BP #18 is the first issue of Hudlin's run that I've bought in over a year. I planned on just skimming it in the store, but the scene with Cap and IM looked interesting, and I liked the return of the Texeira outfit as T'Challa's formal duds, so I bought the issue so I could give it an honest read.
My impression after reading it is mixed. Most of the pieces of a good story are here, and there are a lot of nice moments (the Cap/IM scene, the Ororo/Xavier scene, etc.), but I think this issue is where karma finally came back and bit Hudlin in the ass over his reboot of the character. Why? Because every attempt at emotional resonance was undercut by the swiss cheesing of T'Challa's history.
The scene with Cap, Iron Man, and T'Challa would have been really powerful if they'd actually had the shared history we'd seen them have before the reboot. And, in fact, Hudlin writes the scene as if that history still exists -- but as we've seen in the pages of his own book, it
doesn't exist anymore, so the scene makes no sense.
But for the moment, let's pretend that T'Challa still has all of his pre-Hudlin history, since that seemed to be the way Hudlin was approaching this issue. If that's the case, where's Everett K. Ross? I can't believe he'd miss the wedding. Where's Sgt. Tork? Where's Kasper Cole? And why on earth would Man-Ape be on the invitation list when he killed the time-displaced version of T'Challa and sparked a Wakandan civil war so recently? If any Jabari were going to be invited, wouldn't Queen Divine Justice be the obvious choice? And yet she's nowhere to be seen. Let's not forget Dr. Doom at the end, either. Before the reboot he and T'Challa were on cordial terms, but now he's acting like there's leftover animosity between them. Huh?
No -- sadly, Hudlin's reboot is in full effect here, and he just sidesteps it when he feels like tapping into the character's
real history. That's nothing but a parlor trick -- lazy writing of the worst kind. Either the character's history was worth keeping or it wasn't. You can't have it both ways. And yet, Hudlin still tries to -- and in the process he just confuses readers both new and old because he can't maintain consistency even within his own stories.
This certainly isn't the worst book on the shelves, but it's still got serious problems, and I think T'Challa deserves a lot better. It's a shame that an event as big as the character's wedding had to happen in the middle of this muddled mess -- and it's even more of a shame that there were elements of a good story here that were completely overshadowed by the side effects of Hudlin's hubris.
Needless to say, I won't be buying #19.
- Jer
