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Black Panther by Reginald Hudlin: The Complete Collection
Black Panther by Reginald Hudlin: The Complete Collection, Vol. 3
Reginald Hudlin's run concludes, changing everything for the Black Panther! T'Challa and Ororo return to Wakanda - only to find that home is anything but sweet. With serious strife tearing apart his court and one of his greatest foes waiting to strike, can T'Challa regain control of his kingdom? Plus, the Skrulls are coming, and that means all-out war! But there's a reason that Wakanda has never been conquered, and the Skrulls are about to fi nd out why! Then, in the wake of a devastating attack on T'Challa, a new Panther will prowl - and she's badder than ever! Who will wear the cowl? COLLECTING: BLACK PANTHER (2005) 35-41, BLACK PANTHER (2009) 1-6, BLACK PANTHER/CAPTAIN AMERICA: FLAGS OF OUR FATHERS 1-4, BLACK PANTHER SAGA
440 pages, Paperback
First published July 14, 2010
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Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews
October 9, 2022
So Hudlin’s run of Black Panther comes to a close. This final book was pretty dope. We start off with Killmonger showing back up with some new mysterious powers. He tries to win over the neighboring Niganda so he can rule them and then infiltrate Wakanda. Great start to the book. The next 3 issues for the arc, See Wakanda and Die, we’re done by Jason Aaron. Here we have the Skrulls coming to invade Wakanda for the vibranium. The art had a dark, sharp and edgy feel to it that worked for a brutal attempted invasion story. I mean, heads and limbs were getting lopped off in this one. It was dope seeing Storm and T’Challa fight side by side. Next, we have a group of undesirables, Namor, The Hood, Loki, Doom and Emma Frost, forming a cabal and wanting Black Panther to join. Once he refuses, Doom surprise attacks T’Challa leaving him in a coma in critical condition. This is where we see Shuri rise up to take up the mantle of Black Panther and see Storm put her self at risk doing whatever it takes to save her husband. Another great arc. Then to finish up, we have the 4 issue mini series, Captain America/Black Panther: Flags of our Fathers. Set during WW II, we have T’Chaka’s dad and Captain America eventually teaming up fighting Red Skull and some nazis who were also trying to invade Wakanda. So again, with this final volume, Hudlin goes out with a bang helping my thoughts of this run being better than Priest’s.
March 2, 2018
4.5 stars
"See Wakanda and die!" - the main motto of this Complete volume.
This is just a superb collection of the final 16ish issues of the Black Panther run that went from 2005-2009. I had been wondering when we were going to see some of the catastrophic events alluded to in the current ongoing series (mentions of Skrulls, Dr. Doom, Namor, and Thanos all having caused major devastation to Wakanda), and finally got to see *some* of those bits, but definitely not all.
We've got Erik Killmonger (this time playing dictator of Niganda, with some very powerful tech aiding him), Skrulls, Dr. Doom/competing heads of various other African totems (more on that later), and finally Nazis to face off against. The Skrull invasion only lasts 3 issues and is written by Jason Aaron, who does a fantastic job telling an action-packed story of what happens when powerful alien shapeshifters make a play for the vibranium mound. Storm is elsewhere (explained in X-Men: Messiah CompleX but not here at all) for the first conflict, but plays a key role in T'Challa's insane plan to outsmart and survive the Skrulls. Following that intermission, Marvel started renumbering the issues back to #1, but kept Reginald Hudlin at the helm.
"The Deadliest of the Species" is one of the best Panther arcs I've come across, but it also has some plot issues that left me confused by the end.
Much of the "action" in the third arc of this collection occurs on various spiritual/metaphysical planes, which I appreciated. We're always reminded that the Black Panther serves three major leadership roles - political, military, and spiritual - but other than inaugural encounters with the Panther God, I haven't seen that last aspect being shown much. There's a lot of deliberate teasing of the reader across several issues where Marvel wanted readers to buy a bunch of variant covers portraying different women as possibly being the new (second, maybe simultaneous?) Black Panther, but the results are not what I expected at all.
