“Nobody gives a shit about any of the other Marvel characters. Go back and make a deal for Spider-Man only.” A directive from a Sony executive in 1998 according to Ben Fritz in his recent book, The Big Picture: The Fight for the Future of Movies.

Marvel at the time was exiting bankruptcy and had offered the film rights to a whole slew of their characters for a fast $25 million. Sony passed. Flash forward…post Disney buying the comics company for $4 billion. A slew of those characters from Deadpool, Guardians of the Galaxy, Thor, Iron Man, Captain America and even the C-lister Ant-Man made big box office. Though it is notable Daredevil, Elektra and the Ghost Rider flicks didn’t exactly set any movie going records.

Now comes the Black Panther. He’s a character first introduced fifty-two years ago in the pages of Fantastic Four #52, July 1966, in the wake of Malcolm X’s assassination and the Watts uprising. Depending on which Marvel lore you believe, either Stan Lee as writer and Jack Kirby as artist together came up with the character, Stan Lee by himself as he claims in the documentary With Great Power because he thought the time was right for more black comics characters, or Kirby alone, more or less for the same reason.

For the geek fanboys out there keeping score, I’m in the Kirby camp. Nonetheless, the Panther made the scene, does in fact grace the cover of that FF issue. Though again, like so much of inside comics that is analogous to race relations at any given time period, the initial version of the cover by Kirby had BP in a half mask making it clear he’s a black man. The one that ran, his mask fully covers his face as supposedly the higher-ups at Marvel were worried a brother prominent on the front of the book would hurt sales.

While Black Panther wasn’t a runaway hit, he did make an impression on kids like me growing up in South Central, happy to see the arrival of a black superhero. It took some time for him to get an eponymous title. His first feature run was in Jungle Action, a title Marvel had maintained since the ‘50s. The company was then known as Atlas, and the book featured all sorts of white b’wanna jungle lords in the Tarzan mold.

Yet this is a character who as often as he’s had his own title, has had those titles cut out from beneath his agile feet time and again because of poor sales. The adage in comics like movies that the majority white readership won’t support a black lead. But as of this writing, the 2018 movie bearing his name has earned upwards of $897.7 million worldwide. What is it then about this moment in the United States in particular that the Black Panther, T’Challa, son of T’Chaka, brainy warrior king of the scientifically advanced hidden African kingdom of Wakanda, has struck this kind of chord, invoking pride and optimism like Roots did back when? Folks coming out to the theaters in their African finery, celebs and community organizations buying out screenings for young people, Afrofuturists heralding Black Panther as an agent of a change of perception and some seeing the movie three or four times because they want to inculcate all of its nuances and meaning.

Overall I dug the movie. My wife, a veteran community organizer and director of community action organizations, also enjoyed the picture, and she is no fan of Marvel movies or action-adventure movies in general. For it isn’t like the script didn’t lift from the Panther comics storylines and characters written by the likes of Don McGregor, Christopher Priest and Reginald Hudlin (producer on Django Unchained and Marshall) among several others. All Marvel and DC Comics movies and TV shows have taken from the source material. Certainly the film too owes a good portion of its visual style to that endless phantasmagoric imagery Kirby: populated his comics with over all his years of toil.

This cathartic cinematic super black experience has been building. When streaming service Netflix premiered Luke Cage (created as a response by Marvel to the influence of blaxploitation films in 1972 by Archie Goodwin, writer and George Tuska, artist) in 2016, the site crashed there was so much pent-up demand for a “bulletproof brother” in a time of Black Lives Matter. And the new network show Black Lightning (from DC who got on the bandwagon a little later in 1977, the character created by writer Tony Isabella and artist Trevor Von Eden) has garnered some residual BPness. Witness a recent episode echoing Charlottesville where white supremacists linked arms to encircle a Confederate statue chanting, “You will not replace us,” as multi-racial protestors encircled them.

Nor is Black Panther the first black super hero movie. In 1993 Wesley Snipes had an interest in playing the Black Panther and approached Marvel. For various reasons as Snipes recounts in a recent Hollywood Reporter piece, the movie couldn’t get made. But his dealings with the House of Ideas led him in 1998 to play Eric Brooks, aka Blade, an angst driven, half-vampire, half-human vampire killer created by writer Marv Wolfman and artist Gene Colon in the pages of the Tomb of Dracula comic. The Blade movie made money. That and its two sequels helped pave the way for where we are now – a mix of the hyper ideal and the real.

These black superheroes might face down super villains like Doctor Doom and Lex Luthor, but in civilian clothes driving their car to the next Justice League meeting, they could be stopped by the cops because they “fit the profile.” Reality has even intruded in Metropolis. In Action Comics #987, Superman zooms between a pissed-off white guy wearing an American flag bandana who is distraught at losing his job, and some undocumented workers he was trying to gun down.

Is Black Panther’s appeal then as Jamil Smith observed in his Time cover story, “The Revolutionary Power of Black Panther,” such that “After the Obama era, perhaps none of this should feel groundbreaking. But it does. In the midst of a regressive cultural and political moment fueled in part by the white-nativist movement, the very existence of Black Panther feels like resistance.”

Had Clinton been victorious, and the status quo remained “normal,” would Black Panther have the same widespread resonance? I think to an extent it would have, but there’s no denying Smith’s point. The Wonder Woman movie of last year was viewed through a similar lens, an answer to the misogynism of Trump and his ilk. Added to the mix is the subtext of horror film Get Out (writer-director Jordan Peele won the Oscar for best original screenplay), a metaphor for being woke. Is this then a sign of an awakening of those who stayed home for various reasons in November 2016, answering the theme of standing up issued from the silver screen? Activism is on the move and on the voting front, the dems have been racking up wins for statehouse seats. Some in places where Trump won handily.

If a more reflective pop cultural story can inspire us to stay in or get in the struggle be it organizing or the electoral arena or creating more fictions that like vibranium, the space metal upon which Wakanda was built, absorbs then can redirect hostile energy, then maybe the words of the Black Panther from his first appearance those five plus decades ago still have meaning. “A victory too easily won is too soon forgotten!”

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