'Nuff Said: American Graphic Media

  This fan film has been in the work for at least a year. You can find out more about the director here . 

A second Storm of Carnage trailer dropped last week. What's coming next?  This behind the scenes video gives us a hint.

I was able to speak to the star and director of Storms of Carnage: The Black Panther Unleashed for Canada's Digital Journal .  With +14,000 views and climbing, the little fan film hints at the possible demand for a live action Black Panther film. Will Marvel Studios listen?

A great fan film based on Marvel's Black Panther.  Over the last decade the quality and scope of films coming from fandom has skyrocketed.  While major corporate owners are quick to stifle any attempt to make money, fan films continue to grow as non-profit exercises.  Many showcase the skills of all involved.  A smart move would be to create some path for these creators to move into producing content license holders.  Top Cow's Talent Hunt competition does this in comics, YouTube can easily do this as well. 

neo Jonathan Gayles' White Scripts and Black Supermen: Black Masculinities in American Comic Books has been picked up for distribution by California Newsreel. I'm flattered to get a mention in this interview on Left of Black.

Stan Lee says he wants to see the Black Panther and Doctor Strange made into films.

Jack Kirby was a legendary comic innovator. While known for his superhero creations, he made his mark in numerous genre, including the Romance comics genre which he pioneered in the late 1940s. Blank Panther?: Jack Kirby, Blackness and the American Dream As you know, I am aware it is Black History Month. I wrote a short piece exploring Jack Kirby's take on race and identity for the good people at PopMatters.com. The short written assignment is the most difficult. Still, I think there is some merit in an honest reflective piece consider Jack Kirby take on race and identity. Perhaps no creator was as prolific creating black characters and unlike other creators, I don't think Kirby's intention was tokenism. Indeed, characters he created remain central to Marvel. The Black Panther's recent centrality is a testament to the character symbolic important and the lack of substantive new characters created since Kirby's actions in the 1960s and 1970s.

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...

My op-ed in the LA Times touches on some of my thinking about race in comics, but if you have been reading this blog, you know there is more to my research. Here is a list for those wondering about blackness in comics. Black Panther (1966) 1st Black Superhero Falcon (1969), 1st African-American superhero Eddie March, Iron Man for one issue (1970) Black Racer (July 1971) John Stewart (Dec. 1971, becomes star GL in 1985) Luke Cage (1972), 1st Black Superhero with his own book Blade (1973) Brother Voodoo (1973) Bronze Tiger (1975) Storm (1975) 1st Black Superheroine Misty Knight (1975) Black Goliath (1975) Get his own book in 1976 Bumblebee (Teen Titans 1976) Tyroc (1976) Black Lightning (April 1977), 1st DC superhero with his own book Vixen (1978), 1st DC black superheroine This list is imperfect, but it is telling us something about race in comics. As you can see, after the Black Panther a number of black characters are introduced. The first African-American character, the Falcon is...

I recently got feedback on Ages of Heroes, Eras of Men from a prospective publisher. It a tough process, getting feedback from someone who doesn't know all the work you have put into something. It is honest feedback and I will take it and make sure the final product answer the editor's questions. We have done a lot of great work on the book, but publishers are a cold and objective bunch slow to hand out praise (and contracts). As I scramble to reply to the press, I realize I have not done much with one of the chapters I am writing for the book. My chapter looks at the introduction of African-American superheroes to the Marvel Universe in the 1960s and 1970s. The decision to introduce minority characters to a fictional universe may seem petty compared to the titanic struggles occurring over Civil Rights during the 1960s, but those struggles drove the decision to incorporate minorities into comics. The question for me is what does the Marvel Comic experience integrating per...