Dimension

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