With the subtitle, “Prelude to the Wedding of the Century,” I was not expecting this to be a teen romance. But here we are.
If you’re a huge fan of Storm or T’Challa, you may find this tale rewarding. It tells of Storm’s pre-teen/teen years as a thief in (I think an unnamed) African country, right after she fled Cairo. One of the issue summaries says she is on “the streets of Africa,” which in my view is a big problem. Africa is not a city. It’s not a state. It’s not even a country. It’s a f—cking continent.
Anyway, through flashbacks and overdub narration, we are shown her early experiences, how she lost her parents (they were killed during a war), how she met teen T’Challa, who saved her from being raped by a big, mean white guy.
Gross.
The two kids crush on each other. T’Challa teaches her some karate moves, etc. etc. There are clear callbacks to prior stories (notably Marvel Team-Up #100, which showed Black Panther and Storm’s first meeting with a lot less detail than what we get here).
I’ll confess that these kinds of stories just aren’t my thing. The stakes feel very low and nothing really new or informative is revealed. At the same time, if you want a little more texture or content around known facts about Ororo’s childhood, it’s not badly executive. Just my personal bias to not dig these kinds of “young hero” stories that don’t move the needle on the overall character.
\Ororo and T’challa’s first meeting, as told in Marvel Team-up (1st series) #100.
While it isn’t said outright, the protest march in New York seems to refer to mutants. Rather strange, as mutants weren’t really a well-known phenomenon in the Marvel universe until the X-Men fought Magneto in X-Men (1st series) #1.
Also one of the men refers to Thor, but the Avengers shouldn’t yet exist at the time of the story.
Ororo’s pendant seems to be the stone given to her by her mother (see X-treme X-Men #10), though she does seem to gather rather many red jewels in her life.