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I’ve always viewed Wakanda as a proper return of African Americans (the direct descendants of enslaved Africans during the Transatlantic Slave Trade) to the continent of Africa. I got to listen to, know, and speak to T’Challa and the people and land of Wakanda.īlack Panther and Wakanda hold a powerful place in the Marvel Universe. I couldn’t be passive during my visit, and that made my visit even more interesting. It was like visiting a country for the first time, and not as a tourist, but as a diplomat. I could enter into direct conversation and be heard. Then I realized, in writing Black Panther, I could affect him and his country. I grew up hearing this phrase, and between this and also being an American, any type of monarchy gets my side-eye of disapproval. I came to more superheroes through Grant Morrison’s Animal Man and Vixen and Alan Moore’s Watchmen. I read these while I earned my second MA and then PhD. I went on to consume comics through graphic novels, including Persepolis, A Contract with God, Bone, and two more iconic cat narratives in The Rabbi’s Cat and We3. The first superhero comic I read was Wolverine. It was the first time I understood why so many loved superheroes. As a 21-year-old who’d just lost her super powers and was now trying to figure out who the heck she was, this discovery gave me strength. I especially loved Storm, who could fly.īut the one who intrigued me most was Wolverine because he was so angry and he had a skeleton that was unbreakable.
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But that summer, while I was still using the walker, I spent a lot of time in front of the TV. Eventually I graduated to a half walker, then cane, then finally using only my own two legs. After a month in the hospital, and then another several weeks of rigorous physical therapy, I got out of that wheelchair and began using a walker. It took me months to regain sensation in my legs (and the doctors didn’t know whether I would until it gradually happened). So I went from super athlete to paralyzed from the waist down in a matter of nine hours. When I had the surgery, I was in the anomalous 1 percent of patients who mysteriously respond to the surgery with paralysis. I was eventually told that I could either have the spinal surgery to straighten it out or become crippled by 25 and have a much shorter life due to compressed organs. I was a semipro tennis player and a track star with severe scoliosis that was increasing in severity every year. I wrote a whole book about it called Broken Places & Outer Spaces. That’s a lot crammed in one sentence, I know. My discovery of superheroes didn’t happen until I was nineteen years old and paralyzed from spinal surgery complications when doctors tried to straighten out my acute scoliosis. I can’t state it enough: to be white and male was such a privilege if you loved or wanted to love comic books. Comic book shops remained an unwelcoming place on several levels for many years. I knew when to avoid a space, even if I didn’t fully understand the depth of it. I was navigating through a lot of blatant racism, prejudice, and xenophobia. I was between eight and twelve years old in those years, the child of Nigerian immigrants, an athlete playing and grandly excelling in the sport of tennis. Heroes in capes with super powers were definitely in my realm of wonder. And since I was very little, I’d always had dreams of flying. The excitement of those boys and their flimsy books intrigued me. I had seen boys at school with comic books and their colorful covers with titles in electrical-looking fonts. I was interested and so, yes, I’d walk in there. When I was a kid, I’d see the local comic book shops. Nevertheless, I didn’t arrive at comic books until much later in life. Even before I was writing stories using prose I was marveling at the dance of symbolic representations of sound and images. There was something about those dark lines, how they looped and swirled to create images and how those images molded with the “drawings” of letters that were words, communicating thoughts and ideas with the pictures. And, oh man, on Sunday, there were pages of comics, and they were in color! I loved these little stories told in pictures. The Family Cir cus, Hi and Lois, Bloomsbury, Calvin and Hobbes, Momma, Ziggy-there were so many I enjoyed. It was while hanging around him that I noticed that there was a comics page every day. My father was an avid Chicago Sun-Times newspaper reader, and every day he would sit at the dinner table and read it. It began when I was about seven years old in the early ’80s with. Even before the word, it was the black line that drew me (pun intended).
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My path to writing the big black cat started with a fat orange cat.