His introduction was deliberately paced.

[thanekos]

It came in its turn in the setup of the Black Panther's post-Shadowland status quo.

It began with him describing where he lived and continued with his family.

Then it got into what he did to make his money, and how he now had the opportunity to move up the ladder.

The ladder was New York's criminal hierarchy.





(It's safe to say he probably doesn't care much for the Tracksuit Draculas.)



(How much his syntax's part of his branding's never specified.)



(The limitation of his power and his use of it working around that's a nice touch.

Oh yes, pagecount- 2 and 3/5ths out of 22.)

Comments

[laughing_tree]

It's interesting how some stuff just works better in one medium than another. I can't be sure, but I suspect I'd find a scene like this cheesy or corny if I saw it in live action. I can't place why I'd feel that way, but it's how I almost inevitably feel about these kinds of "scary bad guy punishes minion" scenes when I see them on TV or film. Yet do it as a comic, and it works just fine.

On a completely different not, this *is* an interesting superpower, but it coming from a super-soldier serum knockoff doesn't really work for me. It's too out-there as an ability for that. It feels... completely arbitrary in a counter-intuitive way, if that makes sense? Like a radioactive spider bite giving someone magnetism.

[akodo_rokku]

Well there's *a* super-soldier serum and there's *THE* Super-Soldier Serum. A lot of characters have come from trying to replicate or compete with Project: Rebirth after all, with all kinds of different powers.

[laughing_tree]

Sure, but this particular one actually did succeed in giving the guy Steve Roger's abilities. That combination of such similarity with something so out-of-left-field and different makes it feel too arbitrary, at least for me.

[akodo_rokku]

It gave him strength, which isn't the sum total of what Steve Rogers got. There have been a LOT of successful super strength methods in Marvel.

And really, aren't unexpected results the heart of "SCIENCE!"?

[laughing_tree]

I took his comment to be shorthand for "I basically have Steve Roger's physical abilities" since strength's the most salient of those abilities anyway. But regardless, even if that's not the case, this seems to not just be any super-strength attempt but a deliberate super-soldier serum replica. And it somehow got really close yet at the same time so far off it resulted in a completely unrelated power several rungs higher on the suspension of disbelief ladder. Again, it's like if the Jackal tried to duplicate Spider-Man's powers and wound up with a magnetic guy. There's no throughline.

And I'm probably making it sound like a bigger deal than it is for me, the way I'm writing so much about it. It was just a moment of "Eh, kinda forced" when I read it.