Dear age 40,
I win.
Sincerely,
Ta-Nehisi
— Ta-Nehisi Coates (@tanehisicoates) September 29, 2015
While I was on involuntary hiatus, I didn’t get to share the news about Ta-Nehisi Coates’ new sideline as a Marvel comics writer. From the Washington Post:
… Coates is slated to write a new Black Panther series beginning this spring, Marvel announced…
The year-long story line is called “A Nation Under Our Feet,” after the Pulitzer Prize-winning book about black political struggles in the rural South. With a narrative centered around revolution, terrorism and heroism, the series will embody the intersection of several of Coates’s preoccupations, including a comic-books fandom that he has nursed since he was a child…
Black Panther debuted in a volume of “Fantastic Four” in July 1966, actually preceding the founding of the Black Panther Party that same year. But in many ways, he shouldered the gauntlet raised by the radical black nationalist group: the Black Panther (whose given name is T’Challa) hails from the fictional African nation of Wakanda, to which he returns during the height of a revolution.
The son of a onetime Black Panther member, Coates is familiar with political unrest, at least when it comes to literary subject matter…
Vulture also reprinted a long interview from April: “Ta-Nehisi Coates Unpacks the Way Comics Have Conquered the World“.
Last weekend, the very British, very establishment Financial Times gave TNC its “Lunch with the FT” treatment…
Paris has its own problem of racial segregation, so when I arrive at the restaurant 15 minutes early and spot across the room a tall black man already hanging his coat over a chair, I know at once: this must be the American writer Ta-Nehisi Coates. Black people are scarce in upmarket Parisian restaurants.