Letitia Wright has just brought Shuri into the Marvel Cinematic Universe by debuting in Black Panther. Audiences around the world are clearly in agreement, Shuri is one of the stand-out characters of the entire film. Her comedic timing is perfect and she breathes a sense of fun into a film that could’ve ended up being consistently dramatically somber. Let’s not forget using memes to make jokes at her brother’s expense. And although we were disappointed she didn’t take the Heart-Shaped Herb in T’Challa’s absence midway through the film, she still managed to impress us with her fighting prowess and Panther Gauntlets in the finale.

But in the comics there is a lot more to Shuri than meets the eye. She might be the Princess of Wakanda in the MCU, but her role in ruling Wakanda has been far more central in recent years. She’s a fully-fledged Black Panther, and is potentially as powerful as T’Challa if not more so. Shuri is an enigmatic, vicious character that heroes and villains shouldn’t get on the wrong side of -- as Namor found out. If the MCU has any of this planned for Letitia Wright, we’re excited. Here are 15 things you never knew about Shuri.

15 RECENT ADDITION

Whilst T’Challa may have debuted back in Fantastic Four #52 in 1966, his sister is a much more recent addition to Wakanda. Reginald Hudlin and John Romita Jr. invented the younger member of the Royal Family in 2005. She made her first appearance in Black Panther vol. 4. During her introduction, she attempts to join in the challenge to become a Black Panther, but before she can make it into the fight, T’Challa wins and takes the mantle.

Passed down from his Father T’Chaka, T’Challa becomes the King of Wakanda rather than Shuri becoming the Queen. It partly feels like an afterthought simply due to the late entry, but Hudlin and Romita Jr. gave her a welcome introduction to the Marvel Universe. We don’t see any of this storyline during the MCU, but it would’ve been interesting to see Shuri throw her name in the ring for ruler.

14 REBOOTED BUCKY

A large part of the first Avengers: Infinity War Prelude comic dealt with Bucky Barnes in the aftermath of Captain America: Civil War. We know that Black Panther takes him to Wakanda and places him in cryo-storage so that his scientists (aka Shuri) can work on Bucky’s brain.

She explains that trying to rid his brain of Hydra’s programming isn’t as simple as she thought. She explains that there are many tortured moments in Bucky’s memory that have been manipulated. Shuri has created an algorithm that pulls out anything related to the keywords that Hydra had implemented in his programming. But, the way Shuri has worked it means his original memories will still be kept; "Essentially, I should be able to reboot him,"

13 SHE’S A BLACK PANTHER TOO

Shuri T'Challa's sister as Black Panther

When the Cabal fail to recruit Black Panther they launch a vicious attack on him, which ends when he falls into a coma due to his injuries. Since Wakanda can’t be without a ruler or a protector, Shuri is next in line. And when Morlun begins to lay waste to Wakanda, she straps on the Black Panther costume and throws herself into the fight.

She manages to save the nation whilst also healing T’Challa so that he rises out of the coma that he was left in after the Cabal’s attack. Her powers and abilities are relatively the same as T’Challa’s after the Panther God allows her to keep the Black Panther mantle; enhanced strength, speed and endurability. Her costume is also similar to T’Challa’s iconic look, except she has a huge fur collar that flows onto her shoulders.

12 FLOCK OF BIRDS

After her time in the Djalia, the afterlife made up of Wakandan souls, one ability that Shuri could tap into was transformation. No, she cannot transform into a literal Black Panther (although that would be impressive), she can turn herself into either a huge flock of birds, or one very large one. It is an interesting power to say the least. She can also flick between her powers at will.

We even see her switch from her impenetrable stone form into the flock of birds without a moment’s hesitation in a fight during Black Panther #18. T’Challa might be the King of Wakanda, but Shuri also has her fair share of abilities that sometimes puts her on a whole other level to her older brother.

11 JEALOUS OF T’CHALLA

Whilst Shuri eventually does become a Black Panther, originally she held a lot of jealousy towards T’Challa for his superheroic role as protector of Wakanda. Shuri was truly set on becoming the first female Black Panther ever since she was a child. However, Ramonda was completely opposed to this idea. She didn’t want her only daughter to be involved in conflict.

But Shuri disobeyed her Mother and attempted to join in the challenge against S’yan, her uncle. However, T’Challa managed to beat S’yan before Shuri could even make it into the arena. It caused the young hero to foster a jealousy of T’Challa and his powers thanks to the Heart-Shaped Herb. Obviously later on she managed to fulfill the role she had always wanted, even defying T’Challa in her methods of ruling Wakanda on occasion.

10 WAGED WAR WITH ATLANTIS

During "Avengers vs. X-Men", Namor mounted an attack on Wakanda that damaged the nation and struck a blow in the war. Since Shuri is considerably more hot-headed than T’Challa is, she responded to this by returning the favor. She waged an equally brutal war against Atlantis and the Atlantean Prince.

Remember, Namor is a mutant, so it was clear where his allegiances lied in the battle between the Avengers and the X-Men. But when Shuri and the Wakandan forces attacked Atlantis, they did so with minimal mercy. They killed scores of Atlanteans and establishing their dominance as one of the most powerful nations on the planet. T’Challa obviously objected to the idea of waging war against Atlantis. With that Disney deal on the horizon, it’s only a matter of time…

9 HER DEATH

Like most superheroes in comics, Shuri is killed off at one point. She stays behind during an attack from the Cabal. Shuri ends up fighting Proxima Midnight during “Time Runs Out”. Whilst the incursions are piercing the universe, the Cabal mounts an assault on Wakanda. Proxima Midnight and Shuri ends up sacrificing herself so that T’Challa could escape, but she fails to stop the villain and is left in a bizarre state of living death.

