“He could have been blue—I wouldn’t have cared one lick,” Marvel TV chief Jeph Loeb says of hiring Cheo Hodari Coker, the African-American show-runner of Netflix’s latest superhero show, Luke Cage. But Coker, and a number of Marvel fans, see things differently. “I’m not one of these people that says, ‘Oh, Luke Cage happens to be black,’” Coker told Vanity Fair. “No, he’s black all day because I’m black all day. There’s just no way around that.”

Coker is just one of several new black creators to join the print, TV, and film divisions at Marvel, one of the world’s most influential entertainment companies. In the same year, Marvel Comics featured a black man as Captain America and a black woman as Iron Man; Zendaya was cast as Mary Jane Watson in an upcoming big-screen Spider-Man, co-produced by Marvel and Sony; Chadwick Boseman made his feature film debut as Black Panther in Captain America: Civil War; and Mike Colter’s Luke Cage will get 13 hours of story on Netflix beginning this Friday. At a time when the national conversation around race has reached a boiling point, has Marvel recognized, in a way many entertainment companies have not, that black voices matter as much as black dollars?

Black Panther and Luke Cage can both trace their origins on the page back to the 1960s and 1970s, but both characters were created and, for a long time at least, written by white men. Jamie Broadnax, founder of the popular Black Girl Nerds Web site, tells Vanity Fair, “As much as I hate the word pandering, I think Marvel has had a long history of doing so to bring in black readers and other readers of color. I would always cringe a little bit reading comic books with black characters written by white dudes.”

The company continues to field critiques for a lack of black representation among its creative staff. David Brothers, a comics critic who has penned lengthy academic articles for marvel.com, remains unimpressed with the race-bending of characters like Iron Man and Captain America. “The marketing screams that it’s progress, but we’ve seen black versions of Iron Man, and even Superman, before,” Brothers said while reserving praise for the recently relaunched Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur, calling it “a better sign of progress, as far as that goes. It's still a riff on an old idea, but that original Devil Dinosaur idea has been fallow long enough that it can become its own thing without the threat of the older, more popular version taking its throne back and forcing the new thing to the sidelines.”

The conversation shifted dramatically in September of 2015, when Marvel Comics E.I.C. Axel Alonso announced that author and critic Ta-Nehisi Coates would write a new Black Panther book, with art by Brian Stelfreeze. The resulting book was a critical and commercial smash. And though Coates wasn’t the first notable black author to tackle Black Panther —Reginald Hudlin wrote the comic from 2005 to 2008, while also serving as the president of BET—his prominence in the subject of racial identity signaled an even more dramatic commitment to the black perspective.

Coates and Stelfreeze, along with Coker on Luke Cage, writer/director Ryan Coogler on the upcoming Black Panther film, and authors Roxane Gay and Yona Harvey on the Panther comic spin-off World of Wakanda, represent a brave new world. Brothers tells Vanity Fair, “As important as representation on the page or screen is, having representation behind it is paramount. I’ve been a reader of comics since I learned to read, and there are elements of the Luke Cage show that resonate harder than almost any comic I’ve read from Marvel ever has.”