Ta-Nehisi Coates: [Laughs] That's a great question. You know, I learned something from Between the World and Me. I think it's something I already knew and probably should have taken to heart: You get to the universal by the specific.
You can take Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God as an example. It's written firmly within the black experience, but I don't think there's anything about that book—and I think time has proven this to be true—that has prevented people who are not black from reading it, from enjoying it, from inhaling it. I was lucky enough to see Ryan Coogler's Creed a couple of weeks ago—he's going to be directing the Black Panther movie—and Creed is a movie that is firmly rooted in the African American experience. And it's very, very clearly an American film.So I guess I don't recognize the same dichotomy. I think we write out of our experiences if we're writing right. If we're writing from anything else, we're not really being true."We have this kiss between two women in the first issue, and I wrote to Brian: 'It shouldn't be like softcore porn. It should be tender. It should be beautiful. It should be human.' We had to talk about how it would look to the women as opposed to how it would look to us."
Maybe I had too much confidence about this, but I wasn't too worried about the bodies of the black dudes. I felt like I was on pretty good terrain with that.Instead, we talked a lot—between me, Brian, and our editor Will Moss—about the things that we have to do being three dudes working on this. Four, including our associate editor, Chris Robinson. (We have one woman on our creative team, colorist Laura Martin.) There's an angle dealing with, for lack of better words, feminist issues in the book. I wanted to take great, great care with the depiction of the bodies of women because of where the storyline is going. I didn't want to have women at the center of the story, to have them partially leading it, and then have the depiction be, how shall we say, problematic.I just wanted to make sure we were depicting folks the way they should be. Not just in images but even in my own writing. We have this kiss between two women in the first issue, and I wrote to Brian: "It shouldn't be like softcore porn. It should be tender. It should be beautiful. It should be human." There'll be a bunch of dudes reading the book from the dude gaze, like, "Oh, it's two women kissing!" and that was really the thing we had to talk about: how it would look to the women as opposed to how it would look to us.
In the first issue, women and queerness are central to the narrative that's unfolding. This is a relief, since so often they are left out of the equation on every front, but especially because Marvel's stance on queer representation was recently called into question. Could you say a little about that choice?"My politics are my politics. You probably won't see T'Challa at a Black Lives Matter rally. That doesn't mean Black Lives Matter isn't important, but it's not on top."
I remember having a conversation with Axel. Axel is a fan of the Dora Milaje—Black Panther's all-female bodyguards—and I wasn't a fan initially. But, the more I read, the more I liked them. To be frank with you, though, something about their origin sort of bothered me when I thought about the real world. The Dora Milaje are raised to be the bodyguards for Black Panther, for the king of Wakanda, but depending on whose rendition you're looking at, they're also raised to potentially become his wife. And when you write stories, you try to pull from real life, right? You think, OK, let's bring that as close to reality as we can. Even recognizing that it's a comic book, what would that look like? What would it mean? Given what I know of men in the real world and what I know of men throughout history, that's a situation that's ripe for abuse. So it occurred to me that some of the Dora Milaje might have issues with that.
Yeah, you can't escape it. One of the great arguments in favor of diversity and diverse representation is that when you're not doing it, you actually aren't reflecting the world. Representation actually has a storytelling impact. It's not just a matter of social justice—it's actually a matter of good storytelling.
It didn't, really. I mean, I love the hip-hop covers! I'm telling you this sitting in the Marvel offices, but this is me speaking right here.
I'm curious, given your journalistic and critical background, what it's been like taking the theory of your work and putting it into narrative practice with the additional duty to entertain."Representation actually has a storytelling impact. It's not just a matter of social justice—it's actually a matter of good storytelling."
In journalism, the storytelling is always there. There's always a narrative. There's always a story, but, of course, the political point you're trying to make is much more prominent. But when you're writing fiction, your politics are in the back of your head. It's not like I'm going out of my way to show X, Y, and Z—discussion is baked into the writing. First and foremost, I want to write an exciting, deeply engrossing book. My politics are my politics, and, you know, for example, you probably won't see T'Challa at a Black Lives Matter rally. That doesn't mean Black Lives Matter isn't important, but it's not on top. I'm trying to tell a good story. That has to be the most important thing.Follow J. A. Micheline on Twitter.Black Panther is out in stores April 6.