Official Black Panther MCU Thread

[Bigbigguy]

Actually, Priest made up the Dora Milaje and their original intention of being teenage bride concubines for T'challa ().

Don't put that on Coates.


Hudlin and Coates actually fixed them up and improved on them.

You say that like that shyt actually happened in Priest's run

 

[Concerning VIolence]

You say that like that shyt actually happened in Priest's run

No but Priest still put that in as their origin for some strange reason.

Let's not pretend in the 90's Priest made them to be feminist,representations.

 

[KravenMorehead™]

thing about hickman's run is that when black swan is talking to the illuminati, she says that them facing rabum alal/ the great wheel would turn each of them inside out, and make them the complete opposite of themselves. I can't remember which issue she said that in; i've got the long box of the whole run beside me. I was looking for a panel on google/pinterest. But yeah, she inferred that they would become unspeakable versions of themselves. And it came to pass:

T'Challa lost everything, was abandoned by his ancestors and wakanda, and became soft,

Namor lost all of atlantis and was getting bytched out left and right by Doom, Thanos, etc.;

Iron Man lost his marbles;

Dr. Strange sold his entire soul to become a black priest;

Black Bolt's family abandoned him and he was exiled from Atilan;

Reed Richards was a fugitive from S.H.I.E.L.D.


the only character whose turn i can't recall is Hank McCoy, and frfr I think Hickman wanted to use Xavier and Xavier would've made more sense in his original story design. but yeah, the way it panned out everybody was turned upside down in this story, so T'Challa's Ls have an asterisk to me and don't really bother me...


Hickman Sets the Stage for His "Avengers" Finale & Marvel's "Secret Wars"

Hickman Sets the Stage for His “Avengers” Finale & Marvel’s “Secret Wars”
04.07.2015 by Dave Richards in Comic News Comment

The Marvel Universe is doomed — and not even the Avengers can save it. Earth’s Mightiest Heroes have worked tirelessly to stave off an impending multiversal cataclysm, which has taken the form of a mysterious Incursion phenomenon where two dimensions occupy the same spot and ends six hours later with the destruction of one or both realities, a mission that began during writer Jonathan Hickman’s Marvel NOW! relaunch of “Avengers” in 2012 and “New Avengers” in 2013.

The battle to stop the Incursions became especially heated and divisive in late 2014 when Hickman jumped both titles eight months into the future with the current “Time Runs Out” storyline and split the Avengers into three different factions. Steve Rogers’ squad partnered with S.H.I.E.L.D.; a second team composed composed of genius heroes including Reed Richards, Tony Stark and the Beast were hunted by S.H.I.E.L.D.; and the final group led by Sunspot featured heavy hitters like Thor and Hyperion.

The storyline revealed that Doctor Doom was working to find his own solution to the Incursion problem in his guise as the mysterious Rabum Alal, and the all-powerful race of cosmic beings known as the Beyonders were ultimately responsible for the Incursion phenomenon.


With his final issues of “Avengers” and “New Avengers” looming, CBR News spoke with Hickman in the first of a massive two-part interview about recent “Time Runs Out” revelations, how they’ll set the stage for the team’s last doomed efforts to save the Multiverse and the Marvel Universe shattering “Secret Wars” event that follows.

CBR News: Jonathan, I wanted to kick off with the reveal that came in “New Avengers” #31 — that Doctor Doom is Rabum Alal, one of the major and mysterious power players in the Incursion phenomenon. What made you cast him in this role?

Jonathan Hickman: First of all, he’s awesome. That’s always a factor. I think though that when this is all done and you look back on some of the choices, this one specifically, why we went with Doom, how it ends the “Avengers” run and how it ties into the overall story of “Secret Wars” is going to make a lot of sense.

But if I’m being completely honest, any time I could sneak in a chance to write Doctor Doom I would.

Was including Doom and the Molecule Man, who’s working side by side with him, also an homage to the roles those character played in the original 1985 “Secret Wars” series?

Sure, there are some of the obvious connections.

When [editor] Tom Brevoort and I first started talking about doing this years ago, the original concept for what I wanted to do was kind of like “Exiles” meets “Strikeforce: Morituri.” That was kind of the book I wanted to write.


