The Black Panther first appeared in comics back in 1966. This was Marvel's heyday. Spider-Man,

the X-Men, the Fantastic Four, Iron Man, the Incredible Hulk, the Avengers, Daredevil.

All of them are products of the 1960s.

You can kind of feel it too.

When I was a kid, it was widely held that if you were a black comic book fan, you read Marvel.

Marvel was the real world. It was the street. It made perfect sense to black comic book

fans that cops would always try to arrest Spider-Man, that the X-Men were hated and feared,

that Tony Stark would be an alcoholic, that Bruce Banner's rage would be world-breaking.

So there was always something appropriate about the fact that the first superhero of African descent in mainstream comics would be in Marvel comics, because Marvel felt real.

And in any real world, there had to be black superheroes.

I don't want to overstate this.

The fact is that until Christopher Priest took over the title in the early arts, there really was no definitive Black Panther run, and there's no defining events which rang out across the Marvel universe. No Phoenix Saga, no death of Gwen Stacy, no secret wars, no scourge of the underworld. For a writer, this presents a problem.

Comics are a heritage.

Creators take over a title and bring their own ideas all while deepening the older and more

familiar stories.

So Ed Brubaker and Steve Epting bring Bucky back from the dead, but as the winter soldier.

Jonathan Hickman takes the X-Men's outcast tradition and pushes it to its separatist extremes.

Brian Michael Bendis creates Miles Morales, all the while building on the legacy of Peter Parker.

This is as true in the movies as it is in the comics.

But when director Ryan Coogler began writing the first Black Panther film with

co-writer Joe Robert Cole, they didn't have that same deep well of stories. The result

is that what you see in the first Black Panther film and in Wakanda forever are characters,

...