Black Panther HEARTS Storm

a) the characters have little in common aside from being from Africa, and that is a lame connection to go on

b) Black Panther has nothing to do with the X-Men, and she's an essential member of that group. Bringing him into things just makes her character unnecessarily complicated in terms of continuity.

c) Storm is better as a lesbian!

Also, duh: why wouldn't an African king not marry an African goddess?

Luke Cage is bringing the marriage on in some future Bendis title.

A) marry the king of a fictional country whose advanced technological state is the result of a fictional metal
B) marry some time-traveling mutant cop w/ energy powers
C) lez up w/ a former assassin

Semantics can take a hike up to Valhalla.

Unless this mini's going to splain the history that exists between Ororo and T'Challa. In bed.

-yellow shirt
-disfunctional relationship ending in wedding bells due to unexpected bun in oven

Surely there must be more connections between these titans of sequentiality.

Matthew, I'd recommend checking out Priest's Black Panther run, but I imagine your boredom w/ BP takes root in the actual character & not how he's been used.

Tuomas, my feeling is that it's strange to have Storm get married to anyone at all, much less a character from outside of the X-Men corner of the Marvel Universe.

Anyway, I'm all for cross-pollination between Marvel folx, and the hook-up makes some sort of sense to me (even if they're kinda shoving it in there w/ a certain lack of grace), so go for it, Joey Q & Co! (But don't be surprised when I don't buy the Storm mini.)

Black Panther in Avengers is generally either a) doing hideously 70s stories about the plight of the inner city (often featuring BP declaring himself woodenly as a 'soul brother' and then deciding that being king of a country with a monopoly on a vital resource isn't as useful as being a high school teacher) or b) sitting about. The Avengers already have a kick-ass hand-to-hand fighting guy dressed as a national symbol, various technological genii, and a couple of super-rich people. All BP can do in that context is lean against a wall making the occasional wise yet personality-free comment and waiting for a story set in TEH RELEVANT GHETTO. Little Jimmy wants to straighten up and fly right BUT THE HATE MONGER AND MAN APE WON'T LET HIM they're dressed in masks rallying a mob of, I don't know, Native Americans. GUEST STARRING RED WOLF.

The Priest BP is very much not dull, he's a great re-invention as a world player (eg using the fact that he's all of the things Vic mentioned + an actual sovereign) as well a scheming bastard. The book occasionally got a bit bogged down in spy story-type stuff, but it's always electric when the main character is on-screen.

I didn't really get what it was in PO'B's article that means he doesn't listen to much rap.

PO'B: black people don't read comics
Rappers, many of them black, talk about comics & superheroes A LOT. (especially Marvel comics from the 70s)

Also, I think Storm's importance to the team has been as marginalized as her role in the X-films of late - she's probably 9th or 10th on the depth chart nowadays. Unless there was some hott Storm action in X-Treme X-Men.

Andrew, where the funk is the obnoxious question in Tuomas' post?

One thing I was thinking about is how Marvel has lets it writers fuck over future X-Men writers too much in recent years in spite of the fact that they need enough X-Men characters to carry three titles. Joss Whedon is hogging most of the big names. Mike Carey is forced to turn X-Men into Nu-X-Force. Ed Brubaker has so few options that I can't even begin to imagine who will be on his roster aside from Rachel and Nightcrawler.

All of these established X-Men characters are off-limits:

Jean Grey (dead for the moment)
Archangel (was claimed by Claremont for the old Excalibur, currently powerless)
Psylocke (claimed by Claremont for future storylines)
Banshee (killed by Brubaker)
Gambit (will be a Horseman of the Apocalypse, will leave group)
Storm (pulled out of the group by editorial to marry Black Panther)
Dazzler (used by Claremont in New Excalibur)
Jubilee (lost powers)
Chamber (lost powers)
Northstar (killed by Mark Millar)
Sage (used by Claremont in New Excalibur)

It's rather slim pickings! Apparently Havok and Polaris won't be available anymore either. So who is up for grabs? Bishop and Forge, I guess.

Luke is marrying a WHITE WOMAN!
-- David R. (quoteidio...), February 1st, 2006. (popshots75`) (later)

might stand out on a casual flick through the thread.

Matthew I was going to say that's nowhere near true about Storm, but then I realised that my exposure to the Xmen over the last five years has been X-Statix and the Morrison/Whedon cast, so I've not really seen her at all.

Mammomax.

Er.... (I'm being unfair, but still you see my point?)

http://www.comics.org/covers.lasso?SeriesID=2387

The post-Kirby issues look insanely dull. It must be quite a comedown after finding King Solomon's Frog and hanging with the Black Muskateers to end up back in boring old Manhattan fighting boring old Klaw with the boring old Avengers.

In fact, I don't even like the new direction everything is going in. At this rate I might even have to stop reading X-men at the comic book stores anymore.

As for those 3 post-Kirby Panther books - Jerry Bingham & Gene Day on the art can't be all bad, but ED HANNIGAN?

And if anything, wasn't the interaction between the many mutant comics of the 90s and the rest of the Marvel universe characterized not by segregation but by forced bussing?

But during the 80s heyday there would be plenty of MU cameos without it ever overwhelming the books - Cloak and Dagger in New Mutants being a good example, and the whole (excellent) Asgard storyline was of course steeped in Marvelism.

I have a lot of problems with the mutant persecution angst coexisting with the Avengers and Captain America (particularly the 80s/90s incarnations thereof, who weren't meant to be morally flawed), and with those non-mutant heroes paying nothing but lip service to mutant "tolerance." It's the kind of thing that seems like it would be explained forty years later by Henry Peter Gyrich having the Spear of Destiny.

But I don't like that aspect of the X-books to begin with, so nix or downplay that and I think the neighborhoods can get along just fine.

Fred Hembeck:

I will say that I created Black Lightning after convincing DC not to publish another "black" super-hero on which they had started work. The Black Bomber was a white bigot who, in times of stress, turned into a black super-hero. This was the result of chemical camouflage experiments he'd taken part in as a soldier in Vietnam. The object of these experiments was to allow our [white] troops to blend into the jungle.

In each of the two completed Black Bomber scripts, the white bigot risks his own life to save another person whom he can't see clearly (in one case, a baby in a stroller) and then reacts in racial slur disgust when he discovers that he risked his life to save a black person. He wasn't aware that he had two identities, but each identity had a girlfriend and the ladies were aware of the change. To add final insult, the Bomber's costume was little more than a glorified basketball uniform.