Mighty Marvel Monday: Darwyn Cooke, #BlackPantherSoLIT, and more

Welcome back to another Mighty Marvel Monday!

This week I have two big things to point to, and then a few smaller things to highlight.

Firstly,  it’s always sad when the comics community loses a beloved member, but it’s especially sad to lose someone like Darwyn Cooke, who was an amazing talent. And although most of his work was not with Marvel, I have strong memories of my artist friend who got me into comics raving (in a good way) about Cooke’s run on Wolverine and Doop, which you can see in the gallery of his some of his Marvel works below.

He also called DC and Marvel out on their bullshit. In this interview from 2010, Cooke talked about what needed to change in Marvel and DC:

Interviewer: “Is there anything you would like to see DC or Marvel change about the way they do business?”
Darwyn: “Yeah, I want them to stop catering to the perverted needs of 45 year-old men. I want to stop seeing Batman fucking Black Canary. I don’t want to hear Batman swearing, I don’t want to see him feeding a boy rats. I don’t want to see characters getting raped in the ass. […] I want to see new characters for a new time, and when the industry of superhero comics realizes its sights to the young people it was meant for, I’ll be there with both arms and feet outside.”

Now, within that tirade he also took a shot at “characters who have been straight for 60 years become lesbians overnight because the writer’s too stupid or uncreative to come up with something decent,” meaning Kate Kane, who has turned out to be one of the most important queer women for DC. His comments predated WWAC, but this since deleted post on The Beat covers most of the controversy, and the follow up clarifying statement he made. 

I separated out these comments because legacy is never black and white. Legacy is how other people choose to write about you. People are infinitely more complex than the words we have to remember them by can represent, and to highlight one aspect while erasing another doesn’t honor a person’s memory. But those comments and that controversy need context too. Most people, it seems, forgave Cooke for the off-the-cuff comment he made, even if they disagreed with his position, and I think that says as much about him as his words, or his art. 

Second, I think it’s pretty obvious that T’Challa is THE breakout new character from Captain America: Civil War (sorry not sorry, Spidey), and the post-movie fervor has created excitement for the upcoming solo Black Panther film, which, as of now, is slated to be released in 2018. In the past week, it was announced that not only was Lupita Nyong’o is in talks to play T’Challa’s love interest in the film, but Michael B. Jordan will also be joining the cast in a yet-to-be-named but possibly villainous role. Further, Marvel Studios’ Kevin Feige made a statement claiming that 90% of the cast for Black Panther will be African or African-American.

It’s a pretty big deal. And Black Twitter celebrated using the hashtag #BlackPantherSoLIT. Started by twitter user ChadwickNChill, the hashtag is everything the name implies. All tweets below are linked to with permission.

In other news, ABC has officially cancelled Agent Carter, and the Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D spinoff, Marvel’s Most Wanted, hasn’t been picked up. The announcements beg the question–why can’t Marvel translate into broadcast TV success the same way DC can? It also adds to the ongoing debate of what exactly “TV success” means when you have platforms like Netflix, where Marvel shows have been doing exceptionally well. Marvel is letting Freeform, the basic cable competitor for the CW, develop its next endeavor, Cloak and Dagger. They managed to make highly successful shows off of Pretty Little Liars and Shadowhunters, partly due to casting, so this may pay off.

ICYMI

This is old, but in light of reminding everyone about the Cloak and Dagger TV show in development, I realized that I never linked to Kate Beaton’s brilliant comics about Dagger’s iconic costume inspired by this series of tweets.  The whole series is fantastic, but this one might be my favorite.

supertapecdaggerbeaton

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Kate Tanski

Kate Tanski

Recovering academic. Fangirl. Geek knitter.

One thought on “Mighty Marvel Monday: Darwyn Cooke, #BlackPantherSoLIT, and more

  1. T’Challa really was the breakout character for Caps: Civil War, and I am sooooooo excited about the Black Panther movie in a way I have not been for a superhero movie in a very long time.

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