Black Panther Wakanda Forever post-credits scene turns Marvel comics

Like nearly everyone Movie Marvel Cinematic Universe before it, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever There’s a treat for fans who are patient enough to get past the point where the credits start.

You’d be hard-pressed to find another Marvel post-credits scene as touching as this one. But it also raises bigger questions about where the MCU stands, and how closely it will follow the comics.

[Ed. note: This piece contains spoilers for Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.]

Image: Marvel Studios

The film closes with T’Challa’s older sister Shuri (Letitia Wright) finally being able to come to terms with her family’s grief by performing a traditional Wakandan funeral rite. The credits scene begins moments later, when Nakia (Lupita Nyong’o) joins the young Black Panther and introduces her to Nakia’s secret son – T’Challa’s biological child and Shuri’s grandson. The boy said he was called Toussaint, in the sense of Toussaint Louverture, a key figure in the overthrow of French control in Haiti and the transformation of the country into a sovereign nation of formerly oppressed peoples. slave. But that, according to him, is his Haitian name, and he has another: Prince T’Challa, of Wakanda.

Nakia explains that she and the late T’Challa conceived in secret, and decided to raise their son outside of the pressures – and dangers, like Wakanda Forever expressly so – of the court of Wakandan. It’s a nice twist on the film’s theme, as Shuri embraces the last member of her family she didn’t even know she had. And it’s a tear-worthy tribute to T’Challa’s predecessor, the late actor Chadwick Boseman: a firm statement that a hero’s legacy exists alongside death in action. those who love them.

What would make it even more special is that there is no comic precedent for this scene. This moment stands on its own, without the current Marvel Comics continuity that the MCU has expertly weaponized to gain attention, interest, and ticket sales.

Wait, T’Challa doesn’t have a son in the comics?

Image: Reginald Hudlin, Scot Eaton / Marvel Comics

Though T’Challa has had some deeply romantic relationships – he and Storm of the X-Men were married in 2005, only for T’Challa to call off their engagement seven years later, after Wakanda destroyed by Namor, who was allied with the X-Men at the time. But he’s never been so lucky with royal heirs, at least not in the main Marvel Comics timeline.

But there is a story about a prince Wakandan never had.

Modern Giant-sized mutants is a loosely organized group of one-scene comics, each focusing on a different classic X-Men character in the series. dawn of the Krakoan Era. The books include a story in which a super-advanced and isolated human society called The World has infected Storm with a sci-fi disease, and Jean Gray and Emma Frost have combined powers. their psychics to cure her. It’s the story as it is printed – but the initial pitch will leave a huge mark on the Marvel Comics universe.

As X-Men architect Jonathan Hickman (writer puts Black Panther at the heart of one of the greatest Marvel stories ever told) shared on Jay & Miles X-Plain the X-Men audio filesInitial issues revealed that Storm, after rekindling her relationship with T’Challa, was pregnant with their child.

“The next few problems would be for her to go in [the World’s time-accelerated vault-civilization] and there is the child,” said Hickman, “who will grow up in the World. So it will be the heir of two kingdoms without knowing mother or father. ” Characters will take inspiration from all over the place, 2008 live-to-video animated film Next Avengers: Heroes of Tomorrowincluding T’Challa and Storm’s future son, Azari.

At the same time, however, writer Ta-Nehisi Coates is beginning the wide-ranging finale of Black Panther“Wakanda’s Intergalactic Empire”—which is full of its own elements of cultural amnesia and relativistic time freaks. According to Hickman, who had no ill intentions on the matter, the son of Black Panther and Storm was one of the only famous characters he requested during his time as an X-Men architect that he wrote. Marvel interns refused.

As great as a lineage of mutantdom and Wakanda must be, that’s probably the best thing Marvel has come up with with the idea. It’s a bit odd, in general, in the world of superhero comics, when a major development in the background of one character happens in a book that belongs to another character or silo of other characters. And it leaves plenty of room for the Marvel Cinematic Universe to take on T’Challa’s legacy on its own, without the dangling backdrop of any comic book precedents to follow. or separated from.