Dimension

More documents

Recommendations

Info

REPEAT DEFENDER Luke Cage has long been a mainstay of Marvel Comics’ all-too-human street-level roster. 1972 VICTORIA TANG Hero for Hire In this original issue, an innocent Carl Lucas lands in prison, where a botched experiment gives him superstrength and bullet proof skin. 1974 Defenders After breaking out of prison, Cage gets roped into this “non-team” to stop bad guys like the unabashedly racist supervillain group Sons of the Serpent. 1978 Power Man and Iron Fist Cage rebrands himself and partners with martialartist Iron Fist to provide superhuman security and investigative services. 2001 Alias When Cage and Jessica Jones have a one-night stand, the P.I. gets pregnant. The two ultimately wed and become parents to a baby girl. 2010 Thunderbolts Captain America puts Cage in charge of his own group of crime-fighters, which operates from a maximum-security island prison and rehabilitates supervillains. COURTESY OF MARVEL Powell Jr., and Crispus Attucks. There have been African American super heroes 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. Not that he’s rebooted Do the Right Thing, exactly. Luke Cage is fundamentally a four-quadrant-seeking, crowd-pleasing, big-tent affair, like Empire, Power, or the Thursday-night Shonda Rhimes–fest on ABC. The success of those shows suggests that we may have finally entered a new epoch in the 21st century’s golden age of television. For years, the nascent medium of prestige TV drama was defined by what author Brett Martin has called difficult men — grimly captivating white guys like Tony Soprano, Don Draper, and Walter White, struggling to find a foothold in a culture and economy that were leaving them behind. That was before Netflix and Amazon and their respective breakout hits, Orange Is the New Black and Transparent, proved that hit dramas could move beyond straight white men. In part, this is a happy consequence of the TV wars. As a glut of competitors have pumped out a steady stream of compelling shows, executives are more motivated than ever to find programs that will stand out from the crowd. Subscription-based digital platforms, eager to reach into global markets and unburdened by skittish advertisers, are more willing to gamble on series that traditional networks might consider too risky. In the meantime, three decades of boundary-pushing television has created a more sophisticated audience, willing to watch characters that previous generations may have found alienating. “It evolves, but incredibly slowly,” says Jessica Jones’ Rosenberg. “I think we are beyond overdue for both Luke Cage and Jessica Jones.” Compared to his big-screen Marvel counterparts, like Iron Man and Thor, Netflix’s Luke Cage might seem like a low-stakes superhero. He isn’t out to save the universe, and he doesn’t wear a flashy costume; he rarely even uses his superpowers, which are presented more as a behavioral 30
quirk than a defining characteristic of his personality. He’s deeply flawed, haunted by his past, and, as Colter says, might pick up women at a funeral. But that’s precisely what makes him so heroic. He’s working on it, struggling to accept himself in the face of a world that keeps pushing him toward invisibility. “So many times, black protagonists have to be holier than thou, but he’s not an angelic figure,” says John Singleton, the Boyz n the Hood director and a friend of Coker’s. “It’s the right time for this kind of hero. He’s so needed in the world.” WITH COKER’S COMIC-GEEK background underpinning his years of experience in TV and film, the role of Luke Cage showrunner fits him as snugly as a Spidey suit. But where Marvel’s superheroes tend to stumble into their powers by accident — radioactive spider bites, misbegotten nuclear tests — Coker didn’t have to wander into a malfunctioning laboratory to acquire his skills. He’d been actively accumulating them for decades. Coker started reading fantasy novels after his parents divorced and his mother went back to college and then law school. She usually brought Coker with her to the library, enforced quiet time that sparked a love of reading. When Coker was 10, a friend showed him a copy of Wolverine, the beginning of a seminal story arc written by Chris Claremont and arted by Frank Miller. The story starts with Wolverine sadly killing a grizzly bear, then goes on to depict a battle between the superhero and his fiancée’s yakuza father — a saga of regret and doubt, not just Technicolor beat-’em-up. Coker keeps all four issues of the series in his LA office for inspiration. “They were saying yes, this is an adolescent pastime, but that doesn’t mean we can’t imbue it with a sophisticated worldview,” he says of its creators. Comics didn’t just provide great stories but also a target for Coker’s obsessive tendencies, a wealth of back issues, in-jokes, and cross-references to hunt down and untangle. He had a similar response when his cousins introduced him to hip hop in the mid-1980s. Over time he came to think of it as superhero music. “It’s the attitude,” he