The Origins of Writing Black Panther

Sometime after the mid-2010s, I began to notice something significant unfolding in comics: more Black writers were publishing titles with major comic book companies, and conversations about diversity were expanding in noticeable ways. By 2017, I had started sketching out draft tables of contents for what I imagined would become a book project.

Initially, I planned to write a book about “diversity in comic books,” tracing multiple developments across the industry. Between August 2017 and January 2021, I produced more than 30 drafts of a table of contents while continuing my research. Then, on March 7, 2021, I made a decisive shift. I wrote in my research log: "Made the decision to make the book about Black Panther and Coates, not about comics in general.” From that moment until October 11, 2024, I drafted 33 additional versions of the table of contents, steadily refining the project’s scope and structure.

On the one hand, I was aware of the limits of focusing on one Black writer at a time. On the other hand, I had compelling reasons to center Ta-Nehisi Coates. I was extending research I had begun in Bad Men: Creative Touchstones of Black Writers (2020), as well as in ideas I had been developing in my blog writing. Concentrating on Coates’s work on Black Panther also provided a powerful entry point for discussing other Black creators in comics and the broader ecosystem of critics, artists, and commentators shaping the field.

My two previous books were organized into five substantial chapters, each centered on a distinct topic. For this project, I wanted a different feel—more chronological and slightly less overtly academic. I ultimately structured the manuscript into ten shorter chapters, allowing the narrative to unfold across time while maintaining momentum.

An editor at Bloomsbury had read an article that my brother Kenton and I had written and invited us to submit a proposal for what became One Black Writer at a Time. When we submitted that proposal, I asked whether I could also share my manuscript on Black Panther, which was already well underway.

By the time I began writing the manuscript in earnest, I had spent years researching and outlining. I felt an unusual motivation to move steadily and deliberately. As I conceptualized the closing sections, I decided to title the final chapter “Star Wars for Black People,” borrowing a phrase used in 2018 to describe aspects of the Black Panther film. That framing allowed me to explore Coates’s conception of “The Intergalactic Empire of Wakanda,” Afrofuturist aesthetics, and my longstanding interest in Star Wars.

Knowing that chapter was ahead of me gave motivated me to keep a steady writing pace. I pushed forward, chapter by chapter, eager to reach it. When I finally finished, I felt satisfaction and also a touch of reluctance. I was glad to complete the book, but a part of me wanted to keep thinking and writing just a little longer.

Related:

• Book Notes: Writing Black Panther

Book Notes: Writing Black Panther

Writing Black Panther: Ta-Nehisi Coates and Representation Struggles (2026) focuses on Ta-Nehisi Coates's 50-issue run on the comic book and highlights the many developments taking place in the industry during that time.

Entries: 

• The Origins of Writing Black Panther

Overview of the Black Lit Network

The Black Lit Network is a dynamic, data-rich, and publicly accessible digital platform designed to strengthen and transform African American literary studies by expanding the discoverability of Black-authored works and connecting them to engaging multimedia resources for scholars, students, and broad public audiences.

The Network is organized around four main portals:

The Literary Navigator is a searchable, multi-genre digital archive that enables readers, students, and scholars to discover and explore more than 2,000 Black-authored works through interconnected, reader-centered pathways across genres, historical periods, and themes.

Remarkable Receptions Podcast is an audio series that examines the critical and popular responses to African American literary works, highlighting how Black writers and their texts have entered and shaped public and scholarly conversations.

This portal also includes a variety of videos, some focusing on African American poetry, and some on aspects of Black literary history.

The Literary Data Gallery showcases visual projects that use data to highlight Black writers, artists, and their cultural legacies. Through charts, timelines, and other visualizations, the Gallery reveals patterns in publishing, creative production, and critical attention, offering new ways to understand African American literary and artistic histories.

The Multithreaded Literary Glossary is a multimedia hub offering concise definitions, curated lists, key scenes, and interconnected commentary that illuminate the authors, genres, movements, and recurring themes shaping African American literary studies.

Related

• Black Lit Network

Some Forms of Reading

Realizing that my team and our interviewees had various ideas in mind when we asked about "reading," I figured I should offer definitions of various kinds. 

Academic reading is the study of texts for the purposes of learning or completing assignments within scholarly or classroom contexts.

Book-length reading is the experience of reading a complete, extended work,, such as a novel or nonfiction book, that unfolds ideas or narratives across chapters.

Close reading is the detailed, line-by-line analysis of language, structure, and meaning within a specific passage.

Deep reading is the slow, cognitively demanding process in which skilled readers move beyond decoding to integrate perception, analysis, inference, reflection, and empathy, constructing layered meaning while continually strengthening the brain’s reading circuits.

Digital reading is the engagement with text through electronic devices, often across multiple platforms and formats.

Immersive reading is the act of becoming fully absorbed in a text, entering its world with focused attention and minimal distraction.

Informational reading is reading primarily for facts, updates, or practical knowledge rather than aesthetic or interpretive engagement.

Long-form reading is the sustained engagement with extended texts that require continuous attention over significant stretches of time.

Screen-based (or onscreen) reading is the act of reading text displayed on phones, tablets, or computers, typically within environments shaped by hyperlinks, notifications, and multitasking.

Scroll-based reading is the rapid, continuous consumption of short segments of text, often on social media or news feeds, characterized by movement, brevity, and frequent shifts in attention.

Skimming is the strategic scanning of a text to identify key points, themes, or relevant sections without reading every word.

