Luke Cage and the Year Marvel Finally Reckoned with Its Black Audience

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    He could have been blue—I wouldn’t have cared one lick,” Marvel TV chief Jeph Loeb says of hiring Cheo Hodari Coker, the African-American show-runner of Netflix’s latest superhero show, Luke Cage.But Coker, and a number of Marvel fans, see things differently. “I’m not one of these people that says, ‘Oh, Luke Cage happens to be black,’” Coker told Vanity Fair. “No, he’s black all day because I’m black all day. There’s just no way around that.”

    Coker is just one of several new black creators to join the print, TV, and film divisions at Marvel, one of the world’s most influential entertainment companies. In the same year, Marvel Comics featured a black man as Captain America and a black woman as Iron Man;Zendaya was cast as Mary Jane Watson in an upcoming big-screen Spider-Man, co-produced by Marvel and Sony; Chadwick Boseman made his feature film debut as Black Panther in Captain America: Civil War; and Mike Colter’s Luke Cage will get 13 hours of story on Netflix beginning this Friday. At a time when the national conversation around race has reached a boiling point, has Marvel recognized, in a way many entertainment companies have not, that black voices matter as much as black dollars?

    Black Panther and Luke Cage can both trace their origins on the page back to the 1960s and 1970s, but both characters were created and, for a long time at least, written by white men.Jamie Broadnax, founder of the popular Black Girl Nerds Web site, tells Vanity Fair, “As much as I hate the word pandering, I think Marvel has had a long history of doing so to bring in black readers and other readers of color. I would always cringe a little bit reading comic books with black characters written by white dudes.”

    The company continues to field critiques for a lack of black representation among its creative staff. David Brothers, a comics critic who has penned lengthy academic articles for marvel.com, remains unimpressed with the race-bending of characters like Iron Man and Captain America. “The marketing screams that it’s progress, but we’ve seen black versions of Iron Man, and even Superman, before,” Brothers said while reserving praise for the recently relaunched Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur, calling it “a better sign of progress, as far as that goes. It's still a riff on an old idea, but that original Devil Dinosaur idea has been fallow long enough that it can become its own thing without the threat of the older, more popular version taking its throne back and forcing the new thing to the sidelines.”

    The conversation shifted dramatically in September of 2015, when Marvel Comics E.I.C.Axel Alonso announced that author and critic Ta-Nehisi Coates would write a newBlack Panther book, with art by Brian Stelfreeze. The resulting book was a critical andcommercial smash. And though Coates wasn’t the first notable black author to tackle Black Panther —Reginald Hudlin wrote the comic from 2005 to 2008, while also serving as the president of BET—his prominence in the subject of racial identity signaled an even more dramatic commitment to the black perspective.

    Coates and Stelfreeze, along with Coker on Luke Cage, writer/director Ryan Coogler on the upcoming Black Panther film, and authors Roxane Gay and Yona Harvey on the Panther comic spin-off World of Wakanda, represent a brave new world. Brothers tellsVanity Fair, “As important as representation on the page or screen is, having representation behind it is paramount. I’ve been a reader of comics since I learned to read, and there are elements of the Luke Cage show that resonate harder than almost any comic I’ve read from Marvel ever has.”
    “The greater the diversity of creators working with a company,” he continues, “the greater the storytelling opportunities that are available to that company. The black experience is vast—basically infinitely so—and no one experience should have primacy over another. They’re all valid.”

    You couldn’t get much more vastly disparate black experiences than those of the Wakandan prince T’Challa and Luke Cage, street-level protector of Harlem. And these characters are coming front and center at a time in America when, thanks to a proliferation of disturbing cell-phone footage finding its way online, a uniquely black point of view is becoming increasingly impossible for even the most disinterested bystander to ignore.

    “The world has been changed by the fact that no matter where you go, there’s a camera and it’s called your phone,” Loeb tells Vanity Fair, referring to the political powder keg sparked by the deaths of Tamir Rice and Michael Brown that helped inspire Season 1 of Luke Cagein early 2015. “Cheo and I sat down and had a very real conversation about what’s going on in our country—the Trayvon Martin case, and Ferguson. Those stories were affecting the world. So of course they were going to affect storytelling.”