As I worked on “Secret Warriors,” “Fantastic Four,” and the stuff I’ve done in between, I had a little more success each time. Then when I eventually ended up on the Avengers books it became obvious that if I did that there, it could be a really, really big story. But as to the question, what does this story have to do with the original? How much of it is a convenience of name? I’m not going to answer that, but I will say that as we’ve pivoted more toward it being a bigger book, we’ve had more rope.

Certainly things like Doom and Molecule Man working together and some other stuff that you’re going to see very soon not only fit perfectly, but it echoed back to the older thing, which is always good.

Doom’s role as Rabum Alal and the fact that he’s working to stop the Incursions in his own way is interesting because it feels like when you write Doom he’s more interested in saving the world instead of conquering it. Is it fair to say that you write Doom as more of an anti-hero than a villain?


Yeah, I’ve never thought he was a straight villain. Sure, he’s incredibly flawed and such a pragmatist that we would often look at what he does as villainy, but I think there’s a lot of nobility in him. Much like Magneto in the mutant world, it’s very easy to understand where Doom is coming from. So if you can easily understand the perspective of the villain, it becomes very easy to write them from that position. And depending on the kind of story you’re telling, perhaps they’re not wrong at all. It’s that their methods that are.

So, you’re not wrong. As we get into “Secret Wars” proper this will get even more interesting.

Hearing you talk about Doom’s pragmatism reminded me of the sequence in “Avengers,”#43, where Reed Richards is talking about Tony Stark to Steve Rogers. From your perspective, do Tony and Doom have a lot in common besides being geniuses who wear high tech battle armor?

I think pragmatism can very quickly turn to ruthlessness or a cold, get-the-job-done attitude. And I would say that it’s unfair to judge all of the Illuminati guys strictly on how I have written them because I’ve put them in a situation where they weren’t allowed to be heroic at all.

So it’s a little bit unfair to say that Iron Man or any of the other guys is a bad guy, or that Stephen Strange has lost his way, or any of that kind of stuff. This was never a story that they were going to win, triumph, and overcome. So when you put anybody into that situation the point is that they break and when they do it’s a question of when and why?


So Iron Man, as the “architect” of the Avengers Machine while the “New Avengers” stuff with the Illuminati was going on, has a lot to answer for. He’s made a lot of terrible decisions. I don’t think that means he’s “bad” though. It’s just that he was wrong. Flawed. Broken.

You mentioned Stephen Strange, who stands beside Doom at the end of “New Avengers” #31. Is part of the journey Strange went on in “New Avengers” about what he’s willing to sacrifice in order to try and solve the problem of the Incursions?

I think that’s been the journey of every single member of the Illuminati to one extent or another. You’ve seen that with Namor and the Black Panther and you’ll see more of that coming up with some of the other guys. It doesn’t end well for anyone. [Laughs] Again, that’s kind of the point.

The thing that’s interesting about Doctor Strange is that, much like Namor, he chose to go in a completely different direction than trying to fix the problem from an analytical perspective. He wanted to ‘do things.’ So he went out and did them, and it inevitably lead him to where he’s at now.

The last issue of “New Avengers” is basically him and Doom figuring stuff out and paying the price for it.


One of the things Doom and Strange are sure to be discussing is how to deal with the threat of the alien race known as the Beyonders who are behind the Incursions and the impending Multiverse collapse. There’s been continuity in recent years that linked the Beyonders to the Inhumans, but there’s also been some previous stories that established them as this omnipotent race. It looks like you’re leaning toward the race of all-powerful beings approach, correct?

Early on I talked with Brevoort about this and my understanding is that the editorial position regarding the “New Avengers: Illuminati” [miniseries] Bendis wrote was that it was all a construct of that Beyonder. It was all unreliable narrator stuff and he wasn’t Inhuman. I think that’s clearly the way we’ve gone, but I don’t know that Marvel would think they’ve ever moved off this path. It was just Beyonder shenanigans.

Hickman & Brevoort Take “Avengers” Eight Months into the Future

To me, casting the Beyonders as villains gives your story an almost cosmic horror vibe. Was that something you were aiming for?

Sure. In terms of the kind of mythos around them, and the patina of whatever the reader puts on to it, including yourself, you get out of it what you get out of it. But, yeah, they’re definitely this otherworldly thing that has an ethos or ideological bent that is so outside of what we consider to be human that they seem like monsters.