But that's not all! The final *real* story arc changes up the art style drastically (and to great effect, imo) and puts us in the past, where Nick Fury and his Howling Commandos first encounter the nation of Wakanda while fighting Nazis. As far as I know, this is before S.H.I.E.L.D., which helps make it a much different story than we usually see when Fury is involved. It's also the first meeting and team-up between the Howlers and Captain America, and as a group they're all invited as guests of the king into their off-limits kingdom. The narrator throughout the story is the sole African-American soldier on Fury's elite team, named Gabe. We're told that this is before the U.S. armed forces started integrating black and white soldiers, so Fury and Cap in particular are portrayed as progressive for their time. But of course they still try using the one black guy to infiltrate and steal from Wakanda and Panther.
But for some reason, we never hear Black Panther's name in the entire 4-issue miniseries! I was under the impression that it was T'Chaka - T'Challa's father - who had originally beaten Captain America in hand-to-hand combat before becoming friends and fighting alongside each other. Maybe that's true in another continuity? Maybe I just made that up? I had to Google the family tree to try figuring out who was behind the mask through this entire story, and even now, I see sources that say both Azzuri the Wise AND Chanda are T'Challa's paternal grandfathers. If there were any evidence of there being a gay/bisexual Panther in the recent path, that would make more sense, but I really don't get who this is. We get to see T'Chaka and his younger brother S'Yan as constantly-fighting adolescents, which is a rarely seen insight. And we see Hitler, Red Skull, and Baron von Strucker, which means we see both lots of Nazis dying bloodily *and* have to hear them espousing their Aryan Supremacist ideology.
(Wouldn't it be great if in 2018 we could look *back* at fascist regimes and racist propaganda dominating headlines? Instead, these same root ideas still have a stronghold on a huge chunk of the population.)
Other than not being told who Black Panther is at this time, my only other complaint has to do with the superhuman secret weapons, whose generic and forgettable names I'm having to look up now. The White Gorilla (presumably the grandfather or predecessor of M'Baku) makes an appearance, but it's three other monsters that are the really scary enemies: Master Man, Warrior Woman, and Armless Tiger Man. I'm not making up those names. Other than a mech suit that's more bark than bite (in a dubious way), these are Red Skull's main weapons deployed that nearly defeat the heroes, and kill many civilians along the way. Warrior Woman is basically a trope - picture an SS officer with the long, black overcoat and hat, but a dominatrix/fetish model underneath. At least she's not as vom-inducing as the similar character Frank Miller has used, where torpedo boobs and buttocks protrude equally and are bare except a huge, red swastika stamp, but she's still here to play the same role of the tantalizingly erotic femme fatale. I don't know what Master Man's powers are, but he's pretty tough. Armless Tiger Man is by far the creepiest character design, and I gotta hand it to the artist for drawing some interesting stances for this mass murderer with bandaged stumps, who uses his spiky teeth, speed, and agility as his weapon. Anyway, they make a formidable multi-pronged attack force against our teamed-up heroes, so it was a little incredible when they're quickly taken down with a simple, unexplained series of strikes.
