And now Black Pan­ther is the first Black-led film released with­in the Mar­vel Cin­e­mat­ic Uni­verse, which is cur­rent­ly cel­e­brat­ing its 10-year anniversary.

Black Pan­ther has since become an impor­tant char­ac­ter with­in the Mar­vel Uni­verse, often used to intro­duce sto­ry­lines that deal with race. In one of his ear­li­est appear­ances, T’Challa uses his Black Pan­ther per­sona to fight the Ku Klux Klan in the Amer­i­can South. In recent years, writ­ers like Ta-Nehisi Coates, Rox­ane Gay and Yona Har­vey have exam­ined the pol­i­tics of Wakanda’s rul­ing monar­chy and the con­flict between T’Challa’s desire to be a super­hero and his respon­si­bil­i­ties as king.

In that first issue, the Fan­tas­tic Four met King T’Challa, regent of the mys­te­ri­ous African coun­try of Wakan­da. T’Challa dons the man­tle of the Black Pan­ther to pro­tect his kingdom’s peo­ple and its tech­no­log­i­cal advance­ments, which far out­strip the out­side world’s, from those who would exploit them. The con­ceit is one of sym­pa­thy with the plight of Black peo­ple (even if it was spurred by Mar­vel real­iz­ing a busi­ness oppor­tu­ni­ty in Black readers).

The char­ac­ter of Black Pan­ther first appeared in the July 1966 issue of the Fan­tas­tic Four series, which was the pres­tige Mar­vel title at the time. Cre­at­ed by Jack Kir­by and Stan Lee, the char­ac­ter debuted dur­ing the Civ­il Rights Move­ment and was the first Black super­hero in main­stream Amer­i­can comics. Only a few months lat­er, in Octo­ber 1966, the Black Pan­ther Par­ty would be found­ed in Oak­land. The over­lap­ping names were a coin­ci­dence , but a fit­ting one.

In Black Pan­ther, those con­ver­sa­tions are turned on their head. This is a film that fun­da­men­tal­ly ques­tions the nature of pow­er, free­dom and respon­si­bil­i­ty. It’s unlike any oth­er film Mar­vel has released thus far.

The philo­soph­i­cal debate about Black free­dom in the Unit­ed States has often been reduced to a bina­ry choice between inte­gra­tion and sep­a­ratism: W. E. B. Du Bois’ imme­di­ate equal­i­ty or Book­er T. Wash­ing­ton’s indus­tri­al edu­ca­tion. Mar­tin Luther King, Jr.’s South­ern move­ment against Jim Crow or Mal­colm X’s cru­sade for Black awakening.

When the co-con­spir­a­tors fear the police are about to burst in, they con­ceal their armory in walls decked out with African print and a Pub­lic Ene­my album poster (the apt­ly titled, It Takes a Nation of Mil­lions To Hold Us Back).

Two Black men are plot­ting some type of caper in a small apart­ment. The film doesn’t clar­i­fy if it’s a rob­bery or the gen­e­sis of a rev­o­lu­tion. But a tele­vi­sion in the back­ground broad­casts scenes of Los Ange­les on fire dur­ing the 1992 riots after the arrest and beat­ing of Rod­ney King. Out­side the apart­ment, young Black boys shoot hoops to the sound­track of Oakland’s own Too $hort.

The first words uttered in direc­tor Ryan Coogler’s Black Pan­ther are, ​“Tell me a sto­ry, the sto­ry of home.” From that phrase the film opens, not in the fic­tion­al African nation of Wakan­da, but rather, in ear­ly 1990s Oak­land, Calif.

Cen­tral to the new film are ques­tions of pow­er and respon­si­bil­i­ty regard­ing Wakan­da, the tech­no­log­i­cal­ly advanced coun­try of mys­ti­cal­ly pow­er­ful Black peo­ple. Should the fic­tion­al Afro­fu­tur­is­tic land stay free by con­tin­u­ing an iso­la­tion­ist view that pro­tects its resources from pos­si­ble out­side exploita­tion? Or should Wakan­da, the most advanced nation on Earth in the Mar­vel Cin­e­mat­ic Uni­verse, take the helm of a glob­al Black uprising?

It is telling that this sto­ry roots itself in Oak­land, the birth­place of both the Black Pan­ther Par­ty and Coogler. Almost imme­di­ate­ly, the film stares down the dif­fi­cult impli­ca­tions of an Afro­fu­tur­ist oasis like Wakan­da exist­ing along­side the his­tor­i­cal oppres­sion of African dias­poric peo­ples. The film, in no uncer­tain terms, con­sid­ers the pos­si­bil­i­ty and neces­si­ty of rev­o­lu­tion for Black peo­ple across the world.

