With the planned marriage of Storm and the Black Panther, Marvel have achieved something unusual.  They have managed to make me bored of a storyline before it's even started.

There are all manner of problems with this concept.  Primarily, it's a totally artificial pairing that relies on us accepting the characters suddenly rushing into marriage on the strength of a Marvel Team-Up back-up strip from some twenty years ago, despite the absence of any subsequent story.  On top of that, announcing their intentions so unambiguously prevent later stories from having any real hope of developing the relationship in a way that feels organic.  And the whole thing has the worrying feel of a publisher pairing up the black characters in, at best, a clunky effort at outreach.

I have a sinking feeling that this story is going to be another of Marvel's periodic marketing disasters where they try to appeal to new and existing readers simultaneously, and end up crashing to disaster.  Why would you care about the wedding of Storm and the Black Panther unless you already cared about the characters?  I just don't get the logic.  And if you do already care about the characters, are you really going to want to see this story?  Again, I'm really not seeing it.

The thankless task of retrofitting the characters with the required back story falls to Eric Jerome Dickey, who is apparently a very big name in commercial African-American novels and precisely the sort of person they need if they're going to pull this off.  The remit for the series is basically to flesh out the Marvel Team-Up story so that the relationship has a bit more weight to it.  For the moment, though, Dickey is giving us another teenage Ororo story.

And despite the overreaching context, there's quite a lot to like here.  For example, Dickey has obviously put some thought into the fact that Ororo's not really African at all, something which most stories tend to gloss over.  The question of her ethnic identity is addressed rather better than usual.  We've also got a much more realistic version of Africa compared with the usual versions of Ororo's back story (which tend to show Africa in a very idealised light, full of noble hut-dwellers who divide their time between silence and wisdom).  There have always been credibility problems with Ororo's back story and Dickey seems to be making a reasonably successful effort to tackle them without actually rewriting the whole thing.  Incidentally, it's also notable that somebody's done the continuity research properly for once, and gone to the trouble of working out how old Ororo is meant to be by this point.

The general approach, then, is fine.  As for the story, it's a set-up issue and rather off the peg.  Ororo has set up home with another group of thieves.  A bunch of evil white guys are looking for her (presumably, in part, because they're the villains from the Marvel Team-Up story and Dickey is trying to give Ororo a better rationale for turning up there).  A rather underwritten bigoted African girl betrays Ororo at the end to set up a cliffhanger.  It's all perfectly alright, but there's nothing desperately original about the plot.  To be fair, there's some suggestion that the bad guys are looking for Ororo for some more specific reason, in which case we might get to more interesting territory in future issues.

Dickey seems generally comfortable with the medium, although there are a couple of pacing blunders.  Most notably, casual executions really shouldn't be so casual that they take place between panels, and they also need proper sound effects to avoid seeming weird.  But overall, a solid debut.  I still question the wisdom of this whole exercise, but as a miniseries, this doesn't look bad.

Rating: B+

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