Coming up: Friday, May 20, matching quiz on idioms
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In class: listening to Ta'Nahesi Coates discussing his writing of the comic The Black Panther
reading reading Ta-Nahesi Coates article
responding to accompanying evidenced-based questions Coates' article
The Return of the Black Panther by TA-NEHISI
COATES
Last year i was offered the opportunity to script an 11-issue series of Black
Panther, for Marvel. The Black Panther—who, when he debuted in an issue of Fantastic
Four, in 1966, was the first black superhero in mainstream American
comics—is the alter ego of T’Challa, the king of Wakanda, a mythical and
technologically advanced African country. By day, T’Challa mediates conflicts
within his nation. By night, he battles Dr. Doom. The attempt to make these two
identities—monarch and superhero—cohere has proved a rich vein for storytelling
by such creators as Jack Kirby, Christopher Priest, and Reginald Hudlin. But
when I got the call to write Black Panther, I was less concerned
with character conflict than with the realization of my dreams as a 9-year-old.
The
September 1976 cover ofJungle Action, the first Marvel series starring
the Black Panther (Marvel Entertainment)
Some of the best days of my life
were spent poring over the back issues of The Uncanny X-Men and The
Amazing Spider-Man. As a child of the crack-riddled West Baltimore of the
1980s, I found the tales of comic books to be an escape, another reality where,
very often, the weak and mocked could transform their fallibility into
fantastic power. That is the premise behind the wimpy Steve Rogers mutating
into Captain America, behind the nerdy Bruce Banner needing only to grow angry
to make his enemies take flight, behind the bespectacled Peter Parker being
transfigured by a banal spider bite into something more.
But comic books provided something
beyond escapism. Indeed, aside from hip-hop and Dungeons & Dragons, comics
were my earliest influences. In the way that past writers had been shaped by
the canon of Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Wharton, I was formed by the canon of
Claremont, DeFalco, and Simonson. Some of this was personal. All of the comics
I loved made use of two seemingly dueling forces—fantastic grandiosity and
ruthless efficiency. Comic books are absurd. At any moment, the Avengers might
include a hero drawn from Norse mythology (Thor), a monstrous realization of
our nuclear-age nightmares (the Hulk), a creation of science fiction (Wasp),
and an allegory for the experience of minorities in human society (Beast). But
the absurdities of comics are, in part, made possible by a cold-eyed approach
to sentence-craft. Even when the language tips toward bombast, space is at a
premium; every word has to count. This big/small approach to literature, the
absurd and surreal married to the concrete and tangible, has undergirded much
of my approach to writing. In my journalism here at The Atlantic, I
try to ground my arguments not just in reporting but also in astute attention
to every sentence. It may not always work, but I am really trying to make every
one of those 18,000 words count.
Left: The cover of Black Panther #1. Right: A
concept drawing by Brian Stelfreeze that influenced the plot. (Marvel Entertainment)
These were the principles I observed
and extracted as a reader of comic books. But when all the fantasy and reverie
faded, and the time to actually write Black Panther came,
those principles turned out to be not as primary as I’d thought. An old saw in
art and in journalism holds that one should show and not tell. In comic books,
the notion is doubly true. Unlike in prose or even poetry, the writer has to
constantly think visually. Exposition and backstory exist, but the exigencies
of comic-book storytelling demand that they be folded into the action.
Writing here at The Atlantic,
I can, say, tell you that:
Daniel Patrick Moynihan, ambassador,
senator, sociologist, and itinerant American intellectual, was the product of a
broken home and a pathological family. He was born in 1927 in Tulsa, Oklahoma,
but raised mostly in New York City. When Moynihan was 10 years old, his father,
John, left the family, plunging it into poverty. Moynihan’s mother … worked as
a nurse.
But for a comic book, I must get
down to the brass tacks of deciding how each beat should look. Is this a
narrated series of scenes, illustrated by panels of a baby being born, a father
walking out of the house, a nurse leaving her children to go off to work? No, I
think it would be better to dramatize everything—perhaps with a young Moynihan
waving goodbye to his mother as she leaves for work and then going to his room
to look longingly at a picture of his father.
A
concept drawing by Brian Stelfreeze that influenced the plot (Marvel
Entertainment)
Ideally, the writer offers notes in
his script on how the comic book should look. This requires thinking with
intention about what a character is actually doing, not merely what he is
saying. This is harder than it sounds, and often I found myself vaguely
gesturing at what should happen in a panel—“T’Challa looks concerned.” Or
“Ramonda stands to object.” I was lucky in that I was paired with a wonderful
and experienced artist, Brian Stelfreeze. Storytelling in a comic book is a
partnership between the writer and the artist, as surely as a film is a
partnership between the screenwriter and the director. Brian, whose art is
displayed here, doesn’t just execute the art direction—he edits and remixes it.
I decide the overall arc of the story, and the words used to convey that
arc—but Brian ultimately decides how the story should look. The script for the
second page of Black Panther #1 called for a big, splashy
panel depicting a massacre. Brian drew that panel, but he also drew two other,
overlapping panels that depicted T’Challa’s realization of the tragedy
unfolding around him. Our partnership doesn’t end with the art, either. Brian’s
concept drawings for Black Panther ultimately influenced the
plot.
Accompanying questions for the above article
Accompanying questions for the above article
Name__________________________ The
Return of the Black Panther by Ta-Nehesi Coates
Please respond to the following using information from the
text.
1.
Where did the character initially debut?
__________________________________
2.
When did the Black Panther initially debut?
______________________________
3.
Who is Black Panther’s alter ego? (give full
response)
_________________________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________________________
4.
What two identities of Black Panther do the
creators try cripohere?
___________________________________________________________________________
5.
Where is Ta-Nehesi Coates originally from?
___________________________________________________________________________
6.
What two reasons appealed to Coates as he read
the comic strips?
___________________________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________________________
7.
What “two seemingly dueling forces” made up the
comic books Coates read?
___________________________________________________________________________
8.
Give three examples of comic book absurdity.
_________________________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________________________
9.
What is the “old saw in art and journalism” to
which Coates refers?
_________________________________________________________________________________
10.
How is writing different for a comic writer, as
opposed to prose or poetry?
___________________________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________________________
11.
How is Coates approach to comic books similar to
his approach to writing as a journalist?
_________________________________________________________________________________
12.
What are some of the societal histories Coates
uses to write the the Black Panther?
___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
I think T'Challa will win that fight at Warrior's Fall but with difficulty
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