One of the film’s strengths is its por­tray­al of Black peo­ple with­in a full and var­ied world. Ear­ly on, White arms deal­er Ulysses Klaue (Andy Serkis) seems poised to be the pri­ma­ry antag­o­nist. Klaue is inter­est­ed in the min­ing and theft of Wakanda’s ​“vibra­ni­um” — the strongest known met­al in the Mar­vel Cin­e­mat­ic Uni­verse and the source of Wakanda’s advance­ment and wealth. Yet, in an inspired and uncom­mon­ly con­cise moment of super­hero sto­ry­telling, Klaue quick­ly takes a back­seat to Erik Kill­mon­ger, played by fre­quent Coogler col­lab­o­ra­tor Michael B. Jordan.

Kill­mon­ger, the son of a Wakan­dan prince who grew up out­side the utopi­an Wakan­da, is full of jus­ti­fi­able anger at the oppres­sion of peo­ple of African descent through­out world. And his anger is only fueled by Wakanda’s iso­la­tion­ist his­to­ry and policies.

Thus, Killmonger’s con­flict with T’Challa (Chad­wick Bose­man) goes far beyond a typ­i­cal com­ic book villain’s pur­suit of wealth or world dom­i­na­tion. Instead, the fight is philo­soph­i­cal. Do Black folks with resources, like the peo­ple of Wakan­da, have a respon­si­bil­i­ty to dom­i­nate the world as rec­om­pense for those who have been oppressed by white supremacy?

In the sub­se­quent con­flict between the two young war­riors, and the larg­er Wakan­dan king­dom, we see avatars of var­i­ous strains of Black lib­er­a­to­ry the­o­ry — rang­ing from the tra­di­tion­al hon­or soci­ety of the Jabari to the David Walk­er-esque notion of vio­lent upris­ing pre­sent­ed by Killmonger.

The film nev­er real­ly resolves this debate, and leaves it an open ques­tion. So while Kill­mon­ger wants to give oppressed peo­ple pow­er the film doesn’t delve into whether that would mean Wakan­da insti­tutes a new glob­al black suprema­cy or sim­ply leads by exam­ple to achieve a more just world.

In what could have been a heavy-hand­ed mis­fire, the gen­er­al­ly superb writ­ing of Coogler and Joe Robert Cole avoids too much pros­e­ly­tiz­ing about the strug­gle of Black peo­ple in the Unit­ed States and Africa (save for an ear­ly speech from Ster­ling K. Brown’s char­ac­ter N’Jobu). And through­out the film we see mul­ti­ple char­ac­ters wres­tle with their own def­i­n­i­tion of jus­tice with­out those strug­gles being reduced to a series of civ­il rights posi­tion summaries.

Yet per­haps the most admirable nar­ra­tive para­dox Coogler and Cole tack­le in Black Pan­ther is the com­pli­ca­tion of hav­ing a Black super­hero in a White world.

Even though it nev­er suf­fered under white rule, Wakan­da has to con­tend with a his­to­ry of white colo­nial dom­i­na­tion that has shaped the world around it. So T’Challa must deal with the microag­gres­sions of being under­mined by U.S. intel­li­gence oper­a­tive Everett K. Ross (Mar­tin Free­man), despite his sta­tus as the head of state of the most advanced inde­pen­dent nation on Earth.

These moments, even when they hap­pen at the rel­a­tive­ly small lev­el of phys­i­cal touch or a flip­pant com­ment, dis­play for the audi­ence the suprema­cist think­ing that under­writes U.S. pol­i­cy in the so-called third world and in domes­tic com­mu­ni­ties of col­or. Wakan­dans don’t shrink from those dis­re­spects, but rather smirk to them­selves with the knowl­edge of their own tech­no­log­i­cal and eco­nom­ic preeminence.

Of course, Black Pan­ther is still a Dis­ney film, and it miss­es a dis­tinct oppor­tu­ni­ty to inject a Black queer ele­ment into the sto­ry­line. In the most recent Mar­vel comics, two of the Dora Mila­je (Wakanda’s elite all-women war­rior bat­tal­ion) were roman­ti­cal­ly linked. Not so in the film. That sto­ry­line would have been an easy oppor­tu­ni­ty for a dif­fer­ent kind of rep­re­sen­ta­tion of super­hero romance than the het­ero­sex­u­al tropes marched out in seem­ing­ly every movie.

Still, Coogler and Cole have writ­ten a film that intel­li­gent­ly con­sid­ers what free­dom looks like for Black peo­ple. They devel­op a rela­tion­ship between char­ac­ters that explores the ten­sions of dias­po­ra and the unavoid­able myth­mak­ing that hap­pens in Black Amer­i­can imag­in­ings of an African homeland.

With an eye toward the his­tor­i­cal back­drops of Black life, Black Pan­ther imag­ines a fierce, lush land­scape of com­pli­cat­ed pos­si­bil­i­ty that is rare for the genre.