Extra Pulp: Black Panther #527 Review

EDITOR’S NOTE: And once again, one last review of last week’s books before the comic stores open… and somehow once again, it’s about Black Panther. Although it might seem like it, Black Panther is not the last book I read every month. It’s just that since it comes out a week before Hawk & Dove, I need it to steel myself for the inevitable.

Black Panther has been canceled; the last issue of David Liss’s run is in two months, closing out the currently running Kingpin of Wakanda storyline. Which is a Goddamned shame on a couple of fronts, the first being that Liss has put together a great run of comics. The second being that, after all this time – I got an inkling of it back when I reviewed issue #524 a couple months back, but I didn’t totally get it – I’ve finally figured this book out. It’s old-school pulp, pure and simple.

A rich guy with a background in adventuring in the jungle, genetic superiority to normal men, who’s battling to defeat colonial encroachment? That’s Doc Savage when it isn’t Tarzan or Alan Quartermain. A rich guy who puts together a team of specialists to battle corruption in an urban jungle? That’s The Shadow –  yeah, okay; it’s also Batman, but if you look back at Detective Comics #27, Batman was also The fucking Shadow. Not to be confused with fucking The Shadow; that was Margo Lane. Or maybe Alec Baldwin. But I digress.

This book has everything you want from a pulp story: international intrigue, disguises, plans within plans, car chases, shootouts… And what’s that? You want a femme fatale? Well, fuck you; that’s noir, not pulp… but Liss chucks in three of them for you, just in case you get bored: Typhoid Mary, Lady Bullseye and whats-her-face. You know, the ninja chick that Typhoid Mary and Lady Bullseye doesn’t like, so they attack her. Meaning this book even has a fucking girl fight. Liss throws it all at the wall. The only thing this book doesn’t do for a pulp and / or comics fan is jerk off for you.

Michael Avon Oeming does the pencils for this issue, and while I considered myself pretty familiar with his art from his work on Powers with Brian Michael Bendis, he mixes up his style for this book. His Powers stuff is very cartoony and reminiscent of Bruce Timm’s on Batman: The Animated Series (albeit a bit darker), whereas here, it’s still abstract and thick-lined, but it feels darker still than his Powers work. Oeming’s action is fluid and exciting, his storytelling is clear and easy to follow, and his throws in a few panels with nifty embellishments – like a page framed with a helicopter shot of the highway the panels’ in-car action is occurring on, and a silhouetted fight sequence against a darker silhouette of the Panther himself – that remind me of old pulp magazine illustrations. To be honest, I preferred current cover artist and former penciller Francesco Francavilla, but chalk that up to personal taste. Oeming’s style fits the story extremely well.

(The biggest problem with Oeming’s work on this issue? If he’s doing this, he’s not doing another issue of Powers. Hey Mike – there’s a fucking TV show of Powers coming out. Why don’t you tell Bendis to quit endorsing Avengers movie checks and get back on the ball? Seven issues in 26 months isn’t a release schedule; guys in solitary confinement get full release more often than that! But I digress…)

This is one hell of a book, and damned interesting. I really feel that if you replaced the Panther with Doc Savage and Kingpin with Dr. Fu Manchu, you could just about drop this book into Black Mask without anyone much knowing the difference. If you like Ed Brubaker’s and Sean Phillips’s stuff (And don’t forget: Fatale drops today), you’ll like this book… not that it matters, because its fate is already sealed.

But since Marvel is notorious for letting books drop ignominiously out of trade paperback reprints, it’s worth picking up, if only to tell them we want it reprinted. And more importantly, that we want more like this.