Wednesday, September 13, 2017

Black Panther and The Crew review


When I first started reading Black Panther and the Crew: We are the Streets by Ta-Nehisi Coates (Writer), Yona Harvey (Writer), Butch Guice (Illustrator) I thought is was going to be a great superhero comic book series but it turned out to be a good superhero graphic novel story.  It was good book and I urge everyone to read it but it wasn’t what I thought it was going to be let me explain.
The first thing that caused me to raise an eyebrow  was how they drew Misty Knight.  She looked like a man on the cover of the first issue.  That is inexcusable.  Misty Knight is the hottest chick in superheroes stories.  How did they mess up Misty Knight?  Aren’t comics are for young men to fantasize about hot women in tight clothes?  How do they have the actress who plays Misty Knight look better than the comic book version?  That was unnecessary.
Now, I don’t mind stories that start slow to build up a real world connection and that is what Black Panther and the Crew had.  The background setting of Harlem and subject of gentrification was a good element but I found that it came at the sacrifice of superhero fighting and action.  Most superhero stories the superheroes use both their brains and their powers to solve their challenges.  In BP and the Crew the powers the heroes had seemed like background elements.  There were fight scenes don’t get me wrong but there was no concerted effort to strategize around the use of them.  BP and The Crew was a beautiful mixture of popular Black superheroes there was Luke Cage, Storm, Black Panther, Misty Knight and Manifold but there use of powers was a side issue.  A good example of superhero powers strategy is with the Fantastic Four.  When the Fantastic Four fight a villain or fight a battle there is a division of heroes based on what hero’s powers can address what area of the threat or which villain they will fight.  BP and The Crew also lacked a super villain.  This superhero team up fought a regular person which is sort of corny to me. 
                I hope this review was helpful.  I wrote this to help provide some feedback for Marvel editors.  I am a new to comic book reader, I started reading around 2008.  I was inspired to start reading comics again by the success and portrayal of more realistic superheroes in the movies.  That said my tastes reside with a superhero that are more like real people with regular human problems. So,


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