The Return of the Black Panther!

A behind-the-scenes look at the revival of Marvel’s first black superhero series, from its fantastical and historical inspirations to early sketches - plus an exclusive preview of the first issue.

- Ta-Nehisi Coates, illustrations by Brian Stelfreeze

Last year I was offered the opportunity to script an 11-issue series of Black Panther, for Marvel. The Black Panther who, when he debuted in an issue of Fantastic Four, in 1966, was the first black superhero in mainstream American comics is the alter ego of T’Challa, the king of Wakanda, a mythical and  technologically advanced African country. By day, T’Challa mediates conflicts within his nation. By night, he battles Dr. Doom. The attempt to make these two identities—monarch and superhero—cohere has proved a rich vein for storytelling by such creators as Jack Kirby, Christopher Priest, and Reginald Hudlin. But when I got the call to write Black Panther, I was less concerned with character conflict than with the realization of my dreams as a 9-year-old.

Some of the best days of my life were spent poring over the back issues of The Uncanny X-Men and The Amazing SpiderMan. 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.