    Of all the comic-book heroes to flourish in the Black Lives Matter era, perhaps none is better suited to the movement than Luke—a man who got his powers (as is always the case with these things, a terrible burden as well as a gift) after being falsely imprisoned and subjected to horrible experiments while behind bars. That abuse-of-authority motif is mirrored by Cage’s timely gift: incredible strength and invulnerability. As Coker put it to riotous applause at Comic-Con this summer, “The world is ready for a bulletproof black man.”

    “I could not have predicted that,” Coker says of the way his quote tore through the Internet in GIF and meme form. “As people are talking about the relevance of the show compared to Black Lives Matter, my feeling is that all black art that is consciously black is ultimately about humanizing the black experience, and saying that our lives matter. It goes beyond a hashtag.”

    Coker—who has created an all-punching, all-kicking superhero show brimming with cultural and literary references—names James Baldwin, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Langston Hughes, Lorraine Hansberry, Sonia Sanchez, and Nikki Giovanni as inspirations for learning how to write about being “black in this country” and steeping Luke Cage in the culture of Harlem. “It’s always been about saying that no matter what we’ve gone through, we are people. We matter. We can’t just be swept under the rug. That’s all it’s about.”

    But as many references as there are to the Black Lives Matter movement in Luke Cage—Alfre Woodard’s character drops the phrase itself less than 30 minutes into the first episode—the primary intentional black influence on Luke Cage is actually musical. Coker got his start as a music journalist before writing Notorious—the 2009 biographical film about Chris “Biggie” Wallace. But “even though I’ve got this really brawny, masculine reputation, I’m a Shondaland Thursdays kind of guy,” Coker admits. While putting together his Netflix pitch, he was inspired by the fact that most episodes of Grey’s Anatomy are named after pop songs. Scrolling through his playlists, a nervous Coker got the idea to string several song titles together to find the “thematic arc of a story.”

    In preparing for that pitch, Coker stumbled onto an element that made it to final cut: every single Luke Cage episode is named for a Gang Starr song. And the hip-hop influences extend well beyond titles, to the series’s soundtrack, look, and more. “This show,” he says, “it’s not about using or exploiting hip-hop. It’s about being a part of the culture in a different way, and for a new context.” Coker points out that Luke’s signature hoodie—which is what passes for a superhero’s cape and a cowl in this series—is as much an homage to hip-hop as it is to Trayvon Martin.

    Coker’s commitment to drenching Luke Cage in hip-hop references serves as an unintentional response to one of Marvel’s recent missteps. The company has a long relationship with the hip-hop community, including Wu-Tang Clan members Ghostface Killah, a.k.a. Iron Man, and Method Man, a.k.a. Johnny Blaze—who took their stage names from Tony Stark and Ghost Rider, respectively. In an attempt to pay homage to that history, in 2015, the company released a slew of hip-hop-influenced comic-book covers, modeled after the album imagery of artists including Nas, Jay Z, Dr. Dre, and Eminem.

    As Marvel Comics E.I.C. Axel Alonso told Vanity Fair, “The hip-hop variant covers were a huge success—embraced by comics fans, hip-hop heads, and, most important, the hip-hop artists themselves, who saw this for what it was: an overdue hollerback from one art form to another.”

    A number of comic-book fans, though, rejected the covers. At the time, Brothers wrote, “Axel Alonso said Marvel has been in a long dialogue with rap music, but that isn’t true. It’s a long monologue, from rap to Marvel, with Marvel never really giving back like it should or could.” (Brothers didn’t know at the time that the deal to hire Coates was already in place—though even after the announcement he remains skeptical of the hip-hop variants.)

    What has put hip-hop and comic-book culture in this never-ending feedback loop, beyond the thousands of comics in Method Man’s garage? Coker has a theory that stretches back to his final interview with Biggie Smalls. “He told me the story of how his mother was a Jehovah’s witness,” Coker recalls. “And she always looked at him as being Chris, or Chrisiepoo. She didn’t know anything about what he was doing on the streets as ‘Big Chris.’”

