Noted journalist and advocate for racial justice Ta-Nehisi Coates has had a good year: on top of being one of The Atlantic's most prolific and popular correspondents, his part-memoir, part-manifesto, Between the World And Me (written in the form of a letter to his son about being POC in America) has received more or less universal acclaim, and was long-listed for the National Book Award in Nonfiction last week.

Now, to add even more to his banner year, the self-proclaimed Marvel fan will be penning the next Black Panther series for the comics publisher.

According to the New York Times, which profiled Coates in the context of the recent comics-centric news, Marvel contacted the author about helming the next Black Panther line after he interviewed Marvel editor and writer Sama Amanat (who is also the creator of the latest version of Ms. Marvel, aka Kamala Khan, the first Pakistani-American and Muslim to headline a Marvel comic).

Coates has been a long-time devotee to the Marvel universe, and he relayed that their comics were "an intimate part of my childhood and, at this point, part of my adulthood ... [i]t was mostly through pop culture, through hip-hop, through Dungeons & Dragons and comic books that I acquired much of my vocabulary."

He also commented on the revelatory nature that the appearance of minority characters like X-Men's Storm and James Rhodes/War Machine had on him as a kid in the 1980s: "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."

Influenced by Steven Hahn's book A Nation Under Our Feet, the new Black Panther storyline borrows Hahn's title and has already been written by Coates, with artwork by comic book artist Brian Stelfreeze (Domino).

Check out Coates's interview with Sama Amanat in the video clip below.

Via: The New York Times

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