His “Black Panther” fandom stretches back to Dr. Greg Carr’s boyhood, with him dashing inside a neighborhood store to snag the latest edition of that barrier-busting Marvel comics series about a caped, cat-masked superhero hailing from a fictionalized, self-determining African nation.
“Lord, have mercy,” said Carr, remembering his 8-year-old self, ducking into that Nashville store. “I’ve been a fan ever since my daddy gave me 50 cents to run around the corner and buy one of those books … It was the first time we saw ourselves in the comics.”
As a movie version of that “Black Panther” comic book, which debuted in 1961, is released Friday on the Big Screen, it’s worth noting that Marvel toyed with renaming the series “Black Leopard” during the Black Power movement when Black Panthers of a different sort toted guns and demanded Black freedoms.
Marvel backed off that idea, said Carr, chair of Howard University’s Department of Afro-American Studies. Still, the renaming idea itself said much about White fear at a time of surging Black resistance, and of Black pride akin to what now is propelling “Black Panther” the movie – with its marquee Black acting cast – to likely blockbuster status.
The optimistic projections are based on historically high advance ticket sales, bookings of entire theaters by like-minded “Black Panther” devotees old and neophyte, and such fanfare as “Black Panther” backers parading across Youtube and other social media hotspots in self-styled panther-centric attire.
The collective signs, Carr and other scholars said, are disproving notions long held by Hollywood: That too few Blacks — and, by extension, other people of color in an increasingly diverse America — are cinema buffs. That a movie with strong Black characters at its core, not on its periphery as Black characters often are, won’t deliver sufficient returns at the box office.
“It’s a milestone film,” said Dr. Darnell Hunt, a University of California at Los Angeles sociologist and researcher on the entertainment media’s handling of race and diversity. “It’s the first tent-pole film — a term they use in Hollywood to explain these big-budget blockbusters — that has a majority Black cast and a tells a purely Black story.”