Complementing that outlook is a fantastic, almost gray alien-like design for the Beyonders. Who came up with that look?


I’m trying to remember. It gets really jumbled because we have done so many issues of Avengers and we do them out of order because we have different art teams working in different orders, but I’m pretty positive that Kev Walker did the original design for that though.

Let’s move from the outside factions in the Incursion phenomenon to the Avengers themselves. As a reader, it felt like Steve Rogers’ faction of the Avengers and the Illuminati were almost wasting valuable time tackling the Incursion problem by not working together. Do you think that’s a fair conclusion? Were we seeing the animosity between Steve and Tony Stark sort of take control and impact the actions of these two groups?

One, it wouldn’t have mattered if they worked together. And two, when we did that eight month later jump we glossed over a bunch of stuff. It’s pretty clear, though, that guys were working on the problem and just failing.

In terms of why Cap and all the S.H.I.E.L.D. Avengers were going after Tony and the Illuminati, a lot of that was because the Cabal was sanctioned by the leaders of the world as an acceptable evil because everybody wanted to live and survive.

So yeah, you’ll see in the final issue of “Avengers” the last meeting of Steve Rogers and Tony Stark. You kind of find out why Steve was going after him so hard.


In “Avengers” #43 you had that interesting scene on the roof between Steve and Reed that I mentioned earlier, where Steve says even now, at what could be the end of the world, he’s still thinking about how angry he is with Tony over wiping out the memories of his actions with the Illuminati in the first few issues of “New Avengers.”

There are people that get married and they love each other and have real relationships, but then one of them cheats on the other and even though they’ve loved each other very much the schism is forever. There’s never going to be any getting over it. Some people can get past it. Some people can’t. This was a betrayal that Steve was never going to get over.

Stay tuned to CBR for Part 2 of our interview with Jonathan Hickman in which he reveals exactly how “Time Runs Out” leads into “Secret Wars” and what readers can expect from the Avengers during the event.

 

[Mic-Nificent]

Actually, Priest made up the Dora Milaje and their original intention of being teenage bride concubines for T'challa ().

Don't put that on Coates.


Hudlin and Coates actually fixed them up and improved on them.

You need to go back and read Priest's run.

He created the Dora Milaje and ROSS was the one always saying they were wives in training. T'Challa never viewed them as such, in fact there was a flashback showing T'Challa telling Nakia that she was free to come and go as she pleased and that he would never make such requests of them. Priest continually hammered home the point that T'Challa only agreed to even let the girls be around in order to keep peace between certain tribes.

The person that actually deserves credit for fixing things is Maberry. He was actually the one that had T'Challa outright change them into a special ops unit.

The whole "Wives in training" thing had been thrown into the bushes for years until Coates came on board and started saying shyt like this:

when you write stories, you try to pull from real life, right? You think, OK, let's bring that as close to reality as we can. Even recognizing that it's a comic book, what would that look like? What would it mean? Given what I know of men in the real world and what I know of men throughout history, that's a situation that's ripe for abuse. So it occurred to me that some of the Dora Milaje might have issues with that.

Ta-Nehisi Coates on ‘Black Panther’ and Creating a Comic That Reflects the Black Experience

 

[Concerning VIolence]

You need to go back and read Priest's run.

He created the Dora Milaje and ROSS was the one always saying they were wives in training. T'Challa never viewed them as such, in fact there was a flashback showing T'Challa telling Nakia that she was free to come and go as she pleased and that he would never make such requests of them. Priest continually hammered home the point that T'Challa only agreed to even let the girls be around in order to keep peace between certain tribes.

The person that actually deserves credit for fixing things is Maberry. He was actually the one that had T'Challa outright change them into a special ops unit.

The whole "Wives in training" thing had been thrown into the bushes for years until Coates came on board and started saying shyt like this:

when you write stories, you try to pull from real life, right? You think, OK, let's bring that as close to reality as we can. Even recognizing that it's a comic book, what would that look like? What would it mean? Given what I know of men in the real world and what I know of men throughout history, that's a situation that's ripe for abuse. So it occurred to me that some of the Dora Milaje might have issues with that.

Ta-Nehisi Coates on ‘Black Panther’ and Creating a Comic That Reflects the Black Experience

Breh, their origin is still the fukking same. I'm not talking about T'challa.

