Plus.. BLACK PANTHER STRIKES!

HOW BLACK PANTHER — THE FIRST MAINSTREAM BLACK SUPERHERO MOVIE — COULD CHANGE COMICBOOK FILMS FOREVER

AFTER RYAN COOGLER signed on to direct the biggest movie of his career, his wife Zinzi insisted they go back, together, to the place where it all began, where Black Panther first came into his life. In many respects, it actually began before that first encounter, when Coogler, still a kid, would follow around his comic-book-mad cousin seven years his senior. “He was reading everything, man,” Coogler remembers. “Stuff from

Superman, stuff from DC, from Marvel.” With a lifelong appetite seeded in his belly and further cultivated by the X-men comics that he bought in the shop across the street from his elementary school, Coogler wanted more. And specifically, more of something he hadn’t yet seen. “I was going in there and wanting to find a superhero comic book where the main character looked like me,” he remembers. “So I walked in and talked to the guy at the front desk and he pointed me to Black Panther.”

Front Desk Guy talked him through at length the different Black Panther runs they stocked. And Coogler, who until that point had only seen one secondary black comic-book character, Bishop in X-men, was completely blown away by the series about an African king and superhero. “I mean, to have a dude with his own comic book named after him and he had this whole run and this pretty cool history — I thought it was amazing.”

Having his own schoolyard epiphany just a few years earlier was executive producer Nate Moore — the man who would call Ryan Coogler up after seeing his second film, Creed. “There was a Captain America cover with Captain America in the foreground, flanked by the Falcon and Black Panther,” he says of his very first comic. “That was the 