• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer

Nick Bryan

  • Home
  • About
  • Comics
  • Shop
  • HOBSON & CHOI
  • Other Work
  • BLOG

christopher priest

Best of 2015 – TOP TEN BOOKS

December 22, 2015 by Nick Bryan Leave a Comment

It’s the end of the year, I’m running out of reading/viewing/listening time, should get my best-of-year posts filed away before 2015 dies and I miss the zeitgeist.

So, let’s see what I can fit in before I need to cut this shit out and wrap some presents. To give these posts more structure (and recreate the glee I feel when writing my Top Ten TV post), I’m gonna mess with the format a little, possibly do a top ten for the categories I feel can sustain it, and post them as I’ve done them. First up: THE BOOKS.

As of this writing, I’m one book away from hitting my 50-books Goodreads challenge target, but I have a novella lined up that will hopefully take me over the top. Or I could just start counting my comic reading on Goodreads, which would win it instantly.

But what were the best of the proses?

10) Heart-Shaped Box by Joe Hill – and immediately we slip out of current releases, but this creeped the shit out of me. I don’t read many ghost stories, so may have been an easy mark for it, but nonetheless, an easy and scary read.

9) Half The World by Joe Abercrombie – last year, I mentioned Half A King, this year it was the sequel, and as you’d expect from Abercrombie, top-notch wry action. Must read the end of the trilogy soon.

8) Rickshaw by David McGrath – full disclosure: I know the author from my MA course, but nonetheless, this is an exhilarating, visceral London dark comedy-drama about a rickshaw driver losing his grip and you should try it.

7) Alif the Unseen by G. Willow Wilson – you’re more likely to know Wilson for her (excellent) Ms. Marvel comic, but she also wrote this modern urban fantasy which really hit my imagination.

6) Dual – A Love Story by James Priest – I mostly know Priest for his comics (as Christopher Priest), but his recent self-published novels have very much captured the smart, funny, pragmatic tone that drew me to his other work, and Dual is the strongest of the two complete ones I read this year. His sci-fi series 1999 might be even better, but I haven’t finished that yet.

5) Rivers of London series by Ben Aaronovitch – this is me cheating, as I read all five of these books in 2015 and didn’t want them to dominate the chart. They’re great, though – a witty, well-thought-out, relatable take on magic, which has found entirely deserved success.

4) Envy of Angels by Matt Wallace – a unique, imaginative culinary urban fantasy novella that kept me hooked from start to finish. Already pre-ordered the sequel.

3) The Death House by Sarah Pinborough – a strange, spacey, atmospheric one-off book about a group of teenagers in a grim facility in the middle of nowhere. Hard to describe but good, read it.

2) The Girl With All The Gifts by M.R. Carey – a zombie book better than most, through sheer strength of character writing. Technically came out last year. Amazing stuff.

1) Jonathan Strange & Mister Norrell by Susanna Clarke –  technically came out a while back, but a lovely, charming, painfully British fantasy book which packs enough plot for a trilogy into a single (admittedly very long) book, full of memorable characters and funny jokes. Also footnotes almost as long as the ones in that Stewart Lee book.

(There is also a very well-done BBC TV adaptation if you can’t face the brick-sized novel, but I’d recommend reading it if you can.)

And that, readers, was the books of the written word of the year 2015. Comics hopefully with you in the next few days.

Filed Under: Book Reviews Tagged With: ben aaronovitch, best of 2015, best of year, blogging, books, christopher priest, james priest, joe abercrombie, joe hill, jonathan strange and mister norrell, sarah pinborough

Black Panther by Christopher Priest – A Homage

April 24, 2014 by Nick Bryan Leave a Comment

Black Panther #1 cover by Mark Texeira

I recently subscribed to Marvel Unlimited, a Netflix-esque system that gives me all-I-can-eat Marvel comics for a fairly low price. Not bang-up-to-date ones, but I’ve not read half the comics I wanted to over the last decade due to financial concerns, so I can keep trawling for a while.

However, as well as striking out for new material, I’ve also re-read some old favourites, and I’d like to talk about one of those now: Black Panther by Christopher Priest and various artists, a series that ran from 1998 to 2003. The Black Panther character has existed since 1966, King of a fictional African nation called Wakanda, and mostly associated with standing in the backdrop of Avengers groupshots in the later decades of the twentieth century.

Attentive readers may note Priest also wrote Quantum & Woody, a series even closer to my heart than Black Panther. I started reading Panther due to following Priest over from Q&W, barely knowing who the character was, and Priest made me love it in approximately one issue. If you want a gushing tribute to Q&W, here’s one I wrote in September 2012.

But anyway. Black Panther. What was that about?

“The bathroom had no door. I still had no pants.” – Everett K. Ross wins my heart in one page.

Everett K. Ross by Mark Texeira

As you may have guessed from both the name and his status as King of an African nation, the Black Panther (aka T’Challa) lives outside the standard white American superhero demographic. And yes, particularly in the old days, black superheroes did have a bad habit of having the word Black in their alias.

Characters outside the standard demo didn’t tend to hit mega-sales in the pre-2010s US mainstream Marvel/DC comic market, but Priest found ways to embrace that. First up, he introduced Everett K. Ross, T’Challa’s new state department liaison and self-proclaimed King of Useless White Boys. With Ross serving as narrator, comic relief, audience POV character and exposition monkey, Priest took a different tack with the title character.

