The jury is still out on Ultimate Black Panther for me. I really want it to be good because of Hill's impressive work on Blade. But so far, I haven't been bowled over on Ultimate Black Panther. It's not bad, but it's not got me on the edge of my seat either. The artwork is good, and the writing isn't bad. I still think Hill's T'Challa is still too reluctant, and I would rather he play around more with his character. We've gotten the kind of ruminating, dithering, I don't want to be a king for successive runs now. How about an impetuous, impulsive, warlike king to do something different.
I finished the last Intergalactic Empire of Wakanda book last night. When I started the Intergalactic run, I thought it was Coates's best writing on BP to date. But as it went on, the old Coatesisms started creeping back in, and the story began to drag, felt bloated (it didn't need to be 25 issues), and Coates fell back into making sure to lacerate T'Challa, as well as T'Challa lacerating himself. I got tired of Kid Bast, and also Shuri as the book went on. It was like Coates forgot how he was writing her in his first couple arcs, and used his last several issues to have Shuri be the main one to berate T'Challa and even tell him who his real mother was (who just so happened to be her birth mother).
Coates took T'Challa's noble pursuit to fulfill his mother's dream and turned it into something selfish and made him take the blame for two thousand years of history that he had had no knowledge of. Everyone else-especially the female characters demanded agency and had it all day-until they needed to blame T'Challa for everything wrong, and he largely took it. T'Challa rarely pushed back, and when he did, it was weak. Coates often had Storm, Ramonda, and sometimes Shuri, speak for him (as well as try to speak sense into him), but the lack of accountability from many of the female characters under Coates's pen got to be too much. The kicker perhaps was Zenzi being made into Bast. She never was held to account for all the crimes she committed. In fact, she was rewarded, and she still got to dump on T'Challa. Coates also seemingly forgot Shuri's new power set too, and they started drawing her to look more like MCU Shuri.
I thought Space Nakia wasn't a bad love interest prospect, but Coates botched that, because he didn't really show them in a relationship, but then when T'Challa made it back to Earth, it seemed like they had been in one, but it was just not on the page. That was weird, and maybe Coates just didn't want to depict T'Challa in bed with anyone but Storm.
I thought Emperor N'Jadaka could've been a great villain, but there wasn't enough time spent with him, and it felt like Prime N'Jadaka (Killmonger) was crowbarred into the book (not sure if that was due to Coates wanting to use him, or Marvel wanting to take advantage of his newfound movie popularity). Killmonger's symbiote design was too cartoony for my taste, whereas Emperor N'Jadaka looked pretty badass to me. The shaman also got short shrift, again, which wasted another potential good antagonist.
Coates did put T'Challa in a better place at the end of his book than the beginning, but for whatever reason, Marvel largely ignored that because they were hellbent on writing him out of his own title. Over Coates's run, I do get what someone had said about them making T'Challa look too old, there was a quite a bit of that, but overall, I enjoyed much of the artwork (with special mentions to Brian Stelfreeze and Daniel Acuna). I did enjoy a lot of the Storm/T'Challa scenes. Coates is one of the better writers when it comes to that relationship. I also liked some of Coates's worldbuilding, though at the same time he had a habit of dwelling too long in the Djalia and Wakanda's past. I thought the Intergalactic Empire was a very neat concept, but he didn't explore that enough. I would've liked to have seen more done with The Between and it wouldn't have hurt to go into more depth about more of the species conquered by the empire.
Coates even gave us a Black Avengers (though he could've done more to play it up). I also don't know why Blade wasn't involved. Many of Marvel's major Black heroes were the battle for Wakanda, with Blade being a notable exception.
Now that I've seen more of Coates's vision, I can understand some of his choices. He looked at a Wakanda wracked by calamity after calamity (from DoomWar on), and logically with T'Challa being king, many would blame him. So, that I didn't have a problem with. I did have a problem often with how Coates explored that kind of trauma by mostly dumping on T'Challa and making him the scapegoat, or rather just the goat. For a man who seems to really like ambiguity, nuance, and complexity, there wasn't enough balance in his depiction of T'Challa and his struggles. It was nowhere close to how bad Ridley wrote him, with Coates understanding that T'Challa needed to win in the end (and that he was necessary), but still, Coates's take made T'Challa a too frequently underwhelming main character.
I still put Coates over Ridley and Ewing. He's about there with Maberry for me because the sidelined T'Challa in DoomWar felt very much like the forerunner of the Coates Era T'Challa. It's just that I recall really, really liking Maberry's "Power" arc more than anything I read from Coates, though his "Intergalactic" arc wasn't bad, for the most part. I also liked his Crew story, even though it didn't really need T'Challa.
Though I mostly praise the artwork and loved a lot of the "Intergalactic" creative design, I never got why Zenzi and the shaman never wore shoes.
How I rank the BP runs I've read:
1. Priest
2. Hudlin
3. Liss
4. Maberry
5. Coates
6. Ewing
7. Ridley
(I can't say I read every Hudlin book, but I read enough of them to get a sense of his writing. I read one of Kirby's volumes, but don't feel that's enough to say I read his run).