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Over the weekend, I chatted withNew York Timesbestselling authorS.A. Cosbyat New York Comic Con 2026 to discuss his new novel,<a href="https://books.disney.com/book/truth-to-power-a-luke-cage-marvel-crime-novel/” rel=”nofollow noopener” target=”_blank”>Truth to Power: A Luke Cage Marvel Crime Novel, in stores Tuesday, October 13.
George Carmona 3rd: Okay, so you’re a mystery guy. Let’s talk a little bit about your writing origin story, how you got the gig for Cage.
S.A. Cosby: Okay, so I started writing stories when I was 7 years old and wrote my first story for my mom. I grew up reading all types of writing: horror, fiction, sci-fi, and mystery, even romance- because my grandmother likes romance novels. Eventually, I settled into crime fiction and mystery fiction. I was first published in a magazine calledThuglit; it was a magazine published by a guy named Ty Robson. It was a magazine of hardcore, hard-boiled crime stories. He used to like to say they published stories that would make Angela Lansbury quake.
I published my first crime novel in 2016 with a small publishing firm out of Maryland called Intrigue Press. And then I published my first major novel with Flatiron in 2020, calledBlacktop Wasteland.Fast-forward about 2 years, and the folks from Marvel reached out to my agent and wanted to know if I’d be interested in maybe writing an adaptation of a Marvel character.
The one I wanted, I couldn’t get. I wanted to do Punisher, but they wouldn’t let me have him, and so they suggested Luke Cage. From there on, I was in that group with my friend Alex Segura and Lisa Jewell. Alex is one of my really good friends, and so he was able to help me sort of navigate the world of IP. It was my first time doing a book like that, but once I got my feet under me, it was a really fun experience.
Carmona: Okay, because then that kind of goes to the next question of how deep is your nerddom? Like, what are your favorite characters or the storylines?
Cosby: I grew up on old-school comics, so I love Batman,The Killing Joke. I love Punisher, his origin story when he’s in Vietnam, of course, Spider-Man, and Captain America. I was a big fan growing up of the DC Vertigo line and The Blood Syndicate and Icon from Milestone. So I’ve always been a big comic and graphic novel fan.
My favorite character, I have two. One is Batman and the other one is Black Panther. I love Batman just because he’s such a force of will, and in this world of gods and super beings, his indomitable strength is his mind. And I think that says something really cool about humanity.
Black Panther, I just like because Black Panther is cool. I love that Wakanda is this incredible sort of utopia that maybe possibly could have existed if things in history had gone differently. But I love a lot of comic characters. One of my other favorites was Fabian Nicieza’s run on Nomad, the Jack Monroe Nomad, I love that run.
Carmona: That’s a deep cut.
Cosby: That was incredible. Fabian was doing stuff in the late ’90s, he was writing about AIDS, he was writing about the LA riots, homelessness, and mental health. And he wrote it in a way that allowed Jack (Nomad) to sort of address these questions, but not pretending he had the answers. So I’ve been a comic fan for a long time, even right back to the old reprints of the Eisner, Tales from the Crypt, and Vault of Horror, stuff like that.
Carmona: Let’s get into the Luke Cage of it all. For fans of Luke Cage that might not follow this series of books, the crime noir, how does it fit into the Marvel literary world? How did you make them work? What was your approach to writing Cage?
Cosby: You know, Luke Cage is known as Harlem’s Hero. He’s a New York guy, and I was like, I’m a dude from the South. I thought it would be funny to see what it looks like when Luke has to come down south and basically beat up rednecks for 300 pages. I thought that was fun, so I had him come down south. Basically, the Marvel Comic novels are sort of a baton pass.Alex Seguratook the baton from Lisa Jewell, who wrote a Jessica Jones novel, Alex wrote a Daredevil novel, and he passed the baton to me and my Luke Cage novel.
At the beginning of the book, Daredevil/Matt Murdock asked Luke Cage to investigate this factory in the south that’s producing prosthetic arms and limbs for people. He thinks it’s tied to these soldiers that he was fighting, the Hand, that they were augmented with cybernetic limbs. Luke has relatives down there, and he calls his cousin to take a look around this plant, he’s coming down to check it out himself. Unfortunately, his cousin is found dead a few days later. So Luke goes down, and initially he’s going down for revenge. He’s going to avenge his cousin. He’s going to find out what’s going on, but he’s more suited, more hyped about getting revenge.