Those are my main thoughts on this book. This collection was just published a week ago, and as of the this moment, there are ZERO reviews or ratings of it on Goodreads! With the ongoing success of the Black Panther movie, Marvel is finally printing and pushing Complete Collections from previous eras of the character's comics. This volume ends with a beautifully-illustrated timeline of the Black Panther, and then a few interviews and retrospectives that are actually worth reading. Afterwords in trade collections are usually just a lot like award ceremony acceptance speeches, but here we actually get to hear past Panther writers talking trash about each other! Roy Thomas comes off to me as a boring old white guy who put Black Panther on the Avengers, estranging him from his homeland, and never doing the character justice. And he actively ridicules the retcon/plot twist that Christopher Priest later introduced, which has become well-known canon. Don McGregor was the first person to take the character seriously and is revered for having written the most important story lines of the series, but was kicked off the title halfway through his planned arc (which, notably, was the FIRST time Marvel printed a story arc across multiple issues!) because he was too on point (i.e. smart, honest, and therefore controversial). Christopher Priest is the last one interviewed, and he plays nice, making it clear that he cares a lot about preserving the continuity, but that he was deliberately introducing facts that would all but invalidate Roy Thomas's work. When I first started reading Black Panther comics a couple years ago, it was the Enemy of the State TPB that kicked off Priest's run and introduced Everett K. Ross, whom I absolutely hated, and I quickly gave up on the book. Now that I've read so much more that I love, and I've become aware of Christopher Priest's justification and intent of his series, I'm inclined to try tackling it again via the other newly-published Complete Collections. He's right about at least one thing: Panther is "a bad dude."
"See Wakanda and die!" - the main motto of this Complete volume.
This is just a superb collection of the final 16ish issues of the Black Panther run that went from 2005-2009. I had been wondering when we were going to see some of the catastrophic events alluded to in the current ongoing series (mentions of Skrulls, Dr. Doom, Namor, and Thanos all having caused major devastation to Wakanda), and finally got to see *some* of those bits, but definitely not all.
We've got Erik Killmonger (this time playing dictator of Niganda, with some very powerful tech aiding him), Skrulls, Dr. Doom/competing heads of various other African totems (more on that later), and finally Nazis to face off against. The Skrull invasion only lasts 3 issues and is written by Jason Aaron, who does a fantastic job telling an action-packed story of what happens when powerful alien shapeshifters make a play for the vibranium mound. Storm is elsewhere (explained in X-Men: Messiah CompleX but not here at all) for the first conflict, but plays a key role in T'Challa's insane plan to outsmart and survive the Skrulls. Following that intermission, Marvel started renumbering the issues back to #1, but kept Reginald Hudlin at the helm.
"The Deadliest of the Species" is one of the best Panther arcs I've come across, but it also has some plot issues that left me confused by the end.
Much of the "action" in the third arc of this collection occurs on various spiritual/metaphysical planes, which I appreciated. We're always reminded that the Black Panther serves three major leadership roles - political, military, and spiritual - but other than inaugural encounters with the Panther God, I haven't seen that last aspect being shown much. There's a lot of deliberate teasing of the reader across several issues where Marvel wanted readers to buy a bunch of variant covers portraying different women as possibly being the new (second, maybe simultaneous?) Black Panther, but the results are not what I expected at all.
But that's not all! The final *real* story arc changes up the art style drastically (and to great effect, imo) and puts us in the past, where Nick Fury and his Howling Commandos first encounter the nation of Wakanda while fighting Nazis. As far as I know, this is before S.H.I.E.L.D., which helps make it a much different story than we usually see when Fury is involved. It's also the first meeting and team-up between the Howlers and Captain America, and as a group they're all invited as guests of the king into their off-limits kingdom. The narrator throughout the story is the sole African-American soldier on Fury's elite team, named Gabe. We're told that this is before the U.S. armed forces started integrating black and white soldiers, so Fury and Cap in particular are portrayed as progressive for their time. But of course they still try using the one black guy to infiltrate and steal from Wakanda and Panther.
But for some reason, we never hear Black Panther's name in the entire 4-issue miniseries! I was under the impression that it was T'Chaka - T'Challa's father - who had originally beaten Captain America in hand-to-hand combat before becoming friends and fighting alongside each other. Maybe that's true in another continuity? Maybe I just made that up? I had to Google the family tree to try figuring out who was behind the mask through this entire story, and even now, I see sources that say both Azzuri the Wise AND Chanda are T'Challa's paternal grandfathers. If there were any evidence of there being a gay/bisexual Panther in the recent path, that would make more sense, but I really don't get who this is. We get to see T'Chaka and his younger brother S'Yan as constantly-fighting adolescents, which is a rarely seen insight. And we see Hitler, Red Skull, and Baron von Strucker, which means we see both lots of Nazis dying bloodily *and* have to hear them espousing their Aryan Supremacist ideology.
