Monday, February 3, 2020

Black Panther: Battle For Wakanda

Bought this for the Kiddo at a bookstore in Hub Mall here in Shanghai.

Title: Black Panther: Battle For Wakanda
Publisher: Marvel Comics
Date: 2019
Writer: Brandon T. Snider

Another of the Mighty Marvel Chapter Books series. While it's a prose story, it is full of color illustrations, but unfortunately, the artists are not credited (at least I was not able to get the information from the Amazon or Goodreads entries for the book and, as noted below, the credits on the copy we bought were not in English). This is the, well, I guess the phrasing would be English language Chinese edition, which we purchased in China. All of the story text is in English, but the credits, copyright and publisher information, and there are vocabulary footnotes in Chinese, which seem to be aimed at English language learners.

The Chinese edition covers for this series look awesome, by the way.

The story involves a plot to stir up trouble in Wakanda every time T'Challa is off doing Avengers things with the Avengers, which is currently more often than usual because there is an imposter Black Panther running around sabotaging SHIELD installations and beating up SHIELD-agent jobbers.

T'Challa makes some questionable decisions in order to move the plot along, but it eventually builds into a big confrontation with Klaw back in Wakanda, and a chance for T'Challa to regain the confidence of his people.

Several Avengers guest-star, and Shuri gets a decent supporting role.

Those picky about continuity should note that this is based more on comic storyline than the MCU version, but like the Gamora book in this series (I reviewed it here), it definitely tries to play to fans who have seen the films, but have not read the comics.

There were some editing issues, including a mess of a pronoun problem at one point, and the plot left a fair number of unanswered questions.

Still, it did the flavor of the characters well, and hit the right emotional notes in the end.

Rating: 5.5/10

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