Ta-Nahesi Coates, Whose Book Made Such a Huge Impact on Our Intellectual Culture That People Talked About It For a Week and Not a Single Time Since, Will Write for Marvel Comics' Character "Black Panther"

Marvel Comics executives said that today's young readers crave tediousness, and Ta-Nahesi Coates "writes like a dream -- boring, didactic boring dream."

Can't wait for the Black Panther to grabble with Nebulous White Power Structures while wicked villains, like firefighters killed on 9/11, threaten to Shatter His Body.

"A Nation Under Our Feet," the yearlong story line written by Mr. Coates and drawn by Brian Stelfreeze, is inspired by the 2003 book of the same title by Steven Hahn. It will find the hero dealing with a violent uprising in his country set off by a superhuman terrorist group called the People...

"The People." Well, I guess I can see where this is going.

Then again, I already saw where this was going, before I read that.

The rest of the article at least paints Ta-Nehisi as relatable, even if he writes gibberish.

Ta-Nehisi Coates Credit Gabriella Demczuk for The New York Times Mr. Coates's enthusiasm for Marvel started when he was a boy. Marvel was "an intimate part of my childhood and, at this point, part of my adulthood," he said. "It was mostly through pop culture, through hip-hop, through Dungeons & Dragons and comic books that I acquired much of my vocabulary."

Mr. Coates, 39, began reading comics in the mid-1980s and was introduced to three minority characters: Storm, the leader of the X-Men; Monica Rambeau, who had taken on the name Captain Marvel; and James Rhodes, who was Iron Man. "They were obviously black," he recalled, but it was not made into a big deal. Still, he said: "I'm sure it meant something to see people who looked like me in comic books. It was this beautiful place that I felt pop culture should look like."

posted by Ace at 06:36 PM

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