Everyone who knows me knows that I’m passionate about superheroes. When the trailer for Black Panther and Infinity War came out, I jumped up and down in my dorm room and played the trailers over and over again to see if I could see new details. I made an article in the fall about my favorite SOCs (Superheroes of Color) that I felt like everyone should know about. Yesterday on Twitter, Marvel celebrated ten years of the Marvel Cinematic Universe with Robert Downey Jr. in dead center, almost as the Godfather of the Marvel Universe. Days before that Twitter user BlackGirlNerds started a trending topic on Twitter called #WhatBlackPantherMeansToMe. Reading the experiences and reasonings as to why people were so excited for this movie is what inspired me to write this article.
Self-admittedly, Black Panther was not a superhero I grew up reading. I grew up reading about the X-Men, the original Avengers, the Bat family, and the Justice League. The comic book world, for both DC and Marvel, is supremely complicated, and it’s even more complicated for new readers in 2018. Navigating that at such a young age was challenging, but I was completely up for the task. I remember visiting comic book stores with my mom on my birthday and using Wikipedia to get the complete histories of characters and watching their animated and live-action movies. Comic books were such an important part of my life that I don’t really think anyone on the outside can comprehend how much it filled a void I had at the time.
Living through three Spider-Man remakes, multiple Superman and Batman shows and franchises, I think I can speak for many people when I say that I’m tired of the same old superheroes. Marvel is really setting a precedent by doing something different and having increasingly diverse casts, especially after Spider-Man: Homecoming in 2017. Not to undermine DC’s Wonder Woman, which set its own precedent as one of the first female-centered superhero film, which I also happened to love very much. I think something superhero filmmakers take for granted is how much people want to see things that are new and fresh. So, when I first heard that they were making a Black Panther film, I was super surprised. I was confused as to whether or not they would even give him a film after Captain America: Civil War since they already introduced the character, but over the last year I’ve grown increasingly more excited.
Watching the cast grow, the photos and scenes from set, I didn’t know how much I needed Black Panther and Wakanda in my life, until recently. Black Panther fills a hole that I have from comic book heroes. I grew up looking up to people like Nightwing, Batman, Ant-Man and the Wasp, Wonder Woman, and Superman, but none of those characters had so great an impact on me as a human being than Black Panther does. When I wrote about my favorite Superheroes of Color, one of the things that I wrote about was how much I resonated with the character Riri Williams, because not only was she a nerd and awkward and the embodiment of everything that I am, she also looked like me. My own mother thought I created her on my computer when I first showed her a picture of her.
Looking at all the characters in Black Panther, I realize that there is now a bigger pool of heroes that I can pull from. Riri is too small of a character to hit the big screen because she was only created a few years prior to now. Black Panther is going to be in movie theaters, its posters are going to be on walls and in Time Square, and the commercials are going to be shown on TV on major channels. Little black kids are going to see it, and elderly people who’ve lived through segregation are going to see it and people like my parents who’ve had to grow in in the in-between stages as America transitioned into the world we live in now. Black Panther connects me to other black people who are from Africa and the Caribbean, and it’s a place where we celebrate and revel in our blackness when a lot of us have spent time trying to hide it or cover it up because we felt ashamed, or unheard, or unseen.
Black Panther is a chance for black people to be seen as multi-dimensional, layered characters with a wide array of personalities. We’re not drug dealers or maids or angry black girls or sassy black friends. We’re finally just people who live, laugh, cry, and face the same trials and tribulations as everyone else.
Black Panther makes it so that we are finally seen, and it fills my heart with joy. So make sure you see Black Panther on the 16th and happy 10 year anniversary to Marvel Studios and let’s pray we have ten more years with diverse, dynamic characters.
Photos courtesy of Marvel, gif courtesy of Giphy