Black Panther is Back

It’s April and the new Black Panther comic written by acclaimed author Ta-Nehisi Coates is here. The comic comes out weeks before we will finally see the live action King of Wakanda appear in Captain America’s Civil War.

Coates breaks down his thoughts and methods for creating the 11 part series for The Atlantic. The full article can be read here. Nonetheless check out a portion below in addition to a short video from Coates.

“Some of the best days of my life were spent poring over the back issues of The Uncanny X-Men and The Amazing Spider-Man. As a child of the crack-riddled West Baltimore of the 1980s, I found the tales of comic books to be an escape, another reality where, very often, the weak and mocked could transform their fallibility into fantastic power. That is the premise behind the wimpy Steve Rogers mutating into Captain America, behind the nerdy Bruce Banner needing only to grow angry to make his enemies take flight, behind the bespectacled Peter Parker being transfigured by a banal spider bite into something more.​

But comic books provided something beyond escapism. Indeed, aside from hip-hop and Dungeons & Dragons, comics were my earliest influences. In the way that past writers had been shaped by the canon of Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Wharton, I was formed by the canon of Claremont, DeFalco, and Simonson. Some of this was personal. All of the comics I loved made use of two seemingly dueling forces—fantastic grandiosity and ruthless efficiency”
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Read the whole post here.