It Can't Just Be Me, Right?

Boy, there's nothing like the old "Check Engine" light coming on to bring Annoyance and Agitation back from their vacation. They ditched Anger, but must have picked up Fretful at a emotional mixer somewhere. Naturally, they weren't too happy to see Mellow, so that poor bloke got thrown out on his butt. So things are pretty much back to normal.

So last week I was in the store, glancing through an issue of Black Panther that had shown up on Thursday. It's the one where he and Storm get to America, and stuff starts happening, and Iron Man acts like a jerk, and so on. I thought that wasn't supposed to show up until the end of December, but there you go. As is usually the case with Civil War-related comics, there was a moment that kind of annoyed me.

Stark tells Storm to not throw lightning at him, because that would just make him angry. Personally, I think Storm could throw enough lightning to do more than that, provided Stark is even in the armor, and not controlling it long distance like the freaking pansy he is. But assuming he's right, it sure is a good thing Storm couldn't oh, I don't know, create a hurricane to pick up a house and drop it on him. What's that you say? Oh, well, whatever.

Of course, T'Challa loves his wife, so he's not going to stand for anyone threatening her, and he leaps into the fray, defeating Iron Man with the Invincible Ebony Blade. The same one Dane Whitman is swinging around right now in New Excalibur. You know me well enough to see where I'm going with this, right?

Now, in the interests of full disclosure, I have to admit that Reginald Hudlin wrote his story where the Black Knight helped invade Wakanda about 18 months before Frank Tieri had Whitman time travel with Excalibur, so he does have seniority. However, I tend to think that the fairly out of character portrayal Whitman received in BP (which I previously griped about here) cancels that out.

Anyway, I pointed this inconsistency out to Jack, and he responded that more people probably care about Black Panther more than New Excalibur. I haven't looked at non-Civil War inflated sales figures, but he's probably right. New Excalibur has this rep as the book Marvel puts out because it knows Claremont sells books. I do get the feeling sometimes that I'm the only person reading this who isn't doing it because Claremont was the writer. The fact the sales have declined since his health issues tend to bear it out.

OK, so I'm not the only one reading it for other reasons. There's Kalinara and all the other Pete Wisdom fans to consider. They are legion, you know. But the concept of reading a comic based on the creative team seems a bit odd to me. There isn't any writer that could make me pick up Batman, not even John Ostrander, who I owe so much to for GrimJack. Of course, to those who operate that way, reading a comic because you think a team with Dazzler and the Juggernaut on it sounds interesting, probably seems pretty weird, too.