SPOILER WARNING: The following article contains major spoilers for Black Panther #2 by Ta-Nehisi Coates, Daniel Acuña and Joe Sabino, on sale now.


The current “Intergalactic Empire of Wakanda” arc of Black Panther is a story that asks of its readers to trust it; Ta-Nehisi Coates built up a lot of goodwill with “A Nation Under Our Feet” and “Avengers of the New World,” and this current arc is bigger, braver and bolder.

Set in the middle of a deep space war, we can’t be sure that the T’Challa we’re following is “our” T’Challa, if it’s set in the future, or an alternate universe, or a simulation. But whatever the truth may be, Black Panther #2 may have unveiled the missing piece of the puzzle as the rebel army manages to steal a powerful artifact which may hold the answers they — and the readers — need. What's more, it's something that has its origins in some of the most classic X-Men stories.

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Marooned

The first issue of this new volume of Black Panther was disorientating, and intentionally so, but Black Panther #2 allows Coates, Acuña and Sabino to pull back a little bit to a more traditional storytelling structure which allows us to follow T’Challa, Nakia and M’Baku’s rebel assault on the Wakandan empire. It’s important to remember that while we use these names, they may not be the characters that we know; as former slaves of the Wakandan empire, they were all mindwiped and nameless, and in joining the rebellion against the empire, they were granted names of courageous Wakandans from the past.

Right now, the best bet is that the story we’re following in the pages of Wakanda is set roughly in 4018. It’s established that the Intergalactic Empire of Wakanda has existed for two thousand years, but we know that Wakanda only began to broach the notion of deep space travel during Jonathan Hickman’s run on New Avengers. It requires a fair amount of speculation and filling in the gaps, but it seems that over the course of a number of centuries, the Wakandan name and culture was infiltrated and absorbed by less noble forces, becoming a tyrannical force within the Marvel Universe.

The backmatter for Black Panther #2 makes mention of a “Wakanda Prime” and that Nakia is part of a sect of Wakandans who claim to originate somewhere across the stars on a world by that name, which is most likely what the intergalactic Wakandans refer to Earth as. It’s also worth noting that not all of the intergalactic Wakandans are human; the chief of the rebel Maroons is an amphibious woman named after T’Challa’s birth mother N’Yami, and her chief intelligence officer Taku is a Rigellian named for T’Challa’s adviser, Taku.

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While it seems that most of the Maroons are named after modern era Wakandans, there are signs that point to this T’Challa being our T’Challa, or at least being able to access his memories in some way. He’s shown having some vague recollection of his past before he was a slave and they involve a woman with white hair telling him to come back to her; with the obvious assumption being that this is Ororo Munroe aka Storm, T’Challa’s ex-wife with whom he’d recently rekindled his relationship. How our T’Challa wound up in this far flung space adventure is still a mystery, but one that might be solved with the help of the recently recovered M’Kraan Shard.

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Crystal Visions

The M’Kraan Shard is just a piece of the M’Kraan Crystal, one of the most powerful artifacts in the Marvel Universe. Introduced by Chris Claremont and Dave Cockrum in the pages of 1977’s X-Men #107, the M’Kraan Crystal is said to be as old as the Marvel Universe itself, formed on the very first planet to exist. While not a Shi’Ar artifact in origin, the M’Kraan Crystal is the only surviving remnant of that first world and the Shi’Ar took it upon themselves to safeguard it, lest its terrible power bring an end to the universe. In its first appearance, it was wielded by the mad Emperor D’Ken in an attempt to destroy all of reality and it takes the full power of the Phoenix Force to heal it.

The M’Kraan Crystal is often referred to as a The Nexus of All Realities, which means it’s an access point to the entire Marvel Multiverse, much like the Florida everglades guarded by Man-Thing which share that title. Inside the Crystal itself is a shining city which houses a neutron galaxy, which contains the dividing line between matter and antimatter. The main thing you should be taking away from this is that it’s very important to keep the M’Kraan Crystal whole and intact, and the fact that the Intergalactic Empire of Wakanda was harboring a shard of the crystal is cause of concern.

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If the M’Kraan Crystal has been split into shards, then that might explain why certain aspects of the current reality presented in Black Panther don’t seem quite right and why it seems similar in some regards to what we know of Wakanda while being vastly different in other ways. If the M’Kraan Crystal has been split into shards then it’s likely that reality itself has been splintered in some way, which could explain how the T’Challa from this story is our T’Challa from the Prime Marvel Universe, or at least how they seem to share some sort of link across two thousand years.

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Given the M’Kraan Crystal’s function as a nexus point for the multiverse, it could be something as simple as a completely separate alternate reality, but it’s likely to be more complex than that; it could be a vision granted to T’Challa in the present of what would become of his Intergalactic Empire of Wakanda, or it could represent some sort of psychic link connecting all the T’Challas of the multiverse. Whatever the case may be, Ta-Nehisi Coates and Daniel Acuña are truly going as cosmic as they can with The Intergalactic Empire of Wakanda, and with the introduction of one of the most powerful cosmic artifacts this side of the Infinity Gauntlet, the stakes have been raised just about as high as they can possible go.