Comic Book Shop as Source of Materials for Writing Black Panther

In many respects, a single comic book shop stands out as the central source of the primary materials that became my book Writing Black Panther: Ta-Nehisi Coates and Representation Struggles.

I purchased all 50 issues of Coates’s run from the same place: Heroic Adventures. I have been a customer at the shop for about 15 years now. By the time Coates’s Black Panther was announced, I had already been stopping by Heroic Adventures every Wednesday, new comic book day, for years, and I immediately asked the staff to add the title to my pull list.

Like clockwork during Coates's run, I was there to pick up my copy of Black Panther. When variants appeared, I grabbed those as well. I first heard about one of my favorite alternative covers for Black Panther when visiting Heroic Adventures. I eventually went on to collect all the Black Panther variants, which remains amusing to me because I distinctly remember visiting the shop during the summer of 2012 and feeling baffled as customers scrambled to grab variants for The Walking Dead #100.

In December 2018, I began drafting a table of contents for what would eventually become Writing Black Panther. Initially, I planned to write more broadly about diversity in comic books. Over time, however, I decided to focus specifically on Coates and Black Panther while still engaging larger questions concerning representation, politics, readership, and the evolving culture of comics.

Over the years, Heroic Adventures became more than a comic shop for me and became part of the routine, conversations, and collecting culture that helped shape Writing Black Panther.

Related:

• Book Notes: Writing Black Panther

• A Notebook on Heroic Adventures