Radiant Comics

I’m back from the comic shop this week and I got no new comics but I did get a hard cover collection:

And now for a review of something I’ve read recently.

“Black Panther: Secret Invasion” by Jason Aaron and Jefte Palo

As I’ve said before I don’t care much for company-wide crossover stories. So I didn’t expect much from this volume. I also have never read anything from the writer or seen anything from the artist. So I was pleasantly surprised by this collection of three issues of “Black Panther” from 2008-2009.

The whole thing is basically a big battle scene between the Black Panther plus the military forces of his African kingdom of Wakanda and the invading army of aliens who are known in the Marvel Universe as Skrulls. The story is simple but well done.

On one side we have the out-numbered and out-gunned good guys and on the other the bad guys. Aaron even does a nice job of humanizing the bad guys by giving us their commander’s perspective. He makes him the old war horse character who wants to retire and leave war behind. Nothing I haven’t seen many times but it’s still effective here. He manages to keep the reader guessing, or at least wanting to see, what the Black Panther’s plan will actually be until the end.

I enjoyed Palo’s artwork. He’s doing a José Muñoz, Frank Miller, Mike Mignola, Tim Sale sort of thing using lots of black shapes to define forms. His storytelling is also good and the colorist, Lee Loughridge, did a nice job. The colors are well chosen and understated in a way that suits the nature of the line art. I’ve seen a lot of colorists who, in this day and age, are used to doing illustrative color and don’t know what to do with more graphic line art so I was happy to see it well handled here.

In the end this story really did have a lot to do with the big crossover event. Not that I read the big crossover event. The enemy could have been any invaders. They just happened to be Skrulls. Either way it was a pretty good comic.