Posted in: Comics, Marvel Comics | Tagged: black panther, christopher priest, joe quesada, marvel knights, The World To Come
Christopher Priest On The White Black Panther Controversy Of 2025
Christopher Priest On The White Black Panther Controversy Of 2025… when even the Daily Mail wanted in on the action
Article Summary
- Christopher Priest revisits the 2025 White Black Panther uproar, explaining how Marvel’s The World To Come sparked headlines.
- Priest says the controversial unmasking was never a Black Panther replacement, but a misread twist tied to Everett Ross.
- The World To Come began years earlier, with Priest and Joe Quesada crafting a Black Panther story about failure and legacy.
- Priest recalls backlash from across the political spectrum as Black Panther outrage spread, often from people who never read it.
In the summer of 2025, I wrote an article about Marvel’s The World To Come first issue by Christopher Priest and Joe Quesada, titled “Marvel Has A New Black Panther, And He Will Cause Headlines.” And I was right; it did. Even if I wasn’t entirely right about him being the new Black Panther… and followed up a month or so later with “The Truth Behind a Future White Black Panther in The World To Come“. In between, on other sites, we had had “Marvel fans erupt after new Black Panther is revealed as white“, “Christopher Priest’s “White Panther” Brings Race, Rhetoric and Resentment“, “Marvel Introduces a White Black Panther in Controversial New Series ‘The World To Come‘”, and “Ryan Gosling Could Be White Black Panther in MCU After Ketema Reveal“
Talking to <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_cvJUxGC6QQ” rel=”nofollow noopener” target=”_blank”>ComicPop Returns, Christopher Priest recalled those heady days when Black Panther was coming to the cinema. “I get this call from Joe Quesada; the Marvel Knights anniversary is coming up. He had the idea for a story set in the near future that could potentially spawn a larger franchise. It took me a while to warm up to the idea because I’ve seen creators who have a notable run on a series, then come back to that character years or decades later, and kind of stumble and fall. And I didn’t want to be the guy who stumbled and fell on Black Panther. So we went around a few times until an idea came to me where I said, well, you know, my Black Panther stories usually followed a familiar formula where, you know, it’s kind of like the old Scooby-Doo cartoon where, you know, you get to the end of the cartoon, and you unmask the villain and ah, it’s Mr Hucklebee, you know, and I would have gotten away with it without you kids. So my Black Panther stories: Black Panther is under some sort of duress or pressure, or you think that he’s losing, or he’s got some challenge that’s overwhelming, and what will he do? And then you get like into the third act or the windup of the story, coming to the climax of the story, and all the mousetraps start snapping shut, and you start to realise this was the Panther’s plan all along; he had been five steps ahead of the bad guys and that he’s the smartest guy in the room, which was incredibly difficult to write. It’s so hard to write a character who’s supposed to be smart because I’m not smart.”
So Priest was in. “I called up Joe, and I said, “What if we wrote a story? What if we blew up that formula? What if we wrote a story where Panther screws up? And that’s what brought me to the table. A story where he’s got it all rigged, he’s got this plan and it’s all working perfectly, and something goes wrong and catastrophically and endangers the whole
planet, and we start to see this Jenga tower fall apart. And we made it a story about legacy, and we made it a story about ageing. It’s a metaphor for us, for me, for Joe, for creators of our era, for Mark Waid and John Romita Jr. We are now thinking about, you know, more about legacy; we’re no longer thinking about ‘man, I can’t wait to get my hands on them X-Men’. They haven’t done it yet; they’re not going to do it, and that’s tough to accept.”
And then we got a White Black Panther. Only, not really. “As far as the whole controversy thing, I wrote the lion’s share of this about seven years ago. There are two things that are happening. One is people are assuming that the book was a commentary on our current political situation, which is hilarious to me because our real-life current political situation was kind of mirroring this comic book that I wrote a long time ago, right? We wrote our story about a lunatic world leader a long time ago, right ? The other thing was that I didn’t know when the book would be published. I didn’t know that Marvel had scheduled this thing to come out. So, all of a sudden, I’m hearing all this online, and I’m getting these emails, and people are up in arms and, you know, they’re setting houses on fire, and I’m going, “What? What is going on here?”
“And they’re mad about where you get to the end of the first issue. Spoiler alert, for a book that’s over a year old and Black Panther is fighting his son and the son unmasks himself, you know, and people are really upset because the son is white.”
But that wasn’t the worst of it. “And they’re making all these Ryan Gosling memes or whatever, which I was unaware of. I didn’t know anything about the Ryan Gosling meme. And the thing about it is when Joe drew the page, my concern about the page was not that the character was white, but that was a tip-off to the reader. I said, “Soon as they see this guy, they’re going to know who that is. They’re going to know what’s going on here because he, you know, he’s not Panther’s biological son. He’s Everett Ross‘s son.” And Joe drew Everett Ross as a young guy. I went, “He looks exactly like Ross.” So I called Joe. I said, “I think we’re giving too much away with this. You know, soon as she pulls the mask off, they’re going to know.” And Joe said, “Don’t worry about it. It’ll be great.”
Priest laid out his original plans. “The unmasking of Black Panther in Fantastic Four #52. We were doing kind of an homage to that. And we’re thinking here’s a big clue as to who this character was, you know, and why Panther would have adopted this particular kid because readers of our original Marvel Knights run would immediately recognise him, and we’re thinking we’re doing something clever and we’re, you know, and we’re high-fiving and we’re going, “Hey, this is really cool.” And then there was all this noise… Marvel has a new white Black Panther; Marvel changing Black Panther to white is ridiculous for a bunch of reasons. Number one, because the way the tribal challenge works, you have to either yield or die, right? And Panther had not yielded, and Panther was still alive. So therefore, the white kid was not the new Black Panther. But it didn’t matter. Just somebody wrote a headline and somebody else saw that headline and wrote their own headline, and then a third party read that headline and wrote theirs and so on, you know. I was watching YouTube, and it was 30 minutes of this guy just going after me, you know, just furious, and he’s red in the face, and he’s shaking the comic book, and he’s like Jimmy Swaggart, the old preacher, and he’s doing the whole thing, and then he gets to the end, I watch the whole 30 minutes of this guy calling me everything. And I get to the end of the video, and the guy says All right, that’s it for this video. And, you know, like and subscribe and, you know, he starts flipping through the book, and he goes, ‘Oh, I guess now I need to read this thing’. He hadn’t read it.”
Which gave Priest a new context to place this in. “We had conservatives who were cheering and liberals who were really pissed at us. And I had like a lot of black people who were just enraged and a couple of guys online saying, “Oh, Priest isn’t really black and he’s an Uncle Tom and saying really unpleasant things, you know, about me. I called Joe. I said, “You know what, Joe? The liberals hate us and the conservatives hate us. We have brought America together… If I’d written that same scene in 1998, people would have gone, ‘Oh, that’s just Priest being Priest,'” he said. “Now it’s, ‘How dare you?’… I can always get a job at Arby’s.”
The World To Comeby Christopher Priest and Joe Quesada is to be published in January by Marvel Comics.
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