The Center for Black Literature at Medgar Evers College welcomes author Todd Steven Burroughs to discuss his latest book Marvel's Black Panther: A Comic Book Biography, From Stan Lee to Ta-Nehisi Coates on Thursday, November 8.
Burroughs, a journalist, self-described popular culture geek and a lifelong student of the history of Black media, will talk about the origins of Black Panther and his different representations from the 1960s to the present in a conversation with Dr. Greg Carr, associate professor of Africana Studies at Howard University.
Created by Marvel Comics legends Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, The Black Panther is considered the first Black superhero in American mainstream comics. Marvel's Black Panther: A Comic Book Biography narrates the history of the character from his first appearance in 1966—the same year, the Black Panther Party was formed in Oakland, California—through Ta-Nehisi Coates' version in 2015.
Marvel's Black Panther: A Comic Book Biography tells the story of how Black and White writers envisioned the character during that period, as a Patrice Lumumba to a Sidney Poitier, a Nelson Mandela to a reflective, 21st-century king. Along the way, the limitations of White liberalism and the boundless nature of the Black imagination are revealed. It is the first textual study of a superhero comic book character, examining its writers and the stories they have created over a fifty year period.
Burroughs holds a Ph.D. in communication from the University of Maryland's Philip Merrill College of Journalism and is the co-author of Civil Rights: Yesterday and Today, as well as Civil Rights Chronicle. He has also contributed to several other books, including Race and Resistance: African-Americans in the Twenty-First Century, Putting The Movement Back into Civil Rights Teaching and the Ethnic Media in America scholarly anthology series.
Thursday's event, which is part of the John Killens Reading Series, is free and open to the public and takes place at Medgar Evers College's Edison O. Jackson Auditorium at 6:30pm. To RSVP, go here.
