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Cover of Marvel Comics’ latest edition of Black Panther, penned by sociopolitical writer Ta-Nehisi Coates
Marvel Comics
Last week the first issue of Marvel’s new Black Panther comic broke sales records and sold 300,000 issues in the first printing. Meaning that a comic book about a black superhero sold more copies than the daily circulation of the Baltimore Sun, Washington Times or Boston Globe. Why? It probably has a lot to do with who’s writing it. This latest incarnation of Black Panther is penned by critically acclaimed writer Ta-Nehisi Coates.
Best known for his book Between the World and Me, as well as his various writings for The Atlantic, Coates has transformed America’s conversations about race, culture and politics. So how does a journalist and culture writer turn the adventures of a superhero African king into the must-read book of the year? The Root sat down to interview him and find out.
First, who is the Black Panther? Named T’Challa, he is a genius who has been part of Marvel’s Avengers team and has ruled his own African nation as a king. He’s got superhuman strength and enhanced senses and is the leader of Wakanda, an African nation that just happens to be the most powerful, technologically advanced nation on the planet. And even though he turns 50 this year (the Black Panther debuted in Fantastic Four No. 52 way back in 1966) and is the first black superhero from Marvel Comics, there’s still a lot about this superhero that comic book fans and casual readers don’t know. And that’s what Coates wants to tap into.
“At the center of that is T’Challa. What I want more than anything is to get inside his head,” Coates says. “I want to know what he was thinking. I want to cut past the mystique. And get ahold on the internal mechanisms of the character.”
Even though he’s new to writing for comics, Coates isn’t new to writing. His Atlantic piece on the case for reparations was one of the most read articles in America in 2015. His commentaries on race and American culture will be pored over by academics, hipsters and social critics for years. But when it comes to writing the Black Panther comic for Marvel, he seems less intent on writing “a great black hero” and more about giving a black character the depth and introspection that black people seldom get in any pop-culture genre.
“I’m not so interested in what he [Black Panther] represents. I want to know how he feels. And how he looks at the world,” Coates says.
As a kid collecting comics in the late 1980s and ’90s, I never liked Black Panther. I thought he was a lame token tossed to us black comic readers to fill a quota. It wasn’t until a new series in the late ’90s that I found a sincere love of the character and what he meant to comics as a whole. Coates, too, didn’t care much for the Panther when he was a kid buying comics in the ’80s, but for entirely different reasons from mine.
“He wasn’t lame,” says Coates. “There wasn’t much to grab onto. There wasn’t anything really complicated or conflicted.
“I liked Spider-Man—being able to lift 10 tons, having the proportional strength of a spider—but that didn’t necessarily make his life great. Sometimes it made it worse. And Storm—Storm lost her powers. How is she gonna manage that? But she led the X-Men for years.
“T’Challa can’t be God. Even the gods are not gods in Marvel. Even Thor isn’t all moral, always correct. You have to have some texture there. And that’s the sort of attraction I have,” Coates says.
There isn’t much drama in reading about a hero who always wins, is always right and is always two steps ahead. Coates is drawn to complex, conflicted characters and wants to bring that same sense of internal and external conflict to his run on the king of Wakanda.
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