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Black Panther & The Crew Gives Marvel Comics A Black History They Didn't Have Before

When Marvel Comics started publishing superhero comic books, you didn't have black lead characters. They wouldn't get distributed. The distribution system basically banned such a thing. The emergence of Black Panther as a superhero character in The Fantastic Four, on the covers no less, was a radical thing – but it helped that his costume covered him head to toe.

The Black Panther gave the Marvel Universe a history with the country of Wakanda, a hidden high-tech African city. And a number of writers including Don McGregor, Christopher Priest, Reginald Hudlin and now Ta-Nehisi Coates have explored that further.

But what about America? There has been a few attempts to create a greater diversity in Marvel superheroes in their past as well as their present. Bob Morales wrote Truth, the series that established Isiah Bradley as a survivor of a series of experiments on black Americans in the 1940s to replicate a Captain America. Agents Of Atlas established Blue Marvel as a black scientist superhero from the sixties, who was made to retire from his role by a racist society.

And today we get another attempt to excavate Marvel's past with Black Panther & The Crew by Ta-Nehisi Coates and Butch Guice, telling the story of Ezra Keith, a civil rights leader who has died in police custody. But who had a much greater impact on the Marvel Universe, by creating his own Crew back in the nineteen fifties in New York. And one that took on the gangsters of the day.

And giving us new fifties superheroes Flare, Brawl, The Gates and Gloss.

And as the modern Crew gathers again, fresh from their antics in the main Black Panther series, so it looks as if more of that history is about to be unearthed…

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