says. “When I heard the Wu-Tang Clan, I always saw Captain America and the Avengers assembling as the camera swoops in.” Coker had his first chance to meet some of his heroes as an undergraduate writer for The Stanford Daily, where he conducted interviews with rappers like Ice Cube, KRS-One, and Ice T. Before he graduated, he was writing freelance articles for The Source, Vibe, and others, becoming an acclaimed and prolific member of the first wave of hip hop journalists. Over time, Coker began to see more parallels between the rappers he covered and the comics he loved. Like Marvel superheroes, rappers often had to navigate between their public personae and their private selves. During an interview for Vibe, Christopher Wallace told Coker that he lived a double life even before he became the rapper Notorious B.I.G.; to his mom he was “Chrissie-poo,” an innocent homebody, but when he sneaked out to sell drugs on the street corners, he was known as “Big Chris.” He even kept a spare outfit on the roof of his apartment building so he could change out of his school clothes without his mother realizing — a detail that reminded Coker of Spider-Man’s efforts to keep his superhero identity a secret from his aunt May. Eventually, Coker took up screenwriting. He was inspired in part by his uncle, Richard Wesley, who wrote the scripts for such landmarks of black cinema as Uptown Saturday Night and Native Son. Together, they wrote a fictionalized version of Tupac Shakur’s murder, called Flow. The film never got made, but it won Coker attention. Soon he was adapting Unbelievable, his biography of the Notorious B.I.G., into the feature film Notorious. That led to other work, including a job as a writer and coproducer for the Peabody- winning series SouthLAnd, under legendary showrunner John Wells, and later a stint as coexecutive producer on Showtime’s Ray Donovan; he calls the respective experiences “my graduate degree and my PhD.” It was around 2014, when Coker was doing a round of touch-ups on the screenplay for Straight Outta Compton, that Marvel started looking for a showrunner for Luke Cage. From the beginning, says Jeph Loeb, head of Marvel’s television division, the company was looking for someone who could not only entertain but also address issues of race: “What is going on in this country for blacks and whites, and how can we tell that story through the eyes of a superhero?” Marvel was in the midst of expanding its roster of nonwhite superheroes, including introducing a Muslim Ms. Marvel and a Latino Spider-Man. The company has since hired Ta-Nehisi Coates, author of the best-selling Between the World and Me, to pen the newest adventures of Black Panther, the supergenius ruler of a fictional African nation. (That character will soon appear in a film directed by Ryan Coogler, who helmed Fruitvale Station, about a victim of police violence, and Creed, the heroic saga of Apollo Creed’s son.) Still, this was Marvel’s first attempt to create a series or film with a black protagonist at its center, a responsibility that Loeb took very seriously. “If we can get one person to watch the show and to think differently about what it is to be a hero in the present day, and what it is to be a black hero, then that’s a victory,” he says. At his first meeting with Marvel, Coker brought a photograph of his grandfather, a Tuskegee Airman who had been awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross. “I talked about him being from Harlem,” Coker says. “Walking up the boulevards, you’d see Duke Ellington and Chick Webb and Lionel Hampton, just walking around. You saw superheroes every day.” Initially, Coker saw Luke Cage exploring a similar dynamic, the pressures of a known superhero operating in the real world, but Marvel wanted Cage to grow into his role as a superhero, not to The main reason people don’t speak out, their main fear, is getting shot. So what happens if someone is bulletproof? What happens if you take that fear away? DIMENSION 31
Page 2 and 3: A NEW CURVED SENSATIONAL DISCOVERY
Page 5 and 6: Contents Fall 2016 20 No, The TV Bu
Page 7 and 8: 5:55 PM An earthquake struck China
Page 10 and 11: Nope, the TV Business Isn’t Dead
Page 13 and 14: Meet Symphony the Company That Trac
Page 16 and 17: HELLO,
Page 18 and 19: WHAT I’M ABOUT TO TELL YOU IS TOP
Page 20 and 21: MR. ROBOT IS DESIGNED TO FORCE US T
Page 23 and 24: Sense8 and the failure of the globa
Page 25 and 26: about these other cultures through
Page 27 and 28: worldview, situate the character in
Page 30: modern marvel why netflix’s Luke
Page 35: supporting roles in shows like Amer
Page 38 and 39: When monitors become fully aware of
Page 40 and 41: offering Helena up for yet more inv
Page 44 and 45: Black-ish Photography: ABC Studios
Page 46 and 47: cleverman Photography: ABC Australi
Page 48 and 49: transparent Photography: Amazon Stu
Page 51 and 52: DVD Theater Panasonic. The quality
Page 53: under represented by a factor of ne

Dimension

You also want an ePaper? Increase the reach of your titles

Delete template?

Save as template?