I’ve always thought the living mummy Panya was one of the Hellboyverse’s most pointless creations. Introduced in the BPRD’s Hell on Earth arc, she sits in headquarters, gives occasional advice and always felt like there’s a big reveal in the wings … but it never happened. Instead she’s just sort of there.
PANYA by Mike Mignola, Chris Roberson and Christopher Mitten (who did the cover) retells her origins in ancient Egypt. As a girl in the reign of Akhenaten, she’s intrigued by legends of Gods of Light battling Gods of Darkness, never mind the kingdom is now monotheist. Soon, of course, she’s involved with the beings behind the legend … but the story ends up murky and confused and the modern-day epilog doesn’t make her any more interesting.
My friends Roger and Janet Carden of the Halfling and Spaceman podcasts also ran the currently quiescent Crimson Streets online magazine. Crimson Streets: The Raven is the second in a series of anthologies (I was in the first) from the magazine which mashes up hardboiled pulp and specfic pulp. The eponymous story deals with a vigilante, the Raven, who fakes supernatural stunts as part of his image; other stories deal with a disgruntled corpse lying in its coffin, a hardboiled elementary-school detective and ninja nuns dealing out justice (for god’s sake, don’t tell them you masturbate!). I’ll be getting to the other anthologies before long.
JESUS & JUSTICE: Evangelicals, Race & American Politics by Peter Goodwin Heltzel is a look at the struggle between evangelical Christianity’s dark side — it’s long history supporting Jim Crow and slavery — and the push for equality from Martin Luther King and others. J. Carl Henry, the editor of Christianity Today, opposed segregation, for example, but believed the solution lay in spiritual awakening of individuals, not political action. This turned out to be more inside baseball on the details and beliefs than I wanted (which doesn’t make this a bad book, just not right for me). And coming out in 2009, Heltzel is optimistic liberal evangelism has finally attained a critical mass, a hope that hasn’t aged well in the age of Trump (though some evangelicals are still solidly on the liberal side).
SHURI: The Search for the Black Panther by Nnedi Okorafor and Leonardo Romero has Shuri forced to step into the Black Panther role after T’Challa vanishes in the depth of space. Shuri’s not thrilled — she’s done it before and it didn’t go well — but there’s a cabal of African women leaders pushing her, an energy-eating space bug to fight, black supervillain Moses Magnum visiting Africa and of course, Groot. The space bug doesn’t work for me at all (it gets more annoying in V2) but Okorafor’s the rare novelist who can do good comics work (so many of them fail).
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