But as the novel goes on, he starts to question about the way he looks at violence, the way he looks at the way his powers, are both a curse and a gift. And, of course, he’s in the South. He’s a black man in the South, you know, he’s from New York. His sort of take on this idea that, you know, the ghost of the South haunts us all no matter where we’re from.
And so it was really fun for me to sort of put him in that position, in that predicament, and see what he, how he handles himself, see how he deals with not only a different environment, a different atmosphere, but also dealing with trying to maybe temper himself a little bit. But like I said, it’s also fun and gets to beat a bunch of rednecks and racists for about 300 pages.
Carmona: That’s the seller right there. So we got a little lifeline from a friend because they found out I was interviewing you, his question was, did you feel hampered by the genre? Or did you find it fun playing with somebody else’s toys?
Cosby: Initially, it was a little difficult for me to kind of pull myself into the Marvel sandbox, you know, that there are certain things that some heroes can do, that other heroes can’t do, and, you know, there are limitations that some heroes have. So for me, at first it was kind of difficult getting into that sort of mindset, but once I was able to get into that mindset, it was really fun exploring Luke, not only his personality, I gave him a little bit of humor, a little bit of sass. He’s a bit more of a smart aleck than maybe he is in the comics in the book, but also sort of developing his fears. There’s a scene in the book, I’m not giving anything away, hopefully it’s not a spoiler but there’s a scene in the book where he’s trapped, and he thinks he’s going to drown. For all his super strength, for all his, you know, invulnerable skins, he needs to breathe, he still has to breathe. And so I like sort of taking a challenge to him and seeing, you know, what can I do to get around his incredible powers?
And then also I like really enjoyed so much dealing with him as a character in the larger Marvel universe. I make allusions to other characters that I love, other characters he’s involved with. You know, some street-level characters, but also some of the more cosmic characters.
And there’s moments where he reflects on his friendship with Danny Rand and how Danny tries to get him to calm down and practice mindfulness and meditation. Luke’s not all about that.
But also his love for Jessica and how, for all of his strength, all of his powers, the thing he’s most afraid of is losing her. And so I kind of like delving into that too.
When I write my own books, crime novels, my guys and gals are really tough, really formidable, but the thing that I think makes them human, that people latch on to, I think, is that they’re vulnerable, you know, no matter how tough they are, no matter how bad they are, they’re still people. They still have love, fears, hates, and desires, and for me, it was really great to sort of do that through Luke Cage.
Carmona: What’s next for you in terms of superheroic stories? Any other superheroes you’d like to write, either novelized or comics, actual comics?
Cosby: Me and Alex Segura, if anybody’s listening to this, we’ve been trying to sell our comic book idea for 3 years, it’s called The 8 Pillars. It’s about 8 people who develop superpowers that are based on Mesoamerican and African gods, or Rishi gods. So it’s kind of like Shazam meets the X-Men. We’ve been trying to get that published for a while here. The comic I would love to write, other than The Punisher, I’d love to write a Batman story. I just think Batman is like Keyser Söze if he wasn’t a villain. And so I just love his indomitable will. I’d love to write a Batman comic or novel.
Carmona: Would you want to adapt any of your books into comic format?
Cosby: A couple of years ago, Prestige Press did a version of my book,Blacktop Wasteland,with illustrations, and it was amazing. It made me want to put it in a graphic novel. I’d love to see any of my books, but especiallyBlacktop Wasteland, because of the car chases and everything, as a graphic novel.
Also, about 10 years ago, when I first started writing, I was a part of a charity project called The Sound and Fury: Shakespeare Goes Punk, and it was me and four other writers, and we did different punk versions of Shakespeare stories. I chose a dieselpunk story, so it’s that 50s aesthetic, you know, the retrofuturism, and the one that I used was Othello. And I made Othello and his guy Iago into Sky Pirates. And I’d love to see that as a graphic novel one day. Yeah, I love comics.
Like I said, me and Alex have these ideas, and I just love graphic novels and comics. So if anybody’s listening, I’d love to adapt work.
Truth to Power: A Luke Cage Marvel Crime Novel,a Penguin Random House book,releases Tuesday, October 13th.
Stay tuned toThe Beatfor more news fromNYCC ’26.
