Why did I think this series had been pushed back to like a November start or something like that?
ETA: Hey, I finished the Shuri series and forgot to mention it! Not sure what that says about my overall opinion of the book.
I had hoped for a story about Shuri trying to search for T'Challa that would have paved the way for the return in his own book (I knew that there wasn't any real clear overlap, but I was hoping for the illusion of it). Instead, it was Shuri fights a giant space grasshopper who likes music. I thought it was interesting that it basically functioned as a way to turn off her powers without eliminating them. My personal preference is to let her keep her powers. Her bird thing is at least visually fun. I know the task was to make Shuri as close to movie Shuri as possible without contradicting current continuity so I thought Nnedi Okorafor did a solid job of that. I think her writing improved by the end too (I thought the dialogue felt very off at the beginning).
That being said, I actually liked the fill-in arc by Vita Ayala more. That one has a crossover with Miles Morales and Kamala Khan. Given that Black Panther in space is pretty much ignored by Jason Aaron, I was curious if this would give some sense of chronology, but I don't think either of those characters are having dramatic changes right now so it feels like this could fit anywhere in their timeline. I'm not reading enough books to know whether there's something I'm missing. My guess is Storm is the only character who appears in Black Panther and the X-Books, but I'm not sure if those books are interacting with Avengers either (despite the whole Phoenix thing). I honestly think the best place would be to put the Black Panther series before the current Avengers series and before House of X and just say T'Challa came back from space fired up and with big plans to take over the Avengers. Does that work with what we got?
I'll finish up Coates' Black Panther in the next week and a half. Looking forward to finally opening issue #25, which I had to order and is still in a shipping package. The goal was to get it done just before the new series, which is why I was asking about whether it got delayed.