Black Panther by Ta-Nehisi Coates and Brian Stelfreeze is brilliant, political, and human

The new Black Panther comic book series, written by Ta-Nehisi Coates and drawn by Brian Stelfreeze, is the most anticipated comic debut of the past decade. And let’s get one thing squared away up front: It’s excellent.

Coates and Stelfreeze have created a pocket in the ever-expanding Marvel comic universe that’s daring and wondrous, but also organic and natural — a place and a comic that feels crucial and important to the company’s legacy.

Stories about Black Panther, a.k.a. T’Challa, are largely the same. He’s the king of Wakanda, a fictional, technologically advanced African country that’s rich in a material called Vibranium — the stuff Captain America’s shield is made from. Storm, a member of the X-Men known as Ororo Munroe, was the love of Black Panther’s life, but they’re divorced. And Black Panther can’t act impulsively or selfishly, because he represents a nation.

Within the first six pages of Coates and Stelfreeze’s comic, you begin to find out just how abbreviated that version of his story really is. Many comics that have featured Black Panther have touched on the responsibility he feels in being tethered to his country, but they’ve never fully realized the complicated political situation he’s in or fleshed out the people he’s pledged his fealty to.

Coates and Stelfreeze’s comic places Black Panther at the helm of a Wakanda in unrest. The country is as advanced as any on this Earth, with all kinds of cutting-edge technology, but neither its status nor its superhero king has been able to protect it. It’s been drowned (in 2012’s Avengers vs. X-Men crossover) and converged upon by Thanos and his dark cabal (in 2013’s Infinity event).

There are crags and fissures in Wakandan society; it’s nowhere near as strong as Vibranium, the export it’s known for. Some of that strife is due to a mysterious, emotion-manipulating villain (or that’s what her power seems like for now). But it’s also due to the years of bottled-up frustration that many of its citizens feel toward their king.

In Black Panther’s first issue, Coates examines the title character through the eyes of his people. He becomes a secondary, reactive character of sorts — there are more panels featuring characters other than Black Panther than panels that feature the title character himself. And Coates makes clear that the Wakandans’ strife and distrust isn’t unwarranted or illogical — Wakanda is supposedly exceptional, but under its current regime, the country is far from it.

Coates has a National Book Award and mountains of respect to his name, but writing nonfiction books about politics and race is very different from writing interior monologues for a superhero. Coates has already written about how he’s had to calibrate his writing for this project, and how he thinks about his writing in the context of a new (to him) medium.

The highlight of Coates’s writing in Black Panther isn’t the way he skillfully laces the comic with broader political themes about power (though he’s very good at that); instead, it’s his ability to give the book’s intimate character relationships a sense of humanity and dignity. For example, the book introduces two queer characters, and their relationship in Coates’s hands is tender, aching, and electrifying.

Stelfreeze’s art is crisp and expressive. He’s almost drawing a sleek space opera of sorts, since Wakanda’s technology is so advanced. The mêlées are exciting, rattling Star Wars–like sequences. But with a flick of the page, Stelfreeze is able to deftly shift into solemn drama, conveying weighty moments and relationships with the same precision.

Ultimately, Stelfreeze and Coates have woven a story that Black Panther deserves, and one that pushes his and Wakanda’s preestablished narrative into brave new territory. This is a story about a man of his people, and unlike many Black Panther stories of the past, it does justice to and makes us care about those he’s pledged to serve and protect. It’s a brilliant start to one of Marvel’s most promising new series, and like the hero whose story it tells, it’s poised to defy its already grand expectations.