Erik Killmonger, the primary antagonist of Marvel’s blockbuster Black Panther, will star in his own comic book miniseries.
Introduced in 1973 by Don McGregor and Rich Buckler, Killmonger has been at the center of many well-regarded Black Panther stories over the decades, but his popularity exploded earlier this year with his portrayal by Michael B. Jordan in the Marvel Studios film.
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Launching in December, five-issue Killmonger by writer Bryan Edward Hill (Detective Comics) and artist Juan Ferreyra (Green Arrow) will examine the life of the exiled Wakandan N’Jadaka, who eventually adopts the name Erik Killmonger. The comic will showcase how he grew from a gifted but bitter child into one of the biggest threats Black Panther has ever faced.
Hill explained to Vulture that the project was pitched to him by Marvel editor Wil Moss, and that he took on the book with the promise of doing something new.
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“I didn’t want to just recap what we had heard in his mythology,” he said. “I wanted to explore the choices and the failures that lead a person to dedicate their life to revenge, and how that happens. Because with Erik, I feel like it’s really a tragedy. It’s a story of a guy who was failed a lot by Wakanda in certain ways, by the people he met outside of Wakanda, by his own conscience in other ways, and I wanted to paint a portrait of that.”