As the world celebrates a proudly black superhero getting his own film, you may hear some fans quietly muttering, "Wait, didn't Blade do that like 20 years before Black Panther?" And then there's an even smaller, weirder group of people saying, "And what about Meteor Man?" But this is about Blade, and what it says about where the world is now versus 1998. (Spoiler: What it says is mostly bad.)

First, remember the context. Back in 1998, we still didn't know if superhero movies truly worked. Sure, we'd seen success with Batman and Superman, but both of those series had fallen into fatigue before they could get through even three entries. We still hadn't gotten the boom period that started with Sam Raimi's Spider-Man. (Yes, I know that X-Men came before it, but I always felt like Spider-Man unapologetically embraced the comic book aesthetic, whileX-Men was still apologizing for it.)

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And then along came Blade. It was a bloody, R-rated superhero movie (long before Deadpool and Logan would be celebrated as trailblazers) featuring a black lead, not to mention a black woman costar (the movie signals this is leading to a romance, but the pair wind up in a partnership of strong, mutual respect). And Blade, under its layers of rad trench coats and vampire raves, has way more to say on the subject of race than you'd think.

Blade is a black vampire in a world dominated by pasty white bloodsuckers who sit around a big table and secretly control everything. But the movie doesn't do that thing where they use supernatural creatures as a metaphor for some minority (hello, Bright). Blade isn't symbolically anything; in that universe, he's actually a vampire and he's actually black. The latter means the same thing in that world as it does in ours. He is fighting a power structure that fears him, hates him, and has forced him into the life he lives. Yet he's supremely confident. The first time he shows up in a club of EDM Nosferatus, the entire crowd crouches and slithers and sneaks, while Blade does none of those things. He is direct and he is awesome, and that is terrifying to them.