This week sees the publication of Black Panther #18, featuring the wedding of Storm and the Black Panther.  Marvel is, rather optimistically, billing this as "the wedding of the century."  Part of me feels that I should be reviewing it.  After all, the X-Axis' remit is to track the X-books.

But then again, thanks to the wonders of late shipping, Storm #6 also comes out this week, concluding the miniseries.  And that's more than enough excuse to write about this whole stunt, without having to dredge through Black Panther.

It ought to go without saying that the marriage is a downright horrible idea - the very worst sort of bad story, which will actively damage both characters for years to come.  Then again, somebody must have thought it was a winner, so perhaps the points are worth spelling out.

Marvel have made no bones about the fact that this storyline is a publicity stunt, designed to attract black readers.  The underlying logic seems to run like this.  Black people like reading about black people.  Storm and the Black Panther are black.  If they get married, then black people who don't read superhero comics will flock to read about two black characters they don't care about, in a genre they don't read.

To put it mildly, the logic of this position escapes me.  It isn't being marketed as a story, or even particularly as a direction.  It's just an event, and one that you could only care about it you had an existing emotional attachment to the characters.  Attracting black readers is a worthwhile and sensible goal.  Merely shoving black characters out there is not enough to achieve it.  Even if it were, Black Panther would be getting those readers already, without the need for stunts.  Who on earth is going to care about the marriage of two B-list Marvel superheroes, other than an existing reader?

It's essentially the same blunder they made with Araña, a book which seemed to assume that teenage hispanic girls would buy the book merely because the star was a teenage hispanic girl, and therefore it was unnecessary for the book to be original or good.  To the surprise of absolutely nobody, aside from Marvel themselves, the target demographic turned out to have higher standards.  The level of response to the wedding can perhaps be gauged by the sudden decision to make the wedding issue into a Civil War crossover.

Given the way in which this whole affair has been presented, readers will inevitably perceive the relationship as artificial.  That's an undeniable obstacle, but a good writer can get around that and draw people into the plot.  Reginald Hudlin has, I'm told, written quality material in other media.  You wouldn't know it from his approach to the wedding storyline, in which he has unaccountably omitted to include a plot.  Black Panther decides, out of nowhere, that he wants to marry Storm, because he has retroactively been in love with her since he was a teenager.  He asks her to marry him.  She says yes, because she too has retroactively been in love with him since he was a teenager.  So they get married.  The end.

Leaving aside the obvious implausibility of characters who have been around for decades suddenly claiming that they have been pining for one another all along and just never got around to mentioning it before, there is a more fundamental problem here.  There is no bloody plot.  There is just a series of events, where the characters spend several months building up to a foregone conclusion, and the story grinds to a halt periodically so that everyone can deliver clumsy dialogue about what a glorious event it is.  Black Panther #18 is an especially dismal example.  Aside from the Civil War crossover elements, there's no story.  Instead, we have characters pausing at every opportunity to tell us what a wonderful event this is.  The overall impression is of a writer who is desperately pleased with himself, and who thinks that his concept is so self-evidently glorious that to actually write it up into a proper story would be overkill.

Editor-in-chief Joe Quesada has spent enough time whinging about the ill-advised marriage of Spider-Man and Mary Jane (with some justification) that he evidently appreciates the damage that can be done to a character by an idiotic, ill-conceived stunt that future writers will struggle to reverse.  Black Panther is clearly a pet project of the current editorial regime, and Quesada has an unfortunate track record of blind spots when it comes to the quality of his pet projects.  But come on, Joe, take a step back for a moment.  It's a dud concept.  In your heart of hearts, you know it is.

Now, in contrast to all that, we have the Storm miniseries by romance novelist Eric Jerome Dickey and artist David Yardin (with Lan Medina producing some broadly consistent fill-in work for the final issue).  It's a miniseries rewriting the first meeting between Storm and the Black Panther.  In one of the oddities of this whole stunt, the justification for their relationship is supposed to come from a back-up strip in Marvel Team-Up #100.  But it's plainly inadequate to the task, and so this miniseries deletes it and replaces it with something more consistent with the new "Did I never mention I was still in love with you...?" version of history.

Fortunately for Dickey, he doesn't have to wrestle with the implausibility of the present day wedding, because his characters are simply meeting and falling in love.  That allows him to build a relationship that's actually plausible.  And the concept of T'Challa and Ororo as a couple, while contrived, was never absurd - it's the rushed marriage that makes their present relationship ludicrous.  I could believe them as a couple.  It works in the miniseries.

Dickey is a mainstream romance novelist, and it shows in his approach to the series.  It's basically a coming of age story for Storm, using T'Challa as part of that, and keeping the series primarily focussed on her.  There's a decent adventure storyline with a couple of poachers trying to kidnap her, which pitches the threat about right for two superheroes as kids.  Granted, it's not exactly subtle - and for all that I want to like the book, I can't help wincing at dialogue like "I will always remember that you made me a woman, warrior."  But on a broader level, it's the right approach to the material, and when he isn't whacking the audience over the head with a romantic sledgehammer, Dickey is more subtle with the other parts of the plot.  It's a miniseries produced as part of a truly irritating and damaging stunt, and he's still persuaded me to like it.  He must be doing something right.

It's possible to put these two characters together and make it seem like a good idea.  The Black Panther series gets it horribly wrong, but the Storm miniseries points to how it could have worked.

Rating: B

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