Since Proxima Midnight’s spear is made from a star inside quantum singularity, it’s unsurprising that Shuri wasn’t prepared for the fight. But it wasn’t actually the spear that brought about her death. She was trapped in an amber-like substance that kept her both alive and dead simultaneously. Luckily, T’Challa eventually manages to revive his sister. But she’s not exactly the same hero as she once was.

8 SHE BANISHED T’CHALLA

During "Avengers vs. X-Men", Wakanda and Atlantis were put on opposing sides. Since Namor is a mutant, it’s obvious where his allegiances lay. Namor had offered Shuri an agreement that he would cease their fighting if he could be allowed safety in Wakanda. Shuri declined Namor’s treaty and decided to continue her brutal war against Atlantis.

T’Challa obviously objected to Shuri’s vicious tactics, and begged her to call off her attacks. But she wasn’t in the mood to back down from her decision. Seeing her brother as both a decision and potentially trouble in her plans, she banished him from the Golden City. She has been fostering years of jealousy for her brother’s role as King after all. It makes sense that she’d want to make her own decisions.

7 MCU SHURI IS EXPERIMENTING WITH A.I.

What happened the last time somebody in the Marvel Cinematic Universe decided to meddle with artificial intelligence? Tony created Ultron, and the deranged robot decided to lay waste to Sokovia, hoping to wipe out all life on Earth. Well according to Shuri in the Avengers: Infinity War Prelude comic, Stark’s methods were “silly”. Wow.

But the interesting part is where Shuri teases things in the future of Wakanda’s technological evolution. "But more exciting is that this algorithm should provide even greater advancements in Wakanda's own artificial intelligence applications in the near future”. We’re both excited and terrified at the same time. On one hand, Shuri is smarter than Tony Stark and won’t make the same mistakes. But another A.I. on the table? That’s never a good sign.

6 SHE’S A KILLER

We know that Shuri has waged war with Atlantis when she’s in charge of Wakanda, but earlier on in her life as a Princess, she killed someone in a brutal way. Ulysses Klaw and a group of other supervillains mounted an assault on Wakanda and one of those villains was the Radioactive Man.

When he tried to fight Shuri, she had hold of the Ebony Blade that the Black Knight had brought with him during the attack. She swiped the indestructible sword across the Radioactive Man, killing him. Although Shuri survived the attack relatively unhurt, she struggled to deal with the fact that she had murdered someone. It was her first kill, and it had a lasting effect on her. But she channeled her troubled mind into becoming a Black Panther.

5 STORM AND THE FANTASTIC FOUR

Superheroes are great, but they’re even better when they’re surrounded by other heroes that don’t have anything to do with their backstory and stereotypical setting. So when they team-up, it makes an issue or story all the more satisfying. Take “Doomwar” for example, when Doctor Doom attempts to destroy Wakanda.

The villain manages to use Vibranium to infuse into his Doombots, meaning the fight looks bleak until the Fantastic Four, Storm and Shuri team up using the Vibranium weapons that Shuri has access to. Seeing them on the page together is a lot of fun. They even begin to mount an assault against Doom’s forces across the world together, albeit without the results they hoped for. It’s still great after all these years to see characters meeting across the page.

4 TRAINED IN THE AFTERLIFE

When Shuri was plunged into a state of ‘living death’ after her fight with Proxima Midnight, she actually managed to increase her abilities when she returned to life. She was trapped in an amber-like substance that technically killed her, but also technically preserved her body too.

When she awoke in the afterlife, called the Djalia, she was trained by a griot spirit who taught her a number of different abilities that she could use in the normal world. This spirit took on the form of Ramonda, Shuri’s Mother, so that she would be more at ease when being taught and so that her soul would find something familiar to latch onto during her time in the land of the dead. Those abilities certainly came in handy once T’Challa revived her.

3 NECROMANCER

That’s an intimidating title to say the least. Quite possibly the most impressive skill that Shuri took away from her time in the Djalia, was being able to raise the Wakandan dead. Granted, it completely wiped her of any energy and took an extreme toll on her body, but it’s like pulling an ace during a fight if she’s able to summon an army of the dead to fight on her side.

We’ve only briefly seen the Wakandan afterlife in the MCU, and Shuri gaining these powers in a comics accurate way would mean that Ramonda would have to die so that the emotional connection between the young Princess and the Griot would be there. But we have seen the undead in Thor: Ragnarok, so who knows what could happen in the future.

2 N’LIX DESIGNS HER TECHNOLOGY

In the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Shuri is a technological genius that rivals (if not bests) Tony Stark. Her inventions are incredibly futuristic thanks to Wakanda’s huge resource of Vibranium beneath their feet. And her inventor status is partially what makes her so interesting, because she’s a fully developed character rather than a plot-device. But in the comics, she’s a little different.

She (like T’Challa) still has a genius level intellect, but she isn’t the sole master inventor that we see her as during the Black Panther film. Sure, she makes her own modifications to some of her tech but it’s N’lix, her scientific advisor that gives her the technology giving the hero the edge over her enemies, but the translation from page to screen works quite nicely.

1 PANTHER REJECT

Shuri in the film was the cocky lighthearted member of T’Challa’s family. She constantly teased him and loved using memes to make fun of her older brother but she’s not shown as the jealous type whatsoever. She’s just willing to help out with her technology and fiercely protective of her friends and family. However in the comics, she’s a little more vicious.

For example, she coveted the Black Panther role for years, since she wanted to be the first female Black Panther of Wakanda. And although she did manage to achieve this, when she originally ate the Heart-Shaped Herb and put on the Panther suit, she was rejected by the great Panther God for her jealousy. It was her very goal in life that let her down. Eventually with her self-sacrifice, she was accepted by the God.