By the time Black Panther hit screens in 2018, the Marvel Cinematic Universe was already a true phenomenon, breaking box office records and making household names out of heretofore obscure characters like Rocket Raccoon and the Winter Soldier. But thanks to Ryan Coogler’s powerful direction and soulful performances from Michael B. Jordan, Lupita Nyong’o, and of course Chadwick Boseman as King T’Challa, Black Panther became a true cultural phenomenon, a movie that transcended its roots as a superhero story.
The sequel Black Panther: Wakanda Forever brings us back to Wakanda, but all is not well. Choosing to work the shocking and untimely death of Boseman into the storyline, Coogler and his co-writer Joe Robert Cole have crafted a tail of mourning and turmoil. As the country makes sense of the sudden loss of their leader, they find themselves not only under attack by various Western powers, including the American CIA and new antagonist Namor the Sub-Mariner (Tenoch Huerta), leader of the hidden underwater kingdom of Talokan.
While most franchises could not survive the loss of their star, especially one as magnetic as Boseman, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever excels precisely because Coogler created a fully realized world in the first movie, populated by rich and interesting characters. He found inspiration for those characters in the decades of comic book stories about Black Panther, Namor, and even new additions such as Ironheart (Dominique Thorne). These ten stories just scratch the surface of Black Panther comics that inspired the film, giving you more than enough reading material to stay in Wakanda forever.