David Liss, the new writer for Black Panther: Man Without Fear, was kind enough to grant me an interview a few weeks back. Just in time for Black History Month, the interview is available at Brink Magazine. Many thanks to William Rosemann and Arune Singh at Marvel Comics for their assistance (including the image you see in this post).
Race and/in comics resonate with contemporary culture. If you have caught the first two issues of Liss' run, you recognize he has incorporated an understanding of post-colonial theory into this run of Black Panther. In some way, the run represents a return to the Black Panther as seminal black figure in Marvel Universe. Black, not African-American, thus the Panther's perspective is that of an outsider divorced from baggage of African-American cultural placement in the United State experience, but is linked to it by the persistence of race based thinking. Like President Obama, the character of T'Challa (the Black Panther's real name) is forever forced into a balancing act. He must reconcile the positive idea and values associated with the American experience, while facing the very real limitation created by race base inequality. If he is too angry, he is not fit to be a hero and the majority will ignore him, if he is not angry enough, he isn't fit to be represent the minority experience and the racial other struggling to be seen will reject him.
At some level, the Black Panther's person has and continues to represent the possibility of what Africa could have been without white colonial influence. This mix of aspiration and inspiration has defined the character's place in the Marvel Universe since Jack Kirby and Stan Lee created him in the midst of the United States' civil right revolution in the 1960s. We cannot deny the character symbolic importance today, even if, we see the problematic desire attached to idea of "representing blackness." One character of African origin cannot express the totality of the African experience any more than one character of African-American heritage can represent every black person in the United States. Regardless, the decision to introduce a black hero in 1966 challenged the Jim Crow racism in comics in much the same way the civil right protesters challenged exclusionary practices in the streets.
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