Marvel has hired The Atlantic national correspondent and National Book Award nominee Ta-Nehisi Coates to write the new Black Panther series.
Coates is an admitted Marvel fan and writing for the publisher has been a dream of his since childhood, notes The New York Times. His first book for Marvel, Black Panther No. 1, will be published next spring.
The writer got Marvel’s attention when he interviewed Marvel editor Sana Amanat at the Atlantic’s New York Ideas seminar about diversity in comics. Amanat was a major force behind the development of Ms. Marvel, who is a Muslim teen from Jersey City. After the event, Marvel talked to Coates about writing and assigned him an editor.
Coates’ story is titled A Nation Under Our Feet and will feature art from Brian Stelfreeze. It is inspired by Steve Hahn’s 2003 book and has Black Panther challenged by a superhuman terrorist group that threatens Wakanda.
This does sound like a surprising shift for Coates, who is best known for the book Between the World and Me and recently wrote a detailed report on mass incarceration and its effect on black families. But Coates told the Times that comics and pop culture played important roles in his life.
“It was mostly through pop culture, through hip-hop, through Dungeons & Dragons and comic books that I acquired much of my vocabulary,” Coates told the Times.
In addition to the new series, Chadwick Boseman will make his debut as Black Panther in next year’s Captain America: Civil War. A solo Black Panther film is planned for 2018.