Part of 2024’s relaunch of Marvel’s Ultimate Universe, a reboot of Black Panther in an alternate universe makes a lot of sense on paper. The hero has become a household name thanks to the 2018 movie, which effectively showcased the strength of the character in a modern context. There is an opportunity to present Black Panther stories from a clean slate, divorced from the Kirby-Lee originated continuity, which many of their other creations would not benefit from as much. Great power and great responsibility are core to classic Marvel books, but applying the motto to modern colonialism is something the originators never quite proved able or willing to tackle.
The Marvel Graphic Novel line of comics started in 1982 and ran until 1993. The oversized, standalone graphic novels were a mixture of familiar company characters and creator owned experiments, presented in a higher quality format than the typical comic of the time. The collection includes at least seventy five titles, with only the first twenty being officially numbered by Marvel. Ranging from beloved, lauded graphic novels to some of the most obscure books put out by the publisher, the collection is one of their most varied in terms of genre, art, and story. This first iteration of our rankings of the MGN books includes the initial twenty titles.
At the beginning of the year, Split Ticket, a site dedicated to political data analysis, released its Wins Above Replacement (WAR) models for the 2024 US elections. Self-described as a candidate quality assessment, the goal of the score is to identify the politicians who perform at a higher level in elections when compared to a generic alternative While the WAR score may accurately reflect the candidates who overperformed in a specific election, misguided attempts to replicate successful strategies without considering context are bound to lose.
