So yeah, “Black Panther” is officially about, well, the Black Panther. And yeah, Killmonger, and M’Baku, and W’Kabi and are all great and compelling. But the real shining stars of the movie are the women: strong and smart Nakia, quick and deadly Okoye, and innovative, witty Shuri.

It’s because of this that Brittany Oliver, founding director of the advocacy group Not Without Black Women (NWBW), felt like she had to put together an event to talk about the blockbuster film. Black Panther: Bringing the Spirit of Wakanda Talk Back, will be held March 3 from 5:30-9:30 p.m. at Cheat Day Bar & Grill (737 Carroll St., [443] 708-0929, cheatdaybarandgrill.com). Panelists will include Oliver, community health activist and Morgan State University professor Lawrence Brown, Nnamdi Lumumba of the Ujima People’s Progress Party, and professor Natasha Pratt Harris, Associate Professor and Program Coordinator at Morgan State University’s Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Criminal Justice. Community advocate and NWBW leader Charlene Rock-Foster will facilitate.

“I think that ‘Black Panther’ has provided an opportunity for various black communities all across the nation to have really important conversations about what it means to be black in America,” Oliver says.

“Originally we were not [having an event] but because of the response that we were getting from the community, they wanted us to have a talkback because Not Without Black Women brings a certain type of perspective when it comes to black radical politics.”

She says that it’s important to talk about the part women play in the story, and what that means for real women in real life.

Some of the topics to be discussed: the importance of black women’s roles both in reality and in the film, the lessons to be learned from “Black Panther” that can shape and influence black politics, and how entertainment influences our youth and communities.

Oliver is hopeful that by discussing these issues, we can bring a little bit of Wakanda to reality.

“Black women should be uplifted in these roles in this way,” she says. “And so I think that ‘Black Panther’ shows the power of when women are uplifted and placed at the center.” 

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The Fantastic Four, the Avengers, the Justice League. Those are superhero teams. The Blood Syndicate were a super-powered gang. They wouldn’t give a shit about Dr. Doom or Thanos as long as they were out of sight. Their concerns were turf, respect, and burning down crack-houses. This was my favorite comic book growing up. 

From 1993 to 1996, the Syndicate starred in their own title, published by Milestone Media, the largest black-owned comics company (which would cease publishing in 1997) in partnership with DC. The world of mainstream comics, dominated by the purchasing power of white males, was perhaps not ready for a superhero universe in which the people that looked like them were the minority.

Seeing the expected racist pushback against “Black Panther,” I don’t want to even imagine the reaction to a Blood Syndicate film. Would even liberals want to support a team whose tagline is “America Eats Its Young”? Still, “Black Panther” has already broken multiple box office records. There have been superhero films featuring black leads before, like “Blade,” “Meteor Man,” “Spawn,” and “Steel.” But “Black Panther,” a mega-budget production helmed by a black director, starring a predominantly black cast, and dropping in the eye of the storm that is Donald Trump’s racist-friendly tenure as president, feels as though it has its own careening velocity, a trajectory flirting with historic. Yes, it’s long overdue; and yes, it will make Disney tons of money. But we all knew there would be a Black Panther film eventually. It would be a shame if the success of “Black Panther” becomes the end of the conversation. We got the one big black superhero film. Which is why the news that Milestone is set to begin publishing again in the spring with the launch of the new umbrella line “Earth M” feels like a breath of cosmic fresh air.  

Milestone Media was founded by Derek Dingle, Denys Cowan, Michael Davis, and the late Dwayne McDuffie. It operated as an imprint of DC but maintained editorial and creative control. They constructed a comic book universe with the audacity to reflect the demographic realities of wide swaths of America, specifically, an America that white suburban teens and Manhattan power-players weren’t all that interested in. Milestone created scores of complicated characters, super-powered and otherwise, that were not simply defined by their non-whiteness, or reliant on a “Black” prefix.

Milestone’s slate of titles included “Hardware,” “Icon,” and “Static.” Hardware was a genius inventor pulled out of poverty by a white father figure who exploited his labor. “Icon” took the “Superman but black” pitch and deconstructed it with a haughty upper-class Republican haranguing youths about the importance of pulling yourself up by the bootstraps. Static was centered on a teenager who could harness electromagnetism and tackled child abuse, affirmative action, and the differing roadblocks that Jews and African-Americans face in their attempts to assimilate. Again, these were comic books intended for children in the ‘90s—they were not marketed to adults like “Vertigo” or “Dark Horse”—and yet they quietly examined extremely real shit.

But “Blood Syndicate” was my favorite of Milestone’s output. In elementary school, the X-Men were my X-Men, but by 6th grade, Blood Syndicate were my X-Men. The world-building was fit for a prestige cable drama. They were a full squad of Omar Littles, except some of them could fly.

