Marvel’s Comic-Con@Home presence continued today with the “Black Panther: Tales of Wakanda” panel, featuring several of the authors of the anthology book about the fan favorite character and his home nation of Wakanda.
- The panel, which was moderated by editor Jesse J. Holland, featured three authors of this book:
- Tananarive Due
- Sheree Renee Thomas
- Cadwell Turnbull
- The authors talked about their motivations to explore the stories of some of the other characters related to the Black Panther, rather than T’Challa himself. Characters like Killmonger and Storm are also featured in this anthology book.
- Turnbull’s portion of the book focuses on the popular villain, Killmonger. The writer talked a bit about how he could relate to the character:
- “I empathized with his frustration, his anger,” He said. “This is a thing that a lot of black people generally, but black men specifically, have to engage with, like how to respond to oppression in a constructive way and you could see that Killmonger makes a certain kind of choice and T’Challa makes another kind of choice.”
- Due focused on Storm and discussed the allure of writing a story with this character and Black Panther together:
- “For various reasons, Storm has never been with T’Challa in the films,” she laughed. “So on one level, it felt almost a little bit naughty to be able to write Ororo-T’Challa fan fiction.”
- Thomas discussed how she handled her story about T’Challa directly and dove into the character’s history:
- “I wanted to kind of explore different moments of T’Challa’s life because he and his sister, Shuri, experience a lot of loss before they became their full selves,” She said. “You’re looking at the continuity of what some other writers have done before, what are some of the challenges that the character’s had, but then you kind of put that in the back of your mind and then you just have to write!.”
- You can watch the full “Black Panther: Tales of Wakanda” Comic-Con@Home panel below:
Be sure to check back for more coverage from Comic-Con@Home 2021 over the next couple of days.