Black Panther & Black Lightning Stand Out From Superhero Landscape

WARNING: The following article contains mild spoilers for both Black Panther and https://www.cbr.com/tag/black-lightning/.

If you'd mentioned to someone even seven years ago that a movie about Black Panther would not only exist but be breaking box office records and inspiring a genuine cultural moment, they probably wouldn't have believed you. Likewise, no one would've thought that a show about a dedicated C-list superhero like Black Lightning would be a smash hit and making TV history.

Yet, incredibly, all this has come to pass.

But it shouldn't come as a surprise Black Lightning and Black Panther are huge hits. Not only are they shaking up the overwhelming whiteness that's stifled the modern age of superhero movies and television, they're taking characters that have been either sidelined or ignored for decades and giving their stories new contexts and making them relevant for modern audiences. And they're rewiring superhero media in the process.

The obvious place to start is Black Panther, a movie so anticipated that it was one of the most talked-about films of 2017, despite not even coming out until a few weeks ago. And, once you see the film, you realize there's good reason for that.

Not only does the screenplay by director Ryan Coogler and Joe Robert Cole reposition T'Challa (Chadwick Boseman) so that he's at the beginning of his reign as king of Wakanda and as the Black Panther (a period of history largely ignored outside of flashbacks until Marvel's current Rise of the Black Panther miniseries), it also takes the troubling, uncomfortable parts of the character and makes them the primary thematic focus of the film.

By "troubling" and "uncomfortable," I mean the film zeroes in on the facts that T'Challa is a king -- historically, not the most enlightened type of ruler -- and that Wakanda's history is one of both incredible technological advancement and staunch isolationism. Nakia (Lupita Nyong'o) argues repeatedly with T'Challa that Wakanda should drop its facade--a holographically-assisted one--that it is a third world country and should help the rest of the world, particularly the fellow nations of Africa.

Likewise, T'Challa is torn over how to follow the reign of his father T'Chaka (John Kani) as well as be a fair king in his own right. T'Chaka--who was murdered by Baron Zemo in Captain America: Civil War--tells him early on in T'Challa's ceremonial vision of the ancestral plane that "It is hard for a good man to be king." T'Challa struggles with the burden of this throughout the film and the true emotional climax of the story comes when he openly declares that his father and all his ancestors were wrong and that he must do things "my way!" Such a powerful rebuke of outdated, harmful traditions--and of the shameful secret that lies within his own family history--signifies that T'Challa is going to be both a new kind of king and a new kind of superhero.

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On the opposite end of the spectrum (both in age as well as being a DC character), there's Black Lightning. Jefferson Pierce (Cress Williams) is something that hasn't really been seen in the modern age of superhero media outside of the start of The Dark Knight Rises: a retired superhero.

Specifically, because of the stress it put on his marriage (which didn't last), Pierce has retired and devoted himself to a job as a high school principal (a different kind of authority figure, but one undoubtedly still king-like for the younger members of this family-aimed show). But, as always happens in these sorts of stories, his daughters Jennifer and Anissa getting kidnapped by members of the criminal gang known as the 100 forces Pierce out of retirement.

Having to go up against Tobias Whale and the 100 after a decade out of the tights-and-spandex game is a struggle for Jefferson, and it's fascinating to see him work through said struggle on screen. Also helping the show greatly and adding to its POV is that, at least for now, wholly separate from the "Arrowverse" of the other CW DC shows (including Supergirl which, while technically in a parallel universe of its own, has grown more and more intertwined with the casts of other shows). That a superpowered black man is left largely alone to struggle with his villains in a gang-ridden city is thematically important but, unlike Black Panther, this difference is never really messaged well.

Another thing that sets the show apart is the inclusion of Jefferson's daughter Anissa (Nafeesa Williams) aka Thunder, who is the first lesbian black woman in superhero television history and probably the most high-profile queer POC on broadcast television since ABC's Once Upon A Time reimagined Mulan as a lesbian. By making Anissa's sexuality an already-established fact, rather than a discovery to be explored and mapped out, Black Lightning not only strikes a blow for representation but also sidesteps the coming-out narrative, showing that there's more to Thunder as a character and allowing her that growth.

What makes these stories so radical is how they stand out from the larger corporate superhero narrative they are a part of. Black Panther is part of the biggest franchise in entertainment today, the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Yet, it feels so different at all levels--the cinematography is bright and colorful instead of semi-drab, it has a majority black cast, its music is spliced together from hip-hop beats and traditional African instruments rather than bombastic strings, etc.--that it raises the bar for Avengers: Infinity War and everything else in the MCU to come..

Similarly, Black Lightning, which has a lot going against it--its title character's costume is a bit odd, and, like its fellow CW superhero shows, it has far too many poorly lit nighttime scenes that are just confusing sometimes--winds up winning by virtue of its difference. Not only is Pierce from a completely different background and neighborhood than the ultra-rich Oliver Queen, but his age gives him a whole lot of lived-in experience that is fascinating to see play out on screen.

In years to come, the winter of 2018 will be seen as a formative moment for the evolution of superhero media, with Black Panther easily the best MCU film ever and Black Lightning showing how modern superhero TV can't ell more than one kind of story.

Now, if The Flash could figure out a way to not sideline Iris all the time, we'd be set.