A tired complaint about Milestone was that it was the “black superhero company” and thus was a niche or gimmick line of comics that your average (i.e. white nerd) fan couldn’t possibly hope to penetrate. In addition to being tired, it wasn’t even true. Forget the Uncanny X-Men; Blood Syndicate was the most ethnically diverse group in comics. Wise Son, an invulnerable black Muslim led them, and his struggle with imposter syndrome and anger issues made him more relatable than any of his Marvel or DC counterparts. The aptly named Brickhouse was a Puerto Rican girl made of bricks who grappled with body dysmorphia. Fade and Flashback, two Dominican-American siblings, carried stigmas that would have crushed Peter Parker. There was Masquerade, a transgender Haitian-American shapeshifter; Third-Rail, a brawny Korean-American wracked with guilt over failing to save his father’s life; Kwai, an immortal Chinese warrior woman—and Boogeyman, a huge talking rat, later exposed as a try-hard white boy attempting to pass himself off as black.

As Cowan told Wizard Magazine in 1995, “I don’t want a world where you can pop over to Reed Richards’ lab and borrow a time machine. I want it to be when you see a man fly, it’s the most amazing thing you’ve ever seen.” That sense of spectacle was evident throughout the Milestone universe. DC and Marvel leaned on decades of history with which to build upon and tear down. With Milestone, we saw a world bloom and prosper and wither away in real time, just as its characters did. The subjects were heady, but the tone rarely lurched into pedantry. Authentic conversations that Americans did their best to avoid were addressed by super-powered gangsters. These were serious, sometimes nearly taboo topics. Toothless liberal do-gooders, gentrification, the savage consequences of capitalism. It was bracing and subversive, but also it was just good story-telling.

And it’s been 20 years, but the subjects Milestone sought to confront via superhero comics are as germane as ever. And since this company didn’t get the respect nor the sales it deserved the first time around, it’s a comfort that we can perhaps rectify that injustice, so long as the craftsmanship and quality matches the first iteration of course.

It’s a second chance to learn things that you didn’t even know you didn’t know.

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As the first—and maybe best—black superhero the comics world has ever seen, Black Panther is not merely one archetype the way most costumed vigilantes tend to be. He is the ultimate black fairy tale, the king of the technologically advanced African nation Wakanda as well as a super spy, scientist, spiritual warrior, and a billionaire richer than Batman.

If he wasn’t a living, breathing course correction of comicdom’s lily white lineage, this plurality would be overkill. But for a movie released in an era where every big budget blockbuster is about some asshole in a cape punching people through buildings, this versatility sure does help— “Black Panther” begins like a James Bond movie and ends like “Conan The Barbarian,” with enough comedic levity and racial commentary along the way to satiate both heart and mind.

It also withstands the many sides to the draining internet discourse surrounding the eighteenth film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe since 2008, and the first to star a black hero. For every enthusiastic supporter suggesting you see the film en masse, multiple times in the theater to remind Hollywood of the black audience’s collective buying power, there’s an equally vociferous detractor slamming you for even thinking of lining Disney’s coffers in the name of racial solidarity. Somewhere, in a corner, there’s racists mad at the entire endeavor, scratching at their arms and crying that there’s no White Panther for them to champion.

Amid all of this clamor, what’s been treated as the most expensive, pop cultural political football ever made is really just a very good superhero film. Perhaps, one of the finest ever made.

“Creed” director Ryan Coogler delivers something radical and artfully synthesizes the MCU’s most successful, tried and true features: the technological dynamism of “Iron Man,” the Shakespearean tragedy of the “Thor” films, and the ‘70s spy-fi intrigue of the “Captain America” series. And thanks to “Captain America: Civil War,” which did most of the heavy lifting in establishing Black Panther and his alter ego T’Challa (Chadwick Boseman), “Black Panther” instead spends its time exploring the world of Wakanda, the mythical nation T’Challa calls home, and its many inhabitants. It’s clear that a great deal of effort went into realizing Wakanda on screen, even if the end result resembles  an afrofuturist fever dream rendition of Zamunda from “Coming to America” as sketched by Jack Kirby. The film treats the very idea of Wakanda, an isolationist magical city built on a reservoir of otherworldly metal called Vibranium masquerading as one of Trump’s “shithole” countries, as a high-minded symposium on the nature of diaspora, an action packed echo chamber of conflicting geopolitical perspectives.

T’Challa remains a Prince Akeem-esque straight man soaking up the opinions of those around him, as each debate and foil brings him closer to finding out who he must be. This isn’t a story about how a man becomes a leader, but the journey of discovering the kind of leader he chooses to be. No stone sharpens his sword as much as the film’s breakout star, Michael B. Jordan. In his capable hands, Erik Killmonger is easily one of the best villains the MCU has seen thus far, largely because he’s no cookie cutter antagonist. T’Challa and Killmonger are two sides of the same coin, mirroring the Martin & Malcolm ideological divide of two other Marvel nemeses, “X-Men’s” Professor X and his best friend turned lifelong rival Magneto. A villain is always more compelling when the bone he’s picking is a legitimate one, and the beef between these two is artfully wrapped up in the central argument of the film. Jordan plays Killmonger with a singular kind of charisma, a world burning intensity and effortless wit.

