Marvel’s recent resurgence into widespread prominence may be based on their massively ambitious cinematic world, but they haven’t forgotten that comics are what got them started in the first place. Just how seriously they’re still taking it can be seen with their latest hiring: revered Atlantic writer Ta-Nehisi Coates.
Cover of the first issue of the upcoming “Black Panther” series, by Brian Stelfreeze.
Coates, whose book Between the World and Me was recently nominated for the nonfiction National Book Award, has signed up to write a Black Panther comic series due later next year. It will be his first such assignment, but he is a noted fan, and cites comics alongside with hip-hop and Dungeons & Dragons as being the sources of his vocabulary. Checks out.
Black Panther (a.k.a. T’Challa) is best known as the first black superhero, and dates back to 1966, when he first appeared in a Fantastic Four comic. Chadwick Boseman will play the film version of the character next May in Captain America: Civil War, which pits the Cap’n and Iron Man against each other, forcing others, like the Panther, to pick sides. Following that, there will be a standalone Black Panther feature due in 2018.
(via The New York Times)