He made Black Panther effortless, dangerous and scary, and T’Challa a ruthless, brilliant schemer with the world’s finest poker face, an enigma one step withdrawn from the reader thanks to the Ross-focused storytelling. He also dug into the real implications (or as real as you can get in a fictional superhero universe) of the politically active King of a nation choosing to wear tights and play superhero, and the international politics of the Marvel Universe. All while Everett K. Ross flippantly monologued about the oddness of superheroes and explained T’Challa’s labyrinthine plots to us.

And seriously, labyrinthine is not hyperbole. I was in my mid-to-late teens when this comic came out, and re-reading it at the ancient age of thirty, I now realise how little of it I understood, especially in the latter, really confusing storylines. The out-of-sequence storytelling in the opening two or three years didn’t help matters, nor did reading it in twenty-two page monthly chunks.

Ironically, comics have milked death beyond death

Black Panther #14 cover by Sal Velluto

All those things probably contributed to the constantly middling sales on Black Panther, but reading back now, I’m glad Priest stuck to his guns, as it’s great. A uniquely idiosyncratic, smart take on a genre that really has been milked to death and back again. People talk about adult comics as the ones with tits and blood, but this is adult in the sense that it can be denser than a lot of political thrillers. In many ways ahead of its time, considering how much reading comics in collected edition format has exploded in the 2000s, not to mention recent industry moves to diversify a little from the white male superhero demo.

I’ve focused on the writing as that’s my area of interest, but I would be a prick not to mention the artwork – especially the gorgeous painted art by Mark Texeira and Joe Jusko in early issues and the reliably beautiful, clear, emotive work by Sal Velluto after that.

Sadly, Priest’s Black Panther had the poor fortune to be published just before collected editions of everything became standard practice, so it’s not available through many venues – except the afore-mentioned Marvel Unlimited, which has it free and easy, but for some reason it’s not on Comixology yet. Well, they have one issue, but it’s a midstoryline episode published because it crosses over with Deadpool, and would be utterly incomprehensible to a new reader.

Indeed, the series as a whole is quite dense on Marvel Universe guest stars at times. Still, considering we now live in a world where everyone in the geekosphere knows roughly who the Avengers are, it’s worth a go if you can find it and fancy a good, different superhero read.

Post-Panther Notation

Black Panther (Kasper Cole version) by Dan Fraga

The above is talking about the bulk of the Black Panther series by Priest, specifically issues #1-49. After that, other things happened…

  • With #50, the series underwent radical retooling – Priest stayed on as writer, but New York cop Kasper Cole took over as Black Panther after finding a costume abandoned in an alleyway. Cole’s adventures never hit the dizzy joyous heights of the best Priest/T’Challa/Ross stories, but they’re good, engaging super-crime stuff.
  • Alas, the Kasper Cole revamp was not enough to get sales up, and the book ended with #62. Which is about fifty more issues than a low-selling book gets nowadays.
  • Proving that point, Priest and artist Joe Bennett launched an ensemble book called The Crew partly spinning out of Black Panther, featuring Kasper Cole teaming up with a few other characters. It lasted seven issues, and that’s a shame, as it was excellent. Also available on Marvel Unlimited, happily.
  • Priest himself hasn’t done much in comics since the early 2000s, but seems to be dipping his toe back into the water at the moment, with an upcoming Quantum & Woody sequel mini-series and a short story in a recent Deadpool anthology issue. My fingers are predictably crossed that this leads to more – and not necessarily on existing superhero characters, I’d be just as up for a new property for a smaller company.
  • If you want more in-depth (and at times brutally honest) essays on Panther from the author himself, there’s a few on his website.

More blognotes may follow if I want to spotlight anything good on Marvel Unlimited. Or I might just plough through endless old Avengers and X-Men issues rather than taking the time to write about them. Let’s wait and see!

Filed Under: Comic Reviews Tagged With: black panther, christopher priest, comics, dan fraga, homage, mark texeira, marvel, marvel comics, marvel unlimited, my influences, sal velluto, stories, wakanda

Primary Sidebar

AND IT SNOWED now on Kickstarter!
Moonframe
FREE COMICS!
HOBSON & CHOI

Monthly newsletter!

Includes project updates, reviews and preview art! Plus a bonus PDF of my Comedy & Errors comic anthology!

Your data will be used for no purpose other than the above. We use MailChimp as our marketing automation platform. By clicking to submit this form, you acknowledge that the information you provide will be transferred to MailChimp for processing in accordance with their Privacy Policy and Terms.

Find stuff!

Browse by category!

  • Buy My Work (36)
  • Guest Posts (1)
  • LifeBlogging (22)
  • Reviews (50)
    • Book Reviews (18)
    • Comic Reviews (12)
    • Film Reviews (8)
    • Music Reviews (6)
    • TV Reviews (10)
  • Writing (119)
    • Comics (14)
    • Haiku (4)
    • Hobson & Choi (7)
    • Podcast Fiction (33)
    • Short Fiction (61)
  • Writing About Writing (95)

Go back in time!

Footer

  • E-mail
  • Facebook
  • Instagram
  • Twitter

Copyright © 2023 Nick Bryan on the Foodie Pro Theme