(Wouldn't it be great if in 2018 we could look *back* at fascist regimes and racist propaganda dominating headlines? Instead, these same root ideas still have a stronghold on a huge chunk of the population.)
Other than not being told who Black Panther is at this time, my only other complaint has to do with the superhuman secret weapons, whose generic and forgettable names I'm having to look up now. The White Gorilla (presumably the grandfather or predecessor of M'Baku) makes an appearance, but it's three other monsters that are the really scary enemies: Master Man, Warrior Woman, and Armless Tiger Man. I'm not making up those names. Other than a mech suit that's more bark than bite (in a dubious way), these are Red Skull's main weapons deployed that nearly defeat the heroes, and kill many civilians along the way. Warrior Woman is basically a trope - picture an SS officer with the long, black overcoat and hat, but a dominatrix/fetish model underneath. At least she's not as vom-inducing as the similar character Frank Miller has used, where torpedo boobs and buttocks protrude equally and are bare except a huge, red swastika stamp, but she's still here to play the same role of the tantalizingly erotic femme fatale. I don't know what Master Man's powers are, but he's pretty tough. Armless Tiger Man is by far the creepiest character design, and I gotta hand it to the artist for drawing some interesting stances for this mass murderer with bandaged stumps, who uses his spiky teeth, speed, and agility as his weapon. Anyway, they make a formidable multi-pronged attack force against our teamed-up heroes, so it was a little incredible when they're quickly taken down with a simple, unexplained series of strikes.
Those are my main thoughts on this book. This collection was just published a week ago, and as of the this moment, there are ZERO reviews or ratings of it on Goodreads! With the ongoing success of the Black Panther movie, Marvel is finally printing and pushing Complete Collections from previous eras of the character's comics. This volume ends with a beautifully-illustrated timeline of the Black Panther, and then a few interviews and retrospectives that are actually worth reading. Afterwords in trade collections are usually just a lot like award ceremony acceptance speeches, but here we actually get to hear past Panther writers talking trash about each other! Roy Thomas comes off to me as a boring old white guy who put Black Panther on the Avengers, estranging him from his homeland, and never doing the character justice. And he actively ridicules the retcon/plot twist that Christopher Priest later introduced, which has become well-known canon. Don McGregor was the first person to take the character seriously and is revered for having written the most important story lines of the series, but was kicked off the title halfway through his planned arc (which, notably, was the FIRST time Marvel printed a story arc across multiple issues!) because he was too on point (i.e. smart, honest, and therefore controversial). Christopher Priest is the last one interviewed, and he plays nice, making it clear that he cares a lot about preserving the continuity, but that he was deliberately introducing facts that would all but invalidate Roy Thomas's work. When I first started reading Black Panther comics a couple years ago, it was the Enemy of the State TPB that kicked off Priest's run and introduced Everett K. Ross, whom I absolutely hated, and I quickly gave up on the book. Now that I've read so much more that I love, and I've become aware of Christopher Priest's justification and intent of his series, I'm inclined to try tackling it again via the other newly-published Complete Collections. He's right about at least one thing: Panther is "a bad dude."
August 2, 2021
3.5/5
Very solid run overall, seeing T'Challa and Ororo work so well together makes the half assed break-up in AvX even worse ):
Very solid run overall, seeing T'Challa and Ororo work so well together makes the half assed break-up in AvX even worse ):
September 27, 2019
As far as the Hudlin run of the main BP title goes, these are the best stories in the series. The Killmonger arc is bad ass. Furthermore, Jason Aaron temporarily joins the team to tell a Secret Invasion tie-in story, and it is literally the best Secret Invasion tie in. Period.