"An ancient tribal tradition, the Dora Milaje were assembled as potential queens for an unmarried king, maintaining the peace in Wakanda by ensuring that every tribe has the opportunity to put forward one of their daughters for the crown." - Dora Milaje (Earth-616)

I know T'challa rejected that notion PERSONNALLY, but that doesn't remove their reason for existing in the tradiiton of the country.

Also T'challa still fell for Nakia.

 

[Mic-Nificent]

No but Priest still put that in as their origin for some strange reason.

Let's not pretend in the 90's Priest made them to be feminist,representations.

He put it in there specifically to show the clash between modern and traditional Wakanda. It was always intended to be shown as a backwards tradition that T'Challa pretended to go along with just to keep the peace.

This is directly from Priest:

"the order of the Dora Milaje, a kind of nun/wife-in-training deal, gave us a foot in both of the worlds the Panther struggled to maintain peace between: the modern and the tribal. From the very beginning, we planned to have one of the girls go nuts and evolve into one of Panther's deadliest villains"

DigitalPriest.Com: The Black Panther

 

[Concerning VIolence]

He put it in there specifically to show the clash between modern and traditional Wakanda. It was always intended to be shown as a backwards tradition that T'Challa pretended to go along with just to keep the peace.

This is directly from Priest:

"the order of the Dora Milaje, a kind of nun/wife-in-training deal, gave us a foot in both of the worlds the Panther struggled to maintain peace between: the modern and the tribal. From the very beginning, we planned to have one of the girls go nuts and evolve into one of Panther's deadliest villains"

DigitalPriest.Com: The Black Panther

So why can;t Coates go along with his "clash between the modern and tribal" plotlines?

 

[Birnin Zana]

All of the stuff you're talking about happened during the second half of Hickman's story....Also Reed stuck with T'Challa through the whole thing.

During that time we also got T'Challa showing off new abilities, designing planet killing bombs, designing a life raft to survive the end of existence, taking down Black Dwarf, squaring up with a Batman analogue, nearly killing Namor on two separate occasions, and just acting like himself. Hickman's T'Challa was the closest we've gotten in years to the Priest version.

That's why I said my biggest issue with his run is him threatening to kill Namor and not following through.

Deconstruction can be fine, but it can't start out with the character at their lowest point and not feature the character have a single memorable moment.

Seriously no matter how much you might like Coates run there isn't a single moment in that first season that's memorable for T'Challa. Like I been saying whenever people review or talk about that series all they talk about is the Dora Milaje or Shuri, there isn't much of anything to talk about regarding T'Challa that's positive.

Coates is a smart dude, but his writing for T'Challa is just fukking dumb. Like that whole thing where T'Challa meets with the dictators and the footage from the meeting leaks to the public Hickman put T'Challa through the ringer, but he never made him look like a incompetent jackass. In Hickman's run they were dealing with the end of all existence and were doing everything they could to save everyone without selling their souls (even though that's what Strange literally did)..

I don't like season 1 of Coates run like that. As I said here several times, I felt it was "ehhh..." at best. I've bytched about that meeting with the despots many times in many forums. Also said that T'Challa's portrayal overall was lacking.

My original point was to the poster (forgot who it was, sorry breh) who said that what Coates had T'Challa go through was worse than what Hickman had T'Challa go through, which I was about since some of the most painful moments--to me--occurred during Hickman's run, i.e T'Chaka disowning T'Challa.

Most of us who had a beef with Hickman's run at the time soften our stance because of how it ended. If it ended differently, there's a very good chance we would view his run very negatively. I know I would've.

 

[Mic-Nificent]

Breh, their origin is still the fukking same. "An ancient tribal tradition, the Dora Milaje were assembled as potential queens for an unmarried king, maintaining the peace in Wakanda by ensuring that every tribe has the opportunity to put forward one of their daughters for the crown." - Dora Milaje (Earth-616)

I know T'challa rejected that notion PEROSNALLY, but that doesn't remove their reason for existing in the tradiiton of the country.

Also T'challa still fell for Nakia.

You keep trying to spin shyt for the sake of caping for Coates. I never said that the origin changed. I said Maberry had T'Challa change the Dora Milaje it special operations group. The wives in training thing was thrown into the bushes until COATES decided to bring it back and play it up like the Dora Milaje were being abused.

