There’s a moment in “Luke Cage,” the most recent of Netflix’s collection of shows based on Marvel Comics characters, when the super-powered protagonist trades in his bullet-riddled hoodie for a fresh one worn by the rapper Method Man. The exchange sets off a fashion trend in which black men begin wearing pockmarked hoodies both as a gesture of solidarity with Cage and a commentary on the disposability of black lives. The inherent irony of a character that is black, male, and nearly indestructible in an age punctuated by gun violence and black death is not lost on the show’s creator, Cheo Hodari Coker. His unofficial tagline for the series was “The world is in need of a bulletproof black man.” The Luke Cage character, heavily indebted to blaxploitation heroes, first appeared in 1972—a moment when the mere existence of a black comic-book character was considered progressive. But Cage was relegated to battling C-list villains—most notably an obscenely and stereotypically obese mammy figure named Black Mariah, whom Coker brilliantly reimagines as a power-hungry Harlem politician. I randomly caught up with Coker on a day when he’d come to Harlem for a haircut, and we spoke about comics, race, music, and the role that the word “nigger” plays in the world Luke Cage inhabits.

What drew you to Luke Cage as a character?

Well, the main thing for me was, it was the opportunity. I’ll be frank. Black writers seldom get the opportunity to write superhero stories. I find that the new racism isn’t “You’re black. You can’t do it.” It’s benefit of the doubt. I remember early on in my career, I’m like, “Look, I’m an every-Wednesday superhero geek,” so why can’t I get the opportunity to write a comic-book movie? What they say to you is “Well, you don’t have the writing samples to do that.” “Your body of work doesn’t lend itself to this kind of movie.”

It seems like it’s an interesting moment, because you’re doing Luke Cage, Ta-Nehisi Coates is doing Black Panther, Ryan Coogler is working on the Black Panther film. Do you think this is a breakthrough for black people in the comics arena?

It’s just something in the air. I don’t want to get all grandiose and call it a new Harlem Renaissance, but it’s that kind of energy. From what I’ve seen of what Ava [DuVernay] is doing, from what Donald Glover is doing, and Issa Rae—there’s something going on. Then, of course, there are close friends of mine, like Courtney Kemp Agboh, who’s on “Power,” or Kenya Barris on “Black-ish”—all of our shows are divergent in subject matter but they’re all part of the same unadulterated continuum of just unadulterated blackness. All the ground that was laid by Spike Lee, John Singleton, the Hughes brothers, Robert Townsend, and others, all those seeds that were planted are now coming to fruition with this generation. It wasn’t that I set out to do the first woke black-superhero show. It’s just that I wanted “Luke Cage” to reflect, in many ways, some of the people that I’ve come across on my journey.

Tell me more about that.

What I mean by that is I grew up between two different realities. My grandfather was a Tuskegee Airman. He flew with the 100th Fighter Squadron. I grew up in Connecticut, near Storrs, really around him. I remember being eight years old, and he had Perrier before they even sold Perrier in stores. He was a gourmet, reading Craig Claiborne, reading Bon Appétit. He drove a Porsche. Because he was in the Air Force, he would buy the Porsches wholesale in Germany, and he would fly them over when space was available. That’s what kind of James Bond shit he was on.

The other reality was that my mother and father split when I was two years old, and my father’s mother, until I was six or seven years old, lived in Hamilton Street Projects, in New Haven. When I would visit her early on, even when I was five and six, that was a different reality. That kind of split consciousness has always been part of my journey. My mom and dad met at U. Conn., and their lives couldn’t have been more different in terms of their upbringing. My mom growing up on Air Force bases, and my dad growing up in New Haven. My dad going to jail for a while. Then when he got out, he never quite got over the experience, and he started drinking really heavily, and was really a very heavy alcoholic to the day that he died. That split consciousness, those two realities were kind of my obsession, because I grew up in Storrs, and Storrs is . . . here’s the thing, it was the place that cow tipping was invented. You know what I’m saying?

Wow.

You were lucky if they played any black music on the local station. When I was growing up there, I was always the only black kid in my class. You know what I was? I was the black kid on “Stranger Things.” That was me. That was literally my life because all my friends were faculty brats, and they all played Dungeons & Dragons. We used to play those role-playing games all the time, like with dice, and for me, in order to be cool and hang out with that set, not only was it about reading “The Lord of the Rings,” you had to read “The Silmarillion.”

I don’t even know what that is.

It’s this really thick prequel. It’s deep, deep geekdom. I had no idea this was kind of, in a weird way, preparing me for what I was going to do. Then my cousins would come and visit us at Christmas, or Thanksgiving, and they would tape Red Alert or Mr. Magic on KISS-FM. They would leave their tapes. I would take the tape, and I would just play it until it broke. Hip-hop was my only connection to young black people my age. Whereas for most people, the music will kind of play out, the trends will play out, I studied it. It’s almost like I’m one of those prisoners that’s trying to memorize something so just in case a plane flies over, you have the right combination that will get you rescued.

How was Marvel caught up in this mix of stuff you were into growing up?

The comic-book part was a friend of mine. We were in sixth grade, and he was interesting. He introduced me to “X-Men.” He also had the four Chris Claremont and Frank Miller “Wolverine” limited series, those four issues. I traded him. I had the first five issues of “Groo the Wanderer,” and I traded him those for that “Wolverine” series. I think that was probably the most uneven trade since Manhattan was traded for beads.

It sounds like it was you that came up with the idea for that trade.

That’s what really started my obsession, because after I read those, and after I got deep into “Action Man,” that’s when I read “God Loves, Man Kills,” the Chris Claremont graphic novel. I read John Byrne. He wrote and drew “Alpha Flight.” Anything mutant-wise I just grabbed onto. I came across “Power Man,” “Iron Fist.” They were part of the larger Marvel Universe. Comics were strangely intellectual, even though they were supposed to be for kids. If you did the homework. The villains were much smarter than the heroes, and if they made some literary allusion to something, and if you actually read the book they were talking about, you were like, Wow, this is interesting. Then after a while you began to understand that the comics were written as much as they were drawn. And as much as the art was cool, you also began to understand that there’s structure to this storytelling.