    Smalls, Coker said, lived in fear that his mother would find out about his other identity, and so he stashed his street clothes—“his gold rope, or his more expensive sneakers and the stuff that she didn’t buy him”—on the roof. He’d put them on only to go out. “When he told me that, I immediately thought of the relationship between Aunt May and Peter Parker. As Chris Wallace at home, he’s Peter Parker. In the streets, he’s Spider-Man.” That attitude, Coker says, of having a guarded home life and a larger-than-life public persona, extends to all the rappers he’s interviewed. “Calvin Broadus is different than Snoop Doggy Dog.Jayceon Taylor versus the Game.”

    Spider-Man, for what it’s worth, is the superhero that Coker, Colter, and Chadwick Boseman all tell Vanity Fair was their favorite growing up. Luke Cage and Black Panther existed when they were kids, but it was the scrawny, white Peter Parker from Queens who was Marvel’s biggest star. And inspired, in part, by the 2008 election of Barack Obama, the print Spider-Man got an update in 2011: he became Miles Morales, a half-black, half-Puerto Rican version of the character co-created by legendary comics writer Brian Michael Bendis. But even Bendis underwent scrutiny earlier this year, when he wrote a story in which Morales loudly proclaimed that he didn’t want to be the black Spider-Man—he just wanted to be Spider-Man.

    Referring to the Bendis controversy, Broadnax says, “You can clearly tell this is not what a black person would do or say based on their cultural experience.” Broadnax calls Morales’s dialogue “tone deaf in relation to today’s current events.”

    With Coker leading the writers’ room on Luke Cage, the language of that series rings true for Broadnax and Brothers. It also includes references that might sail right over non-black audiences’ heads. “That was really the most fun part of it, because very seldomly as a black creator do you get to do elements of black culture in a subtle way,” Coker said. That said, he admits he had to wrestle with Marvel a bit—and lost a few battles. “We encourage our storytellers to tell the stories they want to tell,” Loeb said of his amiable squabbles with Coker. “As long as they realize, at some point, reality is going to come into it.”
    “My main thing,” Coker explains, “was just saying, ‘O.K., I know you might be uncomfortable with the use of the N-word. But it’s more offensive telling me that I can’t use it than it is for me to use the word within its proper context, from the standpoint of what it is like to be in this world and eavesdrop on what a conversation would be like with two black people talking about these things in a way that they would talk about it if nobody else is around.” Coker likens the language of the series to the street-level Italian lingo of earlyMartin Scorsese, or the Yiddish-flavored dialect of Woody Allen. “You’re in the deep end of the pool of the culture.”

    Axel Alonso hopes that representation on the page will extend even beyond the black community. He describes how his four-year-old nephew couldn’t sleep after learning that Korean-American teenager Amadeus Cho would soon be the new Hulk: “The very idea that the strongest character in the Marvel Universe could be just like him was mind-blowing.”

    And as black heroes played by Colter, Boseman, and Mackie take center stage, black womenare also becoming more visible in Marvel stories. Alfre Woodard and Simone Missick’sMisty Knight walk away with large swaths of Luke Cage as actresses like Zendaya, Tessa Thompson, Lupita Nyong’o, and Danai Gurira join the M.C.U., Broadnax says her readers greeted the introduction of comic-book character Riri Williams as Ironheart—the successor to a retired Tony Stark—with “full-throated enthusiasm.” And Gay’s work onWorld of Wakanda promises to open the door to a whole new audience: “The opportunity to write black women and black queer women was just too good to be true,” she told Vanity Fair.

    Alonso is very straightforward about the recent diversity uptick at Marvel Comics, calling it a “redoubling” of efforts. But Loeb sees the coinciding screen introductions of Cage, T’Challa, and the rest as “pure serendipity.” He also shies away from calling Luke Cagepolitical; citing Jessica Jones, he explains, “If we told people we were going to make a show that was our own feminist doctrine, who’s going to watch that?”

    Coker and Colter echo Loeb, saying that they don’t intend Luke Cage to be any kind of polemic. But, as Coker points out, “Whether I’m comfortable with it or not, it is.”

    “If you come out of Luke Cage, and after 13 hours you have a little more of an understanding of what it’s like to be a black man in Harlem in the present day, great! We would like that very much,” Loeb says. “But if you come out and you say, ‘It was so cool when he ripped off that door and the bullets bounced off him and he threw that guy out the window,’ we like that too.”

    Luke Cage and the Year Marvel Finally Reckoned with Its Black Audience
     
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