There is an old adage that in comics death doesn’t really matter. Your favorite character has probably died, been reborn, been a zombified version of themselves, been cloned, been brainwashed to kill for the enemy or maybe even had their marriage erased by “the devil” at some point in the time you have been reading comics. Many of us have probably had a betting pool, for how many issues the publisher would actually go before the character was back, or even it was just a fake out and they didn’t actually even die. If you are an X-Men fan you are definitely thinking about Jean currently. At the moment (spoiler alert if you aren’t reading X books since HOX/POX) the X-Men can all effectively be reborn at any given time, death is a thing of the past.
Let’s come back to reality, where death doesn’t work like it does in comics. In reality, death is very permanent. On August 28th we lost Chadwick Boseman, a super talented actor who brought Black Panther to the screen in all the regal glory befitting a King. There are people out there, who don’t understand why we mourn the loss of an actor. I can understand how that may seem odd to them, but I would argue “maybe if we felt ANY loss as keenly as we felt the death of one close to us, human history would be a lot less bloody”. The irony here is the loss of Chadwick Boseman is personal to so many of us. Let me take a step back…..
When I was a kid, I never had the thought “I want to read about a comic book character that looks like, or reminds me of myself” but as a white straight male, picking up X-Men, that was already occurring, so I never really had to experience that thought. I would wager that many peoples favorite characters remind them of themselves in some way. Who loves Captain America that isn’t patriotic? Who loves Deadpool that doesn’t at least have a little bit of a smart mouth on occasion? Who loves Spider-man that hasn’t experienced some form of loss and want to do the right thing, but balancing every day life with that idea makes it really hard? For the record, there is a trend in the characters I just pointed out. All of those are white straight males, with the exclusion of Deadpool who is pansexual, but generally viewed more as a straight character by most people.
Stan Lee and Jack Kirby created Black Panther in 1966 when segregation was still a normal concept. This character has existed in comics since that point, but to have him as the lead of a movie, with a predominately black cast, with a black director, for a blockbuster super hero movie is a much bigger deal. Chadwick Boseman brought Black Panther to life, and in the process allowed many kids with the thought I never had to experience be able to say “finally a character who looks like me”. Sometimes we have a hard time understanding a concept that we haven’t personally experienced, the X-Men were created as an entire analogy of that concept.
The loss of Chadwick Boseman is personal to many people in a way that I am unqualified to try and put into words. It’s personal to me, because it brings me joy to see people represented. It’s personal to me because I love seeing a kid look at a comic character, in a book or on a screen and want to put on that character’s costume and imagine being that character. It’s personal to me because I love great characters, great stories, and the idea that ANYONE can be a hero, even if being a hero is something as simple as treating other people equally and making the world a little better in the process.
I wish all the best to Chadwick’s family and friends. He went through four years of fighting cancer and nobody outside of his closest family and friends knew. He went to premiers and pr events and everything else and people joked about how he was getting less excited about giving the Wakanda Forever sign while he was secretly withering away. He was the definition of class to the very end. He will forever be my Black Panther. He will forever be my King. He will forever live on in the hearts and minds of so many people as an inspiration and a reminder that anyone can be a hero. In the end, that’s the only immortality any of us should really strive for, being a positive example to help others work towards a better, more inclusive future.
Wakanda Forever