Ta-Nehisi Coates speaks onstage at the New Yorker Festival 2015. October 4, 2015.
Photo by Anna Webber/Getty Images for The New Yorker
Ta-Nehisi Coates will script a new series of the Captain America comics for Marvel. Coates, an opinion journalist and author of National Book Award-winning Between The World And Me, made the announcement at The Atlantic. Coates has spent two years writing the comic book edition of Black Panther, and says he will continue to do so.
Coates says he was approached by former Marvel editor-in-chief Axel Alonso with the idea to write a new Captain. He writes that he's excited to use the medium to interrogate the American dream and other similar ideals: "Writing is about questions for me—not answers. And Captain America, the embodiment of a kind of Lincolnesque optimism, poses a direct question for me: Why would anyone believe in The Dream? What is exciting here is not some didactic act of putting my words in Captain America’s head, but attempting to put Captain America’s words in my head."
The new Captain America series comes with covers by Alex Ross, and illustrations by Leinil Yu. Issue No. 1 arrives in stores on July 4, 2018.