The subject of today's Marvel Press Conference, which featured writers Reginald Hudlin and Eric Jerome Dickey, was the impending wedding between two key Marvel characters, Storm from the X-Men and King T'Challa from the Black Panther.  The build-up to the wedding, which will take place in July in Black Panther #18, begins in February with the debut of a six-issue limited Storm series written by best-selling novelist Eric Jerome Dickey (see 'Marvel Announces Three Projects With Best-Selling Authors'), and continues in March in Black Panther #14, which is written by Reginald Hudlin, who is also in charge of programming for the BET cable channel.  Then in May comes Marvel Milestones: Black Panther and Storm, which collects Marvel Team-Up #100, a Chris Claremont/John Byrne collaboration that provided inspiration for the entire Storm/Black Panther affair, and Black Panther Vol. 2 #26 from 2000.  Claremont returns to the storyline he helped set in motion in June with an Uncanny X-Men Annual #1, which was described as 'an all-new wedding tie-in focusing on Storm's past.'

Marvel plans to generate considerable media coverage for wedding, and with Hudlin and Dickey's standing in the African-American community, Marvel hopes to generate additional interest in the project outside of the normal comic book market.  Marvel's David Gabriel noted plans to collect the wedding saga in a hardcover book, which Marvel could market to African-American bookstores, which greatly outnumber black-owned comic book shops, although Reginald Hudlin noted that fans on his Website had started to put together a list of black-owned comic stores.  Of course the appearance of Storm in the X3 movie, which opens over the Memorial Day weekend, should also help to keep the character in the public eye.