I’m afraid that this interview with Coates, has merely confirmed that he really doesn’t have a clue as to what he’s currently doing with the Black Panther mythos.
T’Challa has never in the entirety of his pre-Coates existence, been solely portrayed as this uber-unstoppable or infallible protagonist that many of the characters detractors have been fond of mischaracterising him as being.
This is a character who prior to Priest revitalizing him, had been in creative limbo for just under sixteen years and who prior to that, had spent more than a few years languishing at the back of the proverbial bus, shouting out warnings to the Avengers just before getting knocked unconcious by whichever threat said Avengers were facing at the time.
T’Challa was that noble negro, stalwart in friendship and long in flowery prose, that appeared occasionally in a few books as a guest whilst the rest of the MU marched merrily on.
All that changed with Priest bringing T’Challa back in style and when his run ended, Reginald Hudlin took up the gauntlet, and delivered a T’Challa and Wakanda that were extremely confident and fully capable of dealing with all threats on some straight up, in your face 10,000 year old advanced civilization (unsullied by Western imperialism) ish.
Reginald Hudlin treated T’Challa and his world as the A-list concepts that Lee and Kirby launched all the way back in 1966 and for that, he recieved crazy amounts of pushback from readers more invested in T’Challa and his people being portrayed as chumps.
To me, the fact that post Jonathan Hickman’s Secret Wars II, all of T’Challa’s best ANAD MU appearances have occured outside of his own solo book whilst Coates has filled said solo with rape camps and rampant misogyny within Wakanda, tells me all I need to know about this writers agenda laden approach to T’Challa as a character and Wakanda as an intellectual concept.
I somehow doubt, that he would have been so quick to introduce rape camps and rampant stereotypical misogyny into an X-Men or Spiderman centred book but I suppose it’s much easier to push Boko Haram inflected aesthetics through the most technologically and spiritually advanced nation on MU Earth as opposed to actually showing them being an advanced and resilient in the face of adversity.
Coates is a complete and utter idiot as far as writing the BP mythos goes.
