Ta-Nehisi Coates is a celebrated journalist, award-winning author and dogged defender of social justice. Now he can add one more win to that impressive resume: Marvel Comics author.
Coates will write the script for a new Black Panther series from Marvel that is set to debut in the spring of 2016, with art by Brian Stelfreeze. It'll be a big year for the Marvel superhero, with actor Chadwick Boseman commandeering T'Challa's big screen debut in Captain America: Civil War.
Coates' year-long Black Panther story arc, "A Nation Under Our Feet," borrows its title from a 2003 Steven Hahn book, which follows the African-American journey during the six decades after slavery was abolished in the United States. The Black Panther arc sees a superhuman terrorist group known as the People instigating dissent in Wakanda, the small African nation that Black Panther presides over as king.
"It's going to be a story that repositions Black Panther in the minds of readers," Marvel editor-in-chief Axel Alonso told The New York Times. "It really moves him forward."
Black Panther is an important character in the history of comics. He was the first black superhero to really garner mainstream attention in the American comic book scene, and his role as ruler of an African nation has allowed Black Panther comics to touch on socio-political issues in a way that other Marvel comics simply can't.
For all of the serious work that he's known for, Coates' personal interests fall toward the geekier end of the spectrum. He's active on Twitter, he plays and talks about video games, and he's a self-professed fan of comics. He told the Times that Marvel was "an intimate part of my childhood and, at this point, part of my adulthood."
"It was mostly through pop culture, through hip-hop, through Dungeons & Dragons and comic books that I acquired much of my vocabulary," he said.