The Shuri stuff was pretty badass, there was some decent Doom War setup...
but here’s the kicker; the Flags of Our Fathers mini was hot garbage. Sure, it had all the ingredients: WW2 era panther, Captain America, Nick Fury, Nazis, Red Skull, master man... it could have been awesome! Alas, it suffered from weak art and an unfocussed story.
This is a good collection, but I can’t give it the high score I want to give it, because it was filled out with a mediocre mini. I’d rather have had BP 2009 #7-#9 then had to suffer through that. It’s too bad, because the other stuff is sooooo good.
The Shuri stuff was pretty badass, there was some decent Doom War setup...
but here’s the kicker; the Flags of Our Fathers mini was hot garbage. Sure, it had all the ingredients: WW2 era panther, Captain America, Nick Fury, Nazis, Red Skull, master man... it could have been awesome! Alas, it suffered from weak art and an unfocussed story.
This is a good collection, but I can’t give it the high score I want to give it, because it was filled out with a mediocre mini. I’d rather have had BP 2009 #7-#9 then had to suffer through that. It’s too bad, because the other stuff is sooooo good.
March 13, 2024
An improvement from the last volume, and a great way to wrap up Hudlin’s Black Panther run! The Secret Invasion tie-ins by Jason Aaron were whatever, but the Killmonger story, the beginning of Shuri’s time as Black Panther, and the “Flags of Our Fathers” miniseries were all really fun reads. I’m glad that I chose this run to be my first Black Panther comics to read. It’s very tied into the greater Marvel universe and T’Challa’s relationship with Storm is really the emotional backbone that carries the entire series. Overall, an easy recommendation for anyone who wants to get into Black Panther comics!
July 1, 2018
Reginald Hudlin had an epic run on Black Panther, and this collection truly shines, with the particular standout for me being the story line of the Skrulls invading Wakanda, which features one of the best twists I can remember reading a comic book. You see a lot of plot points in this collection that Ryan Coogler could put on the big screen.
December 6, 2018
This universe was great because we see how unstoppable Storm and Black Panther are as a duo. Honestly they are so overpowered that nobody can stop them. Takes place after their wedding, and develops into a tour around the Marvel Universe. I hate to make a Jay-Z and Beyonce reference because T'challa would never get his ass whooped in an elevator. Great Read!
March 25, 2018
I think this was my favorite of the Hudlin volumes. I'm glad I stuck it out and read the complete run. Fun stories with confrontations with Killmonger, Skrulls, and Nazis. Plus a new Black Panther. Good stuff.
February 24, 2019
There were two stories not as favorable but able to read and follow storyline. Other stories I absolutely loved, especially storm and black panther togetherness and partnership. Black on black love with an African king of his own land and an African goddess. Most of the artwork was great.
July 11, 2020
Most of the stories in this collection were great though the FOOF was not. And, the depictions of Ororo were a bit hit and miss. She was either green-ish in skin tone or, light enough to pass for Armenian. But, the struggle to get her coloring done "right" was an issue for other characters.
February 25, 2026
I loved this one, the last main collection of Hudlin's Black Panther (he has one issue in Black Panther: Doomwar), pitting Black Panther against Killmonger and the Secret Invasion of Skrulls before taking him off the board in favor of Shuri's run in the costume.
January 7, 2021
Some interesting stories, but as a collection it feels slapdash.
May 5, 2021
I loved how it stayed absolutely Wakanda-centric, but also manages to bring in so many characters from across the Marvel universe
October 31, 2025
i went into this with high expectations and was a little let down but still a good read! liked the captain america/black panther team up!
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
January 6, 2019
I thought this was all pretty good. The Secret Invasion part, I thought, was much better than the Dark Avengers part.
It feels like there's something missing. This witch doctor character is obviously evil, but the hand never gets tipped.
It feels like there's something missing. This witch doctor character is obviously evil, but the hand never gets tipped.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews