Everett K. Ross looks like a cross between Doogie Howser and Alex Keaton, and sounds like a cross between Chandler Bing and Allen Mockery. He is the narrator of the criminally overlooked series Black Panther, written by Christopher Priest (not to be confused with the British author of the same name), the first five issues of which have been collected into a trade paperback called The Client.

"The client" is how Ross refers to King T'Challa of Wakanda, better known as the Black Panther. The populace assumes him to be a superhero. He isn't. His distinctive black kitty suit is not a superhero costume but the ceremonial garb of the chieftain of the Panther Clan. And while he does occasionally punch baddies in the mouth, he's more inclined to defeat the villains through such tactics as nationalizing foreign assets and pegging the currency to the US dollar. Not the sort of thing you tend to see on Superfriends. No, T'Challa is no superhero but rather the king of a sovereign nation, steeped in tribalism but possessing vast mineral wealth that has spawned one of the most advanced cities in the world. This nation is not like America. American superheroes tend not to have concubines, especially not concubines that are six feet tall, equipped with a dazzling array of martial arts moves, and still just a wee bit underage. (Ross: "They were kind of wives-in-training, but the client limited that training to battles with sharp objects. I, of course, would have been UNDER a jail someplace.") American superheroes tend not to take to the floor of the UN to accuse the CIA of plotting a coup d'état. And American superheroes tend not to keep their mouths shut while they're doing their thing. You will hear no witty banter from the Black Panther.

But you'll hear plenty from Ross, and it's the dynamic between the two that drives the series. This is not a buddy flick — the two are rarely on-panel together. Rather, the Panther has one epic geopolitically-tinged adventure after another, which Ross, the low-level US State Department official assigned to keep tabs on him, delivers running commentary on while relating the story to his superiors. The Client, collecting issues #1-5 of the title, is the story of their first meeting. T'Challa comes to America to investigate a scandal involving a charity the Wakandan consulate has been funding. He brings, like, everybody: concubines, advisors, technicians, a hundred people. Ross is assigned to pick them up. He takes his Miata. Things go downhill from there and a few hours later he's mud wrestling chicks in bikinis. They steal his pants. Luckily, he gets a new pair. From Satan. And this is just the beginning.

How can anyone not LOVE this? It's an absolutely wild story with hilarious narration, made all the more entertaining by Ross's non-chronological storytelling — this is a Priest plot by Priest himself, so we don't go from Point A to Point B but from Point J to Point Q via Points E, X and M. What's more, this collection is drawn from Mark Texeira's run on the title, so the art is superb: it's done using an innovative technique where Texeira lays down the tones in black and white and then color is added via computer, so each panel ends up looking not quite like a painting, not quite like a lithograph, but like something ever so slightly else. (This proved too involved to sustain over a long period of time, and Texeira left disappointingly quickly; regular painters were brought in to take up the slack, but before long the title reverted to decent but non-noteworthy mainstream comics art.) I've been trying to get people to hunt down these five issues from the day the first one came out; I was very pleased to hear that it was going to be collected and so instead of telling people to poke through back-issue bins I could simply tell them, "Buy this book." So here goes. Buy this book.

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