#Black lightning marvel series#

The series juggles police brutality, systemic racism, black youth culture, gang violence, and black parenting with aplomb, and all topics feel entirely new to The CW but also necessary for the network, where it can be paired with an equally pulpy series like Riverdale. Series like Jane the Virgin have often felt like an anomaly on the network, but as The CW continued to deepen its storytelling with a treatise on corruption in iZombie and an exploration of mental health on Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, it’s now become a place where Black Lightning is welcome. For the longest time, The CW has focused on the interior lives of young white girls and the white boys they are attracted to. The series doesn’t merely focus on Jefferson, but his daughters Anissa and Jennifer as well. The CW, as it turns out, is exactly the place for Black Lightning. Though the show hardly has any traces of the hero’s blaxploitation origins, it feels at times like a throwback. The series is steeped in respectability politics since Luke comes from a different generation. Luke focuses on street-level criminals like Black Mariah, a corrupt congresswoman, and Cottonmouth, a menacing gangster.

Gone are the myriad superpowers on display in other Marvel films, though. In Luke Cage, our hero is worried about protecting Harlem after serving time for a crime he didn’t commit. They both spouted blaxploitation clichés-a 1977 Justice League of America issue has Lightning refer to Superman’s team as a “bunch of jive turkeys.”įour decades later, both series are now on television- Luke Cage on Netflix and Black Lightning on The CW-and they couldn’t be any more different.īoth series are focused on community-the cornerstone of the black superhero show. Lightning was essentially the same character as Cage, albeit with electric generation powers instead of indestructible skin. He was created as a response to the popular Marvel Comics character Luke Cage, who was not Marvel’s first black superhero-that’d be Black Panther-but was the first to have his own solo series. Black Lightning debuted in the pages of DC Comics in April 1977 as their first starring black superhero.

Black lightning marvel