A same-sex relationship may have been left on the cutting room floor of Marvel’s Black Panther film, but the comic that showed how two Wakandan women fell in love has been recognised as a standout graphic novel for LGBTQ representation by GLAAD.
An image from the cover of Black Panther: World of Wakanda. Image: Marvel
Black Panther: World of Wakanda has received the GLAAD Media Award for Best Comic, presented yesterday. Created by Roxane Gay, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Yona Harvey, Alitha E. Martinez and Afua Richardson, World of Wakanda was a follow-up to Coates’ successful Black Panther relaunch in 2016.
It tells the story of the Dora Milaje, the all-female bodyguard unit that protects the Wakandan royal family, as the country struggles with societal unrest. At the centre of this saga are Ayo and Aneka, who fall in love and form a relationship.
Earlier this year, it was revealed that the Black Panther film was set to include flirting between Ayo (Florence Kasumba) and Okoye (Danai Gurira), but it wasn’t in the final version. This was disappointing, as it was yet another opportunity for Marvel to feature some form of LGBTQ+ representation in its film universe that it eventually decided to reject.
It was especially upsetting in this instance because, as shown in World of Wakanda, that form of representation was already there, on Black Panther‘s pages.
As a special bonus, I’d like to remind you that World of Wakanda, along with every other graphic novel on GLAAD’s nominations list this year, has already been cancelled.
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3 responses to “Black Panther: World Of Wakanda Wins A GLAAD Award, Time For The MCU To Catch Up”
“As a special bonus, I’d like to remind you that World of Wakanda, along with every other graphic novel on GLAAD’s nominations list this year, has already been cancelled.”
As a special bonus i would also like to remind the writer that almost all of those had terrible sales and with the exception of a few brilliant arcs and concepts (looking at you gwenpool) were poorly written.
But hey if we want the comic arm of marvel to go under by just ticking the diversity checklist instead of actually focusing on the characters i am more than happy for a vers2 of their previous appproaches.
I would like to point out that winning an award doesn’t mean much if there weren’t really any good nominations in the first place. best of the worst is still one of the worst at the end of the day as well. Considering America Chavez was their hero of the year (I think anyway) and that book was horrible. plot and motivations. America the hero was a radical lunatic whose danger to the world is not insignifigant.
Whinge whinge whinge.
The main problem with “Catwoman” the movie is that it wasn’t about Catwoman the character we know. It was about some other lady that died and got bit by cats and it all goes downhill from there.
If you want to make a good Catwoman movie, make it about Catwoman!!!