For director Ryan Coogler, Black Panther is deeply personal.
In a recent interview with Entertainment Weekly, Coogler discussed the lack of representation of black superheroes in comic books, and the thrill he felt as a child when he first discovered Black Panther and other characters like Bishop, from X-Men.
It's the same thrill that he felt the day he was hired by Marvel to direct Black Panther. Coaxed by his wife, he went back to the place that introduced him to the comic books in the first place: A comic books store near where he went to school in Oakland, California, called Dr Comics & Mr Games.
It was foreshadowing at its finest, as Dr Comics and Mr Games was where he first found out about the movie that he would one day direct.
"We went in and I bought the two Black Panther comic books I could find," Coogler said. "I was like, you got to take a picture of me. And I sent it to Kevin [Feige]."
Feige, who serves as the president of Marvel Studios, emphasized that the child within someone is what makes people like Coogler want to turn their memories into something even bigger, like a major motion picture.
“Most importantly, you do it for other 8-year-olds, to inspire the next generation the way we were inspired,” Fiege told Entertainment Weekly. “And in this case, when Ryan was growing up, perhaps there weren’t that many of these heroes to be inspired by that looked like him.”
And while Black Panther would has become a major source of inspiration for Coogler, he wasn't the only hero he'd come to admire.
"When I first discovered comic books and superheroes, I remember falling in love with X-Men the first time I saw Bishop," he told Entertainment Weekly. "I was like, 'Holy smokes, there's a black X-Man?'"
Coogler said he was excited when he learned that people like Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. were influencing Stan Lee's characters like Magneto and Professor X.
"So I was like, 'Jeez, my culture is influencing this!' And this is being referenced. But I always did long for that one [black] superhero who the whole book was around," he told Entertainment Weekly. "The same way I could pick up a Captain America book or a Spider-Man book.”
Upon visiting Dr Comics & Mr Games as a child, Coogler recalled, "I remember going in there saying, 'You got any black superheroes? Got anybody who looks like me?'"
They immediately showed him Black Panther, and the rest, as we know it, is history.