Related:

• Notes on Black Readers & Digital Culture

Maryanne Wolf and Deep Reading

The research and writing my team has been doing has me thinking about the concept of “deep reading” as presented by Maryanne Wolf in her works, in particular in Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World (2018).

She describes deep reading as a slow, cognitively demanding process that engages multiple regions of the brain in order to analyze, infer, reflect, and empathize. For Wolf, beyond simply decoding words on a page or screen, deep reading is also about constructing meaning through background knowledge, critical thinking, and emotional engagement with a text.

She notes at one point that

“We who are expert readers process and connect our lower-level perceptual information (i.e., the first rings of the reading circuit) at near-breakneck speeds. Only such speeds can enable us to allocate attention to the higher-level deep-reading processes, which in turn constantly feed their conclusions back and forth with the lower-level processes, thus better pre- paring them for the next words they encounter” (37).

Later, Wolf explains that

“The formation of the reading-brain circuit is a unique epigenetic achievement in the intellectual history of our species. Within this circuit, deep reading significantly changes what we perceive, what we feel, and what we know and in so doing alters, informs, and elaborates the circuit itself” (68).

Related: 

• Notes on Black Readers & Digital Culture

Something Unexpected about Students' Reading Preferences

By Albert Smith

While interviewing Black men regarding their reading habits and digital culture, I was surprised to find out just how many students preferred engaging with literature physically instead of digitally.

With the rise of digital reading, especially in the forms of e-books and podcasts, I had assumed that most students would have expressed interest in newer and more accessible formats. I had to rethink these assumptions following numerous interviews where students noted that they preferred physical books as they were less distracting.

The desire to engage with physical books despite there being accessible options online speaks to a community of traditional readers at SIUE that value tangibleness over convenience. While most assignments and reading at SIUE are assigned digitally, there are benefits of reverting to classic learning methods that students identify with and actively seek.

In an everchanging world of digital advancement, students of SIUE are expressing interest in relationships with physical media.

Related: 

• Notes on Black Readers & Digital Culture

Non-identified Interest as a Major Barrier for Black Men Readers

By Albert Smith

I view non-identified interest as a major barrier facing Black men readers at SIUE because many interviewees mentioned that they were not interested in reading material related to their primary area of study.

This is a barrier as sustained recreational reading requires identifying interesting material that will warrant engagement. Without properly identifying the kinds of literature that one enjoys, the potential for wanting to discuss or critically analyze that material goes down drastically. Second-year student Brandon Perry mentioned that much of the literature associated with his coursework wasn’t interesting because he wasn’t interested in the major he had originally chosen.

To identify reading interests, instructors should seek relevant topics that students have expressed curiosity about. The approach of giving reading options to students (when applicable) should be considered, as this method allows students to choose what they want to read and can engage with their choice accordingly.

Black men readers are often assigned reading that they can’t identify with; there is little acknowledgement that they may have alternate interests, which can increase their engagement with reading.

Related: 

• Five Major Barriers Facing Black Women Readers

• Five Major Barriers Facing Black Men Readers

• Notes on Black Readers & Digital Culture

The Data Rangers Research Team

By Kenton Rambsy

The Black short fiction annotation project depends on sustained, coordinated labor, as each story must be read line by line with consistent decisions about dialogue, space, and character so that shared standards and protocols keep the dataset even and analytically reliable.

I established the Data Rangers Annotation Initiative to give a team of emergent researchers opportunities to gain experience and sharpen their skills working with large-scale data projects in the humanities. The initiative brings together students working at the intersection of Black Studies and Digital Humanities who annotate stories using defined methods and quality control practices. We meet regularly, compare interpretive decisions, and refine guidelines so the dataset remains consistent and replicable.

This collaborative approach builds on a longer tradition in Black Studies. W. E. B. Du Bois worked with students to collect and visualize data for the “Exhibit of American Negroes” at the 1900 Paris World’s Fair. The Slave Voyages project required decades of coordinated archival reconciliation. Douglass Day, launched in 2017 by the Colored Conventions Project, organizes an annual transcribe a thon dedicated to preserving Black historical documents through collective labor. Knowledge production in Black Studies has long relied on structured, collaborative documentation.

Each Data Ranger is responsible for a group of stories that contribute to a growing research archive whose annotations extend beyond a single semester and will inform future publications, visualizations, and public-facing tools related to Black short fiction. The project also develops advanced research skills, as students document interpretive decisions, apply Excel functions to verify data, and translate literary nuance into structured datasets. What distinguishes the Data Rangers is their ability to combine close reading with computational precision, producing scholarship grounded in Black Studies and designed for long-term impact.

Data Rangers:

Howard University

Nandi Chase (Washington, DC): Sophomore, Economics Major
India Crowe (Hampton, GA): Sophomore, Sociology Major
Cheyenne Freeman (Washington, DC): Senior African American Studies Major
Lyric Hoover (New Orleans, LA): Junior, English Major
Giselle Huggins (Suwanee, GA): Sophomore, African American Studies Major
Nyla Jones (Orange County, CA): PhD Student in English
Abiba Moncriffe (Desoto, Texas): Sophomore, African American Studies Major
Gabriella Pardlo (New York, NY): Sophomore, Economics Major
Damarian Washington (Brooklyn, NY): Junior, History Major

Morgan State University
Kweku Schmidt (Bowie, MD): Senior, English Major

Related:

The Black Short Story Project