Originally Posted by
Redjack
Without being critical of any other creator, I agree with the sprit of what your'e saying here.
T'Challa was a b-lister whom Priest ALONE elevated to ICON status. ALONE.
Now the he's there, he should stay there. It's neither difficult nor corruptive to elevate Shuri to a similar status. We did it on our show and it can EASILY be done in the comics without punking out anyone. Wakanda, like a lot of Lee/Kirby creations like New Genesis, Asgard etc. is, just another Hidden Utopia and should be presented as such. Civil wars in Wakanda are antithetical to the concept of its existence and ultimately cancerous to the overall concept. As we've seen over the last few years. Wakanda is considerably worse than it was when we met it and that's due to company edict. Nothing can happen in the comics that isn't signed off on by management. Nothing.
While, as an American, monarchies are like acid on my skin, ASGARD isn't and should not be a Western style democracy and Wakanda shouldn't be either. There should be tension between the high council and the Royals but there should be Royals. Just as there are in Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones, etc. These are NOT documentaries about Real Africa and the further you push Wakanada towards the reality of modern and especially past Africa, the more you corrupt its essential conceptual base, its core. Nothing should happen in any super-hero comic that doesn't ultimately push the focus of that comic to further greatness and I'm not talking about the Intergalactic Empire of Wakanda.
The focus of the Black Panther is, wait for it, the Black Panther. it's right there in the title.
I definitely have a fix that would make nearly the whole audience happy, set Wakanda's politics into a reasonable space. give honor to its past and smack it for its sins, honor most of the continuity (even the stuff I hate) but here are the drawbacks:
it would take three years to do it. Marvel would need to commit to it and STICK to that commitment and I'd need to have ONE artistic partner for each of the three arcs.
NONE of that is going to happen. I'm not even pitching the idea to them because it's highly likely they'll say no but still pick out the cool bits and throw them into whatever story arc is being told by someone else.
Nope to all of that.
I'm not trying to be a buzzkill. All writers are different and want to tell different sorts of stories, even using the same sets of characters. ALL of these takes are valid, even when I disagree with them. If Marvel asks me to do BP one-shots I'll always show up for them because they can be "movies" that begin and end and don't have to worry about existing storylines. Outside that, I just don't see how Marvel will ever let me do what clearly needs to be done.
So, I'll be over here, working on Blood Syndicate (which, incidentally, is about to BLOW THE FUCK UP.).
As the master said, "Be Like Water."
As Mr. Jagger said, "You can't always get what you want. But, if you try, sometimes, you just may find you get what you need."