• Black Panther: The Young Prince
• written by Ronald L. Smith
• published by Marvel Press (2018)

This was when T’Challa felt most alive, in the woods with his best friend, finding adventure and escaping his royal duties. Out here, he wasn’t a prince. He was just a kid.

If you haven’t been paying attention, you might have missed that Marvel Press (an imprint of the massive Disney Book Group) has been putting out some truly excellent YA novels (with some spectacular authors) starring the Marvel superheroes.

We covered Christopher Golden’s Runaways here, and the lineup also includes Jason Reynolds on Miles Morales, Eoin Colfer on Iron Man, Shannon Hale on Squirrel Girl, and Margaret Stohl on Black Widow. And one of the most recent is Ronald L. Smith’s look back at Black Panther’s tween adventures in The Young Prince.

With the film coming to digital and Blu-ray in a few weeks, now’s a perfect time to catch up on your Wakandan lore and dig into the early days of T’Challa and Black Panther.

Fans of the Marvel Cinematic Universe may want to know if these books fit into the canon unfolding on screen of it hey’re more tied to the comic book versions of the characters. The truth is, for The Young Prince, at least, it doesn’t really matter.

The book takes place when T’Challa is just 12 years old, and only the very beginning is set in Wakanda. The situation in Wakanda is tense – tense enough that even young T’Challa knows something bad is on the horizon. It’s so unsettled, in fact, that his father – the king, T’Chaka – sends him to the United States with the purpose of keeping him safe.

So, fairly quickly, we follow T’Challa and his best friend M’Baku to Chicago, where they will attend South Side Middle School posing as exchange students (i.e., NOT royalty).

Of course, not everything goes according to plan. Strange things start happening around school. The school bully turns out to be a lot more sinister than he first appears. T’Challa and M’Baku find themselves on opposite sides of a widening gulf. T’Challa must weigh the consequences of revealing his Wakandan heritage and tech to his friends. And he must also decide if he’s ready to wear the mantle of Black Panther to fix the problems plaguing him in this strange land.

The book is unique in that it tells a superhero story without much in the way of superheroics. T’Challa isn’t really Black Panther yet; he’s just a kid. He’s more of an amateur detective with advanced tech. Change the characters’ names, and this could easily be a standalone, original novel not tied to an established Marvel franchise.

That’s not a criticism by any means. It’s refreshing to read a story set in a superheroic universe that doesn’t rely on familiar tropes and cheap solutions to real problems. To solve his problem with Gemini Jones, the school bully, T’Challa can’t just rely on a superpower. That not only makes him more relateable but also makes the story as a whole more grounded and realistic.

The Young Prince is definitely recommended for young fans of Black Panther and the ever-expanding Marvel universe.

(Disclosure: Marvel Press provided me with a review copy of this book. All opinions remain my own.)