Ta-Nehisi Coates is continuing his Black Panther comic saga for Marvel, this time with a new series and a new co-writer—Bad Feminist author Roxane Gay. Vulture is reporting that the two authors are joining forces for a series called Black Panther: World of Wakanda.
Marvel's recent announcement that a black teenage girl named Riri would be taking over as Iron Man caused many observers to criticize the company for its complete absence of real-world black female writers. This new series will involve several black women as writers and illustrators in addition to Gay. Alitha Martinez is the illustrator, and Yona Harvey and Afua Richardson will co-write and illustrate, respectively, a special "backup" story that will appear in the series' debut issue. Harvey is an accomplished poet and a professor at the University of Pittsburgh. The secondary story will be about Zenzi, a revolutionary introduced in the first issue to Coates' current series.
Gay is a writer and professor best known for her 2014 collection of essays Bad Feminist. This will be her first time writing for comics, though she has written an extremely well-reviewed novel. Gay told the New York Times that writing the series is "the most bizarre thing I’ve ever done, and I mean that in the best possible way."
Ta-Nehisi Coates was tapped to write Black Panther in fall 2015. The series has released three issues so far, to tremendous success.
Black Panther: World of Wakanda is scheduled to debut in November of this year.
Correction: A previous version of this article incorrectly spelled Roxane Gay's name.
