Hello, BP fans. I'm new here, though I've been lurking in this thread for a whole year after finding the HEF by accident while looking for Black Panther cosplay reference pics in research for my own outfit.
But I've wanted so badly to weigh in at times. It just took a very, very, very long time for my account to get approved.
I really thought maybe it had run its course, what with New Avengers and Secret Wars concluding and T'Challa consequently becoming a bigger star than ever at Marvel. But naw, y'all still arguing.
It's all good, though. It has been very fascinating to trace this discussion and reread that Hickman run with new eyes. Panther was the only reason I even picked up the title in the first place, and I liked enough of what I saw to stick around for the duration.
Like S.I., I saw what Hickman was doing, so I didn't mind that T'Challa wasn't succeeding all the time. But like Ture and a lot of the rest of you, I was waiting for that unqualified BP WIN moment. And I never ever got it in New Avengers, the only title I was collecting.
Seriously, eff that whole "In X Months, Time Runs Out!" thing. I skipped what looked like a normal-sized issue with a double-sized price and decided, "A $4.99 monthly comic is my absolute breaking point." And so I came to realize too late that I was lost, lost, lost in this story. And I missed T'Challa's moment when he took out Namor...in Avengers. Which I wasn't reading.
Anyway, I eventually got that win moment in Secret Wars, when T'Challa A) sets aside his beef with Namor, who's another character I like so I really don't want to see him pay the Wakandan penalty for his misdeeds and B) is one of those very few — No, the ONLY ONE! — in the Multiverse who can righteously wield the Infinity Gauntlet and take it to God Doom, who'd punked the other cosmic heavies with contemptuous ease. And, of course, the bookend moment at the close of the miniseries.
And now we're in this weird new place where a BP title sells out a 300,000 copy first printing. The hell were all these fans back in Priest's day on the book?

LOL