And T'Challa never "Fell for" Nakia. At this point you're just making shyt up. Nakia fell for T'Challa and tried to kill Monica Lynne. Nakia had showed signs of being mentally unstable even before the shyt with Mephisto.

 

[Ziggiy]

Actually, Priest made up the Dora Milaje and their original intention of being teenage bride concubines for T'challa ().

Don't put that on Coates.


Hudlin and Coates actually fixed them up and improved on them.

Priest actually made sure to put in the reason why (which was political) the DM's were CEREMONIOUSLY considered "wives in training". Which T'Challa never NOT once took advantage of.

Coates took this and flipped it into the DM's living constantly in fear that T'Challa that would sexually brutalize them. He had his man-hating buddy Roxanne Gay write an entire prequel based upon this. All of this despite the fact that T'Challa has put HIMSELF in harms way attempting to protect DM's.

 

[Mic-Nificent]

So why can;t Coates go along with his "clash between the modern and tribal" plotlines?

Because he wasn't even attempting to do a modern vs Tribal plotline with the Dora Milaje. His entire story revolved around the Dora Milaje losing faith in T'Challa and putting for the idea that T'Challa was "Too busy" to do anything about the women of Wakanda being sexually exploited.

Coates and Gay kept hammering home that "Serve the king in all ways" shyt even though T'Challa had NEVER shown any interest in the Dora Milaje as potential brides and had already changed the group on a fundamental level.

The Dora's weren't even revolting against Wakandan society or even the royal family, they were just pissed at T'Challa. Then we later find out they were pissed at T'Challa for some shyt that they chose NOT to tell him about. Aneka found out about a tribal leader abusing women, decided NOT to tell T'Challa, then straight up executed the tribal elder. Aneka was arrested and sentenced to death by Ramonda, and somehow she blamed T'Challa for all that shyt. Coates first season even ends with Aneka having a breakdown and realizing she was unfairly blaming T'Challa for the wrong shyt......The ending didn't even go over well with many fans of the book because it came out of nowhere. Coates spent 12 issue portraying T'Challa as being in the wrong and the Dora Milaje being just, so Aneka's sudden turn around seemed odd to anybody that didn't know the full story of what T'Challa had been doing (which Coates purposefully left out).

 

[Mic-Nificent]

Most of us who had a beef with Hickman's run at the time soften our stance because of how it ended. If it ended differently, there's a very good chance we would view his run very negatively. I know I would've.

This is fair and true....A strong ending can turn around peoples feelings on a story just like a bad ending can do the same.

Doomwar might have gone down as an all time great story if the ending hadn't been so terrible.

Hickman's run might be judged more harshly if not for how good the ending was.

I still think Hickman at least wrote a recognizable and competent version of T'Challa. He got put through the wringer and was broke, but still acted like himself.

The T'Challa in Coates book really is the most incompetent and weakest version we've seen since the days of Roger Stern's Avengers.

 

[Birnin Zana]

This is fair and true....A strong ending can turn around peoples feelings on a story just like a bad ending can do the same.

Doomwar might have gone down as an all time great story if the ending hadn't been so terrible.

Hickman's run might be judged more harshly if not for how good the ending was.

I still think Hickman at least wrote a recognizable and competent version of T'Challa. He got put through the wringer and was broke, but still acted like himself.

The T'Challa in Coates book really is the most incompetent and weakest version we've seen since the days of Roger Stern's Avengers.

I understand that many fans felt how you mentioned in the bold, but I felt the opposite. The portrayal wasn't bad per se and had moments , but overall I didn't feel like he was being himself. Hickman's T'Challa angered me a lot in fact.

Whole situation mellowed me out when it comes to comics. I'm way more chill now than before lol.

 

[Achille]

 

[Concerning VIolence]

Coates took this and flipped it into the DM's living constantly in fear that T'Challa that would sexually brutalize them. He had his man-hating buddy Roxanne Gay write an entire prequel based upon this. All of this despite the fact that T'Challa has put HIMSELF in harms way attempting to protect DM's.

Bullshyt.
which issue is that, breh?

The "rape camps" are a totally separate thing orchestrated by some village leader.

The MA's were pissed at T'challa's incompetence, not him being a predator.