Illustration by Brown Bird Design

In February, this column investigated the location of Black Panther's Wakanda—not the afro-futuristic Marvel Comics utopia, but the places that might occupy that same geographic space on our Earth. But I neglected one surprising possible locale for Wakanda: northeastern Illinois.

This Wauconda is pretty far from Africa.

Wauconda is a small town about an hour north of Chicago on the shores of beautiful Bangs Lake, making it a popular weekend getaway for families. (It's also six hours north of Metropolis, if you're planning a superhero road trip.) Wauconda was founded in 1849 by New England settlers heading west, and was given its name by a local schoolmaster who saw the word "Wahcondah," meaning "Great Spirit," in a James Fenimore Cooper novel.

Wakanda wasn't named for a suburb.

Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, the Marvel Comics creative team who created the Black Panther, never spent much time in Chicago, and there's no evidence that "Wakanda," the name they gave to their fictional African kingdom, was inspired by the Illinois township. Maybe one of them just liked James Fenimore Cooper. But the Black Panther film is now the highest-grossing superhero movie in American history, and that's changed life in Wauconda.