How much of the series is influenced by Black Panther’s current place in the mainstream?
Well, there’s an interesting relationship between filmed media and then what goes on with comics. And I think in the periphery, you are aware that you’re working on a character that maybe more people are going to pay attention to because of the cultural prominence of the live-action adaptation of the character. So you’re ambiently aware of it, but again, it is nothing that lives in my head. Ultimately, it lives and dies on the story you’re telling and whether people connect to it. So whether there weren’t any adaptations of the character or whether the character was the most important Marvel live-action adaptation [in] the world, the job is still the same. And I’m aesthetically aware of the movies and it’s there, but I wouldn’t say that they’re an aesthetic true north for what I’m doing.
There’s still a combination of aesthetics you can do on the page that is very difficult to do in film, and you don’t have the same budget limitations when it comes to production value and scale that you would with film, that it would be if you’re doing a film, and I know this [as] a filmmaker. So I think sometimes it can be a prison a little bit working within that same paradigm, because you still are free from it, and you also have to give a literary form, which allows you to tell a story in a different way. It allows you to have the passage of time in a story happen in a different way. And comics aren’t just films on paper, they’re their own grammar. It’s its own kind of storytelling form. So yeah, you kind of know what’s going on, but you just kind of have to put the blinders on and just get to work.
How did working on the “Killmonger” miniseries prepare you for this comic?
Well, I mean, maybe in the sense that I was dealing with a character from the Black Panther universe, I think. I mean, the “Killmonger” series was very much an action thriller about a person’s descent into their own kind of anger and bitterness, about the gravitational pull of trauma in a lot of ways. And influences there were like Michael Mann, maybe even some foreign action thrillers, crime thrillers; “Gomorrah,” the Italian horror. I just had different influences when I was doing that project. So I don’t think it’s too connected. And I’m lucky, because I work on the comics that I like to work on, and I don’t have a deep ambition to get from here to there, to grow into this or that. No, that’s not really why I’m there. I love the form. I grew up reading comic books. I like writing them. I love the fans.
So I never really look at one thing as a stepping stone to another, as much as I just look at when someone brings me the opportunity to work on something, the first question I ask is, can I bring something unique to this? Or do I have a perspective on this? That’s why I turn a lot of things down, because oftentimes I don’t have a useful perspective, I think, or I don’t have a native interest that I think would yield in a good story. But I haven’t yet done something on an epic landscape like this before in any form, really. And I have little desire to try to do that as a screenplay, or as a film, or a television show. So the idea of doing it within a comic book seemed like a way to scratch that itch and explore that kind of storytelling in a form that would be more fun for me to do.
How much of the series is influenced by Black Panther’s current place in the mainstream?
Well, there’s an interesting relationship between filmed media and then what goes on with comics. And I think in the periphery, you are aware that you’re working on a character that maybe more people are going to pay attention to because of the cultural prominence of the live-action adaptation of the character. So you’re ambiently aware of it, but again, it is nothing that lives in my head. Ultimately, it lives and dies on the story you’re telling and whether people connect to it. So whether there weren’t any adaptations of the character or whether the character was the most important Marvel live-action adaptation [in] the world, the job is still the same. And I’m aesthetically aware of the movies and it’s there, but I wouldn’t say that they’re an aesthetic true north for what I’m doing.
There’s still a combination of aesthetics you can do on the page that is very difficult to do in film, and you don’t have the same budget limitations when it comes to production value and scale that you would with film, that it would be if you’re doing a film, and I know this [as] a filmmaker. So I think sometimes it can be a prison a little bit working within that same paradigm, because you still are free from it, and you also have to give a literary form, which allows you to tell a story in a different way. It allows you to have the passage of time in a story happen in a different way. And comics aren’t just films on paper, they’re their own grammar. It’s its own kind of storytelling form. So yeah, you kind of know what’s going on, but you just kind of have to put the blinders on and just get to work.
How did working on the “Killmonger” miniseries prepare you for this comic?
Well, I mean, maybe in the sense that I was dealing with a character from the Black Panther universe, I think. I mean, the “Killmonger” series was very much an action thriller about a person’s descent into their own kind of anger and bitterness, about the gravitational pull of trauma in a lot of ways. And influences there were like Michael Mann, maybe even some foreign action thrillers, crime thrillers; “Gomorrah,” the Italian horror. I just had different influences when I was doing that project. So I don’t think it’s too connected. And I’m lucky, because I work on the comics that I like to work on, and I don’t have a deep ambition to get from here to there, to grow into this or that. No, that’s not really why I’m there. I love the form. I grew up reading comic books. I like writing them. I love the fans.
So I never really look at one thing as a stepping stone to another, as much as I just look at when someone brings me the opportunity to work on something, the first question I ask is, can I bring something unique to this? Or do I have a perspective on this? That’s why I turn a lot of things down, because oftentimes I don’t have a useful perspective, I think, or I don’t have a native interest that I think would yield in a good story. But I haven’t yet done something on an epic landscape like this before in any form, really. And I have little desire to try to do that as a screenplay, or as a film, or a television show. So the idea of doing it within a comic book seemed like a way to scratch that itch and explore that kind of storytelling in a form that would be more fun for me to do.