The "Wild Kingdom" crossover from X-Men continues into Black Panther with issue #8.  I was going to just leave this storyline to review in full when it finishes in Black Panther #9, but in the interests of leaving space next month to actually talk about the story, allow me to rant about continuity for a bit.

While it's become slightly less fashionable in the post-Jemas era, for a while it was very much in vogue for creators and editors to declare outright hostility to any notion of continuity, since such things were the preserve of geeks and fools, whereas they were suckling from the breast of art.  Up to a point, this mentality has some justification.  History does not need to be preserved as an end in itself, most long-running characters have back stories cluttered with shit, and if a good story idea happens to conflict with something that happened in Marvel Two-in-One that seven people remember, well, who cares?

Unfortunately, creative trends tend to work in a pendulum, which is why we've had a string of books that seem to take perverse pride in going excessively in the other direction - trashing history for no particular end, screwing up continuity to no creative benefit, and generally acting as if this was the way all true art would be created, were it not for the silly traditions of the genre.  If that sort of thing irritates the readers, well, that just shows how flawed the readers are, doesn't it?

Commercially, this is a slightly questionable attitude, since it's rather hard to imagine anyone other than the hardcore superhero fans giving a toss about the umpteenth revival of a C-list sixties character in the first place, and if they're the only audience you've got, you might as well go some way towards attempting to entertain them.  Because, y'know, it's not like you're writing the great American novel here.  It's Black Panther, for christ's sake.

My problem with Black Panther is not that it changes history.  I couldn't care less about the Black Panther's history.  If they want to declare it null and void and start afresh, that's fine by me.  They can reinvent the character as a Czech architect for all I care.  But any fictional world needs to be at least passably coherent.  So if you're going to change history, you need to be at least marginally clear as to what the new state of affairs is, because otherwise the audience is just going to be horribly confused.  This is not the fault of the audience, however much some creators might like to think otherwise. 

Equally, if you're going to go to the trouble of referencing previous storylines, you might as well get them right, since what's the point of referencing them at all if you're going to do it wrong?

This sort of thing isn't nitpicking, and it isn't a fanboyish obsession with preserving past continuity.  It's simply a request for competent, coherent storytelling.  Unfortunately, some people - such as the writer and editor of Black Panther - seem to have got it into their heads that absolutely all storytelling considerations relating to continuity are based on trivial nitpicking, which results in throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

Black Panther #1-6 were a total rewrite of the Black Panther's origin story, although bafflingly, one of Marvel's other editors, Tom Brevoort, continues to insist that it's just a continuity implant set in the Silver Age.  If that's the intention, nobody's told Reginald Hudlin or his editor, since "Wild Kingdom" involves the X-Men and the Black Panther teaming up to control wild mutant animals set free when the government of Niganda fell in issue #6.  So unless the animals and their creators have been sitting around twiddling their thumbs for ten years waiting for continuity to catch up with them, it would seem that issues #1-6 happened only just recently, in which case the series was a full scale reboot after all, and the Black Panther's entire history has been deleted.

Which would be fine if it had been handled in a remotely coherent way, or if the book was utterly self-contained and didn't have to worry about fitting into the wider Marvel Universe.  Since issue #7 was a House of M crossover and issues #8-9 are crossovers with X-Men, the book can hardly expect to get away with the argument that it should be read in glorious isolation.

Meanwhile, while the story tells us on the one hand that the Black Panther's history has been deleted, on the other hand the past relationship between the Black Panther and Storm apparently still holds good.  Or maybe it doesn't.  Maybe it's just a completely new relationship which is somewhat like the previous one.  Who the hell knows?

Having skilfully reduced his book's timeline and back story to utter incoherence, Reginald Hudlin then endears himself to me even further by bringing Genosha into his storyline and screwing that up too.  The villain turns out to be one Dr Paine (what is this, 1964?), supposedly "the chief scientist" in the mutant-slavery version of Genosha.  Everyone then proceeds to express astonishment that he survived the annihilation of Genosha.

Now, two obvious points arise here.  One, the anti-mutant regime in Genosha was overthrown years before the Sentinels annihilated the place, so it's hardly bloody surprising that he'd left the island, is it?  But no, apparently for present purposes we're taking it that Genosha was still an anti-mutant society when it was zapped.  So New X-Men #114 counts as canon, but the preceding five years don't.  Still with me?

Better yet, the anti-mutant version of Genosha already had a chief scientist in the form of the Genegineer, David Moreau.  Moreau was a major character in the very storyline Hudlin has just referenced by talking about the anti-mutant society of Genosha, but naturally the mere fact that the storyline has been expressly referred to in the preceding panel is no reason why it shouldn't simply be ignored.  Besides, it's not like it's hard to remember!  Genosha was an evil island built on the experiments of Dr Moreau.  The Island of Dr Moreau.  See?  No?  Oh, forget it.

This is not skilful storytelling shaking off the shackles of oppressive continuity.  This is just fucking it up big time by producing a totally incoherent work of fiction, and trying to cover it up by dismissing continuity as the province of nerds.  But the continuity wonks have only ever been guilty of making an exaggerated and pedantic version of a fundamentally good point; and it's a good point which this series spectacularly ignores, making for needlessly bad stories.

There is also a plot in this issue, but I was too busy headbutting the wall to care.

Rating: C

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