Modern Marvel Why Netflix’s Luke Cage is the Superhero We Really Need Now Why Netflix’s Luke Cage is the Superhero We Really Need Now

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Cheo Hodari Coker wanders the aisles of Midtown Comics, a two-story megastore just east of New York’s Hell’s Kitchen. Despite the muggy July morning, he’s wearing a hooded sweatshirt, and he mops the sweat from his forehead as he peruses the new releases and graphic novels. After a few minutes he adjusts the messenger bag on his left shoulder, pads silently up to the second floor, and gets to the real reason he’s here—hunting down back issues of Luke Cage. One of Marvel’s first African American superheroes, Cage was introduced in response to the blaxploitation films of the 1970s. A New Yorker like virtually every other earthbound Marvel character, he lived in Harlem, just a couple miles north of this very store. While he never achieved the blockbuster, iconic status of some of his mask-and-cape-wearing brethren, Cage enjoyed a cult following for decades.

But Coker is coming up blank. Midtown Comics doesn’t carry many classic Luke Cage graphic novels. They don’t have Luke Cage #5, the first appearance of supervillain and Cage nemesis Black Mariah. Ditto Marvel Premiere #20, which introduces Cage’s frenemy, the cyborg cop Misty Knight. The store had some Luke Cage action figures, but it recently ran out of them.

“Well, I’m happy to see he’s selling out,” the man tells an apologetic staffer.

“I guess it’s because they’re promoting the TV show coming out in September,” the staffer says.

“Yeah, yeah, no doubt,” the man says, in a voice that hints, “Please ask me who I am and why I seem so invested in this character.” The staffer does not bite, so he never learns that, in fact, the man standing before him is the writer and showrunner bringing Luke Cage to the small screen.

As with most Marvel properties, comics fans have pored over any scrap of information they can find about the forthcoming show; they know that it comes to Netflix on September 30, and they know that Mike Colter will play the title role—a wrongfully imprisoned ex-convict with bulletproof skin—but not much else. There’s a part of Coker that’s dying to shed his anonymity, to expose the secret identity beneath his burly frame, Muhammad Ali T-shirt, and Stanford hoodie, to pull the laptop out of his messenger bag and show the rough cut of the trailer he has just received from Netflix’s marketing department. Instead, Coker picks up some books for himself—a Black Panther compilation and a new Power Man and Iron Fist—and shuffles out of the store.

TV viewers first met Cage as the on-again off-again love interest in Jessica Jones, Marvel’s previous collaboration with Netflix. That show didn’t just reinforce that comics could profitably extend into the world of premium television; it expanded the very notion of superheroism itself. Led by creator Melissa Rosenberg, it revolved around a PTSD-suffering, borderline alcoholic PI facing down her rapist, a supervillain who could control his victims’ thoughts and actions. The plot touched on gaslighting, victim-blaming, abortion, and an almost literal case of testosterone poisoning; it all suggested a world in which heroes didn’t have to save the universe. Just being a woman amid the many varieties of male vanity and violence was heroic enough.

Cage’s heroic journey is similarly personal. His mission isn’t to track down Doctor Doom like he did in the ’70s but to accept his responsibility to help defend Harlem from the many forces that threaten it. Coker says he was inspired to serve as showrunner when he realized the ramifications of a series about a black man with impenetrable skin and how that might empower him to take on both criminals and crooked authority figures. “The main reason people don’t speak out, their main fear, is getting shot,” Coker says. “So what happens if someone is bulletproof? What happens if you take that fear away? That changes the whole ecosystem.”

Along the way, characters wrestle with their use of the n-word, sing the praises of the ’90s-era Knicks, and discuss the impact that urban planner Robert Moses, the Cross Bronx Expressway, and US senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s policy of “benign neglect” had on New York’s black community. The script name-checks such black cultural and political figures as Ralph Ellison, Donald Goines, Zora Neale Hurston, Adam Clayton Powell Jr., and Crispus Attucks. There have been African ­American super­heroes on our screens before—such as Wesley Snipes’ titular turn in Blade—but Luke Cage is the first to be surrounded by an almost completely black cast and writing team and whose powers and challenges are so explicitly linked to the black experience in America. “I pretty much made the blackest show in the history of TV,” Coker says, laughing.