An interview with @tanehisicoates about his Black Panther comic: https://t.co/Nw0WEwi3yA pic.twitter.com/V4XuFqa50r
— New Republic (@NewRepublic) April 5, 2016
I was planning to save this for Sunday afternoon, but now Adam’s got you all on tenterhooks, so… From Jonathan Gray’s TNR article:
Fifty years ago, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby changed the face of comics when they introduced the first superhero of African descent, the Black Panther, in Fantastic Four #52. As the hereditary ruler and protector of the fictional African nation of Wakanda, the Black Panther is as accomplished a scientist as he is a strategist.Within the cloistered world of comics he’s long been a fan favorite—featuring, for example, in the Avengers, the Fantastic Four, alongside Daredevil, and as a central member of Marvel’s Illuminati—even if he’s had a lower profile than some of Marvel’s other heroes. This promises to change in 2016, thanks to the efforts of two Howard University alumni: Chadwick Boseman who plays the Black Panther this summer in Marvel’s latest blockbuster, Captain America: Civil War; meanwhile, Ta-Nehisi Coates—2015 National Book Award winner and MacArthur fellow—scripts a new comic with a dramatic character arc for the character that debuts on April 6. Pre-orders for the first issue of Coates’s Black Panther have already exceeded 300,000 copies at various retailers, a remarkable feat given that 50,000 preorders for a new comic represents a smashing success. (Top selling comics like Ms. Marvel and The Walking Dead move around 100,000 physical copies monthly.) One of the most celebrated writers and cultural critics of his generation, Coates’s work on Black Panther promises to energize the field while attracting fans old and new to the character; it’s the most anticipated comic debut since Chris Claremont and Jim Lee’s X-Men #1 in 1991. I called across the pond to Paris to speak with Coates, my old classmate at Howard, and chat about all things Black Panther…
JWG: In your first memoir, The Beautiful Struggle, you talk about “an entire shadow canon, a tradition of writers who grabbed the pen, not out of leisure but to break the chain.” How does your work on Black Panther fit into this tradition?
TNC: This is why I included the Henry Dumas poem [in issue #3]. I wanted to incorporate the poets from the Black Arts Movement into the canon of comics. Those are the people who taught how to write. Those were the writers who made space in their poetry to explore questions of democracy and self-determination. But I also was inspired by Avengers #57, “Behold the Vision,” which ends with Shelly’s “Ozymandias.” I just figured if they could fold British literature into a comic I could include African American literature in mine. That’s also the inspiration behind Changamine (a bookish political philosopher who is the intellectual leader of those Wakandans opposed to hereditary rule). This tradition informs us, and I wanted to represent that…
Also, as someone whose history as a comix phan occurred during the all-too-brief feminist flowering of the early 1970s, I really liked Coates’ notes in the Atlantic on “The Feminists of Wakanda”:
… [T]here’s been an ongoing conversation about how women appear in comic books (and women who create comic books) for some time. With the advent of social media it’s gotten harder to ignore that debate. You don’t really have to be a admitted feminist to know what it means to be “fridged.” And whether you agree with it or not, a comic book fan has to be willfully blind to not be aware of the critique of how women’s bodies have been presented in the form.
Excellent Read: Ta-Nehisi Coates on His Marvel <em>Black Panther</em>Post + Comments (49)