Coogler and co-writer Joe Robert Cole flesh out supporting cast members and give each arcs that mirror and compliment T’Challa’s own. Moreso than any other Marvel movie, or really any other superhero movie ever, this is a film where every cast member is given space to shine and a legitimate reason to exist. From T’Challa’s scene-stealing sister Shuri (Letitia Wright) to the General of the Dora Milaje, his personal guard forces, Okoye (Danai Gurira) to the two token whites—the coked out Russell Crowe impression of Andy Serkis’ villain Klaw and the stiff, comic relief of Martin Freeman’s Agent Ross—each character stands alone and plays a part in the film’s larger conversation with conflicting notions of what the nation of Wakanda should be and how they should conduct themselves on the world’s stage.

The same action beats audiences have come to expect from the Marvel milieu are on display, though executed with Coogler’s personal touch and a brio other directors in this playground haven’t been given the opportunity to express. The third act features some positively cringey CGI, and the opening set piece is murkily staged, but those are minor quibbles. Other than Rian Johnson injecting some much needed idiosyncrasy into the world of “Star Wars,” no other filmmaker has dug so deep into the belly of the beast without losing the style that got him to the dance in the first place. That Coogler came out the other end of the Marvel machine with a finished product so distinctly him is a miracle, and one worth celebrating.

A film this Black with such a powerful marketing push behind it is noteworthy, especially in 2018, when people are so thirsty for representation and so ready for this movie to be the end-all-be all-of blackness on screen that they’d likely twist themselves into pretzels defending it as such even if it wound up being lowkey trash. But the real joy is that “Black Panther” is a prismatic portrait of blackness that’s both intoxicating and inspiring. We don’t have to pretend that a superhero movie is going to somehow cure all of society’s problems, but we also don’t need to deny its symbolic power.

“Black Panther” is now playing in theaters.

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The Charles Theatre, 1711 N. Charles St., (410) 727-3464, thecharles.com.

“I, Tonya” (Craig Gillespie, U.S., 2017), now playing.

“Lady Bird” (Greta Gerwig, U.S., 2017), now playing.

“Phantom Thread” (Paul Thomas Anderson, U.S., 2017), now playing.

“The Shape Of Water” (Guillermo del Toro, U.S., 2017), now playing.

“The Sacrifice” (Andrei Tarkovsky, Russia, 1986), Feb. 15.

“A Fantastic Woman” (Sebastián Lelio, Spain, 2017), opens Feb. 16.

“The Insult” (Ziad Doueiri, Lebanon/France, 2017), opens Feb. 16.

“Night And The City” (Jules Dassin, U.S., 1950), Feb. 17, Feb. 19.

The Parkway Theatre, 5 W. North Ave., (410) 752-8083, mdfilmfest.com.

“Desolation” (Sam Patton, U.S., 2017), through Feb. 15.

“Ichi The Killer” (Takashi Miike, Japan, 2001), through Feb. 15.

“Porto” (Gabe Klinger,Portugal/U.S./France/Poland, 2017), through Feb. 15.

“Double Lover” (François Ozon, France, 2017), opens Feb. 14.

Double Feature: “Poetic Justice” (John Singleton, U.S., 1993) and “Love And Basketball” (Gina Prince-Bythewood, U.S., 2000), Feb. 14.

Free Screening: “Manufactured Landscapes” (Jennifer Baichwal, U.S., 2006), Feb. 14.

Masters Of Long-Form Cinema: “The Woman Who Left” (Lav Diaz, Philippines, 2017), Feb. 14.

“Along With The Gods: Two Worlds”, (Kim Yong-hwa, South Korea, 2017), opens Feb. 16.

“Maigret Sets A Trap” (Jean Delannoy, France, 1958), opens Feb. 16.

“Chisholm 72” (Shola Lynch, U.S., 2004), Feb. 19.

“God’s Country” (Louis Malle, U.S., 1985), with a pre-screening talk with writer Colette Shade, Feb. 20.

Reginald F. Lewis Museum, 830 E. Pratt St., (443) 263-1800, lewismuseum.org.

“Tell Them We Are Rising – The Story of Black Colleges and Universities” (Stanley Nelson Jr., U.S., 2017), Feb. 18.

The Senator Theatre, 5904 York Road, (410) 323-4424, senatortheatre.com.

“Call Me By Your Name” (Luca Guadagnino, U.S/Italy/Brazil/France, 2017), now playing.

“Darkest Hour” (Joe Wright, U.K., 2017), now playing.

“Film Stars Don’t Die In Liverpool” (Paul McGuigan, U.S. 2017), now playing.

“The Post” (Steven Spielberg, U.S., 2017), now playing.

“Three Billboards Outside Ebbing Missouri” (Martin McDonagh, U.S., 2017), now playing.

“Black Panther” (Ryan Coogler, U.S., 2018), opens Feb. 16.

“The Princess Bride” (Rob Reiner, U.S., 1987), Feb. 18.

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