Marvel Puts Black Panther Into Motion with Digital Series

Marvel continues to mine its vast collection of super heroes with a new motion comic, Black Panther: Who is the Black Panther? The 12-part series — debuting Tuesday on iTunes, Xbox Live, Microsoft Zune and PlayStation Network — is based on the 2005-08 comic book series written by Reginald Hudlin, the former entertainment president of BET. Hudlin is an executive producer and wrote the motion comic, which was originally planned as a TV series for BET. (A Marvel spokesperson says the series was shifted to digital following the success of previous motion comics Spider-Woman, Astonishing X-Men and Iron Man: Extremis.)
Black Panther, created in 1966 by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, is the super-powered king of Wakanda, a (fictional) technologically advanced African nation that has never been conquered ("the Wakandans have a warrior spirit that makes the Vietnamese look like the French"), but has also never attacked others. In the motion comic, the United States eyes the nation as a potential threat (look for Lee in a hilarious cameo as a hawkish general), even as the assassin Klaw plans an attack on Wakanda. The series features the animated drawings of comic book artist of John Romita Sr. and a voice cast that includes Djimon Hounsou, Alfre Woodard and Jill Scott as Storm, a member of the X-Men portrayed by Halle Berry in the live-action movies.
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