #956

I'm trying to think of something to say about this issue beyond “Kate looks great in a suit and bowtie”. I mean, that's a valid critical opinion but I feel, given how much I've loved the arc, I should come up with something more.

I love Batwing and Azrael as a partnership, the whole science and magic thing really works. Cass continues to be my favourite character of the whole team and her final confrontation with Shiva is a joy to read. I've heard a lot of people complain about how this series “marginalises” Batman himself but so long as it turns out stories like this I'm all for it and Batman can muddle through with his two other ongoing series.

Star Wars: The Screaming Citadel one-shot

The Star Wars/Doctor Aphra crossover I didn't know I wanted until I read this issue. The thing is that once Aphra was out from under Vader's thumb I was so much more interested in seeing her fly solo in a proper EU series with no big famous movie characters getting in the way. After this issue I'm finally convinced that having her interact with the main cast has more mileage in it. Luke and Aphra at the Star Wars equivalent of a high society party is a great hook, not just for how they boune off each other because of how artist Marco Checchetto goes to town on the drawing the guests.

Tonally, this is much more an Aphra story than a Luke story, not just because Gillen is writing and Aphra sets the story in motion but because the gloriously over-the-top setting of the Screaming Citadel itself is much more the sort of place we're used to seeing her in. I like that, I like the mad as you like vision Gillen has for the Star Wars universe and I'm really looking forward to four more issues of Luke bumbling through that side of things.

Black Panther and the Crew #2

To my utter surprise, in spite of having Captain America on the cover this issue had nothing to do with him or the bloody Secret Empire event. Instead, the love letter to Harlem continues as Storm meditates on what the place means to her: her father's birthplace, the place she should have grown up in if her parents hadn't died in Africa. Its actually interesting, after all these years, to see a series address the fact that Storm is black, I know it sounds utterly mad that for all the hundreds and hundreds of X-Men comics I've read, the fact that one of Marvel's oldest and most well-explored black heroes is black has barely come up.

The simple fact is that her being a mutant and all the allegory that entails has sort of eclipsed the fact she's black. This, more than anything else, really convinces me that this series is going to go great places. Hell, even if it doesn't, the team-up of Storm and Misty is more than interesting enough in itself. Hell, I was almost disappointed when T'Challa finally turned up. 

Comic Reviews

This week, the X-Men and Superman relaunches continue apace, Bendis departs the Guardians Of The Galaxy, Nadia Pym is still the most adorable genius in the MCU and Black Panther fails to appear in a great first issue.

X-Men Blue #1

Cullen Bunn has enough credit with me that he gets the benefit of the doubt. This first issue is fun but it does seem to lack a point. We get a nice little team building mission with Jean leading the classic X-Men against Black Tom Cassidy of all people as he tries to rob a yacht full of rich people. Its well executed, the character interactions are charming and Bunn establishes the personalities as well as the angles he seems to be taking with the original X-Men but its all in service to a cliffhanger that, frankly, just tells us something that was all over the advanced advertising for this series.

But I liked Bunn's Venom even if his Uncanny X-Men was perhaps the most filler-tastic portion of the Terrigen Years and the basic idea of this series and the X-Men's new “mysterious” leader interests me so I'll be sticking around.

Weapon X #1

This was actually a really good debut issue. The Weapon X Project is hunting various mutants (the ones on the cover), they've already captured Lady Deathstrike in the X-Men Prime one-shot and here they come after Old Man Logan. Its a good action hook to start the issue with but after it we get to the scene that really sold this series to me: Logan finding Sabretooth to ask for his help.

You see, there's something about this scene that grabs me: Wolverine, despite Sabretooth trying to gut him, actually seems pleased to see the guy. They'll probably never be friends but I like the idea that Logan, having lived through his Mad Max Plus future, has actually come to miss his worst enemy.

Of course, no review of this issue would be complete without mention of artist Greg Land. Look, I could say all sorts of things about his work but by this point I think we're all pretty well-informed on what we'll find here. Actually, by Greg Land standards this is actually pretty well drawn: no one is missing limbs, people actually make eye contact, no one is having an orgasm. These are all improvements.

Action Comics #977

And here comes Dan Jurgen with some answers... eventually. I don't mean to sound ungrateful here but the majority of this story is Superman looking into his own past and revisiting the most stable, most well known part of it: the destruction of Krypton. There are, to be frank, other questions to be answered here. The slow reveal is, as I said with the last issue of Superman, probably the best approach to prevent the sort of front-loaded exposition-heavy snorefest DC retcons often open with but an origin retelling for Superman of all people seems like the height of redundancy.

Though I must admit that having the Daily Planet back is almost worth the price.

Unstoppable Wasp #4

Still the most adorable series Marvel is putting out right now, even if the writers aren't quite up on the world of women's professional wrestling. Seriously, Poundcakes and Letha would make a fantastic tag team in the modern WWE, maybe book them in a program against Nia Jax.

Anyway, bizarre fantasy booking aside, the cuteness continues with more girl genius recruitment, more Jarvis being perturbed about everything, and Nadia finally having her sit down meeting with Matt Murdoch. Best of all, though, her “best friend” *wink wink* Ying turns up again in a scene which leaves nothing to subtext if you want my opinion.

Guardians of the Galaxy #19

“Bendis' Big Time Bye-Bye Blowout” promises the cover and it was frustratingly good. After issue after issue of single character epilogues, some good, some startlingly irrelevant (the Angela one is literally just a coda to her solo series and naff all to do with her story in this title) Bendis hands in a really good one-shot finale with the Guardians going up against Thanos and an invasion fleet of various other nasties. Its big, its fun, there's a fight sequence with various of Bendis' previous artistic collaborators pitching in a page each, and Angela does her best Doctor Who impression at the Brood at one point.

As I've said before, it isn't Bendis' writing in toto that I have any sort of problem with. I really like his work, it was what brought me back into comics as an adult after a couple of years away but I'd be lying if I said his pacing wasn't incredibly off-putting at times. If this is what he can do for a single issue (and so, so little of this issue was built up in the rest of Grounded) I cannot imagine what would happen if this Bendis turned up more consistently.

Black Panther & The Crew #1

I am not at all displeased that Black Panther doesn't show up in this issue. Instead we get a flashback to the Harlem in the 1950s and an African-American superteam of ages past followed by Misty Knight investigating the death in custody of one of their number in the present. There's also a run-in with the Americops from the Sam Wilson series who have been sent in to uphold an unconstitutional curfew in Harlem.

In all of this Ta-Nehisi Coates proves he has range. Whilst this and the main Black Panther series are clearly the stories of a place and the people who live there before they're the story of individual characters they are so distinct in flavour. Coates is also clearly loving a chance to put a Marvel Universe spin on the history of a real place after creating so much Wakandan history whole cloth.

To be honest, my only fear is that I won't like this series as much once T'Challa actually turns up to take main character duties out of Misty's hands.