Black Panther: The Intergalactic Empire of Wakanda (also referred to as Black Panther volume 7) is a comic book from Marvel Comics starring T'Challa, the eponymous Black Panther. The series is written by Ta-Nehisi Coates and Daniel Acuna provides most of the art.
Coates also wrote the previous Black Panther series, which ended the month before The Intergalactic Empire of Wakanda launched, and it's essentially a Sequel Series containing the second half of a a single long run, but relaunched and renumbered to accompany the new arc.
However, the narrative doesn't continue directly from the previous issue - instead, the Intergalactic Empire of Wakanda story begins with an amnesiac T’Challa, a slave for the titular Empire which has somehow expanded across many regions of space in modern day. He is quickly rescued by the resistance and, through visions of who he used to be, slowly begins to remember who he is.
The series was originally divided into four distinct books, each with their own arc title (Many Thousands Gone, The Gathering of My Name, Two Thousand Seasons and Wakanda Unbound), but these names were not used to promote the four collected editions.
Marvel opted to cancel the comic when Coates left at the end of the arc, rather than continuing the same series with a new creative team.
The first issue was released on May 23, 2018. The last issue was released on May 26, 2021.
Black Panther: The Intergalactic Empire of Wakanda provides examples of the following tropes:
- Advanced Ancient Humans: Justified as the humans in question were present day Wakandans who were time-displaced thousands of years.
- Afrofuturism: One of the most notable examples in pop culture with the added flavor of being cranked up. It’s Wakanda with 2000 years of advancement in space.
- Big Bad: Emperor N'Jadaka, who is bonded to a symbiote. When he dies, the symbiote itself becomes the main villain.
- Canon Immigrant: The story introduces characters who are closer to their movie counterparts such as Nakia and M’Baku, both of whom are villains in the comics, and the latter of which is dead.
- The Empire: They spent 2000 years conquering and enslaving a large amount of the galaxy.
- Monochrome Casting: Black Panther summons heroes from all around the Marvel universe for the final battle... but only black heroes.
- Named After Somebody Famous: An in-universe version. Many of the people in the Empire and the resistance have the same names as people from T’Challa’s past (which is also their empire's own distant past), including both friends and foes. N'Jadaka, the emperor, shares Erik Killmonger’s true name. His counsellor is named Achebe. The two resistance fighters are named Nakia and M’Baku, and the resistance leader (who isn’t even human) has the same name as T’Challa’s mother.
- Recycled Title: The Black Panther title has been used for six previous comic books starring T'Challa. As the whole 2018 series is a single arc, collected editions added the arc name, "The Intergalactic Empire of Wakanda", as a subtitle to disambiguate it.
- Retronym: As Black Panther is a Recycled Title and used for almost all of T'Challa's solo series, once this series was reprinted it became Black Panther: The Intergalactic Empire of Wakanda to disambiguate it.
- Trapped in the Past: The Empire turns out to be descended from the Wakandan space team that T’Challa sent out to explore who got displaced 2000 years. They certainly made the most of it.
- Unperson: The Nameless are slaves who have been stripped of their memories and forced to work in the Vibranium mines. At the beginning of the story, T’Challa has been made one of these. M’Baku was also a Nameless at one point.
- Unwitting Instigator of Doom: T'Challa had no idea what would happen when he sent a team into space to investigate the origins of the Vibranium meteorite.
