Black Panther Wakanda Forever’s post-credits scene twists Marvel comics

It is like every Marvel Cinematic Universe movie that came before it. Wakanda for Ever: Black PantherThis is a great treat for those who have the patience to stick around past the end credits.

You’d be hard-pressed to find another Marvel post-credits scene that’s as touching as this one. This raises more questions than it answers about the MCU’s direction, as well as how it will match the comics.

[Ed. note: This piece contains spoilers for Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.]

Image: Marvel Studios

The movie itself closes with T’Challa’s sister Shuri (Letitia Wright) finally able to confront her grief for her family by carrying out a traditional Wakandan funeral ritual. The credits scene picks up moments later, as Nakia (Lupita Nyong’o) joins the young Black Panther and introduces her to Nakia’s secret son — T’Challa’s offspring and Shuri’s nephew. The boy says he is called Toussaint, for Toussaint Louverture, a pivotal figure in the overthrow of French control in Haiti and the country’s transformation into a sovereign state of formerly enslaved peoples. But that, he says, is his Haitian name, and he has another: Prince T’Challa, of Wakanda.

Nakia explains that she and the late T’Challa conceived in secret, and decided to raise their son outside the pressures — and dangers, as Wakanda Forever so emphatically demonstrates — of the Wakandan court. It’s a beautiful button on the film’s themes, as Shuri embraces the final member of her family she didn’t even know she had. And it’s a tear-worthy tribute to the previous T’Challa, late actor Chadwick Boseman: a firm statement that a hero’s legacy lives beyond death in the actions of those who loved them.

What might make it even more special is that there’s no comic book precedent for the scene. Without the string of Marvel Comics continuity the MCU so skillfully used to attract attention, ticket sales, and interest, the moment is all its own.

Wait, does T’Challa not have a son in the comics?

Image: Reginald Hudlin/Marvel Comics

Though T’Challa has had some deep romantic relationships — he and Storm of the X-Men tied the knot in 2005, only for T’Challa to annul their marriage seven years later, after Wakanda was destroyed by Namor, who was allied with the X-Men at the time. But he’s never been blessed with royal heirs, at least not in the main timeline of Marvel Comics.

However, there’s a Wakandan story about a prince who never existed.

The new modern Giant-Size X-MenA loosely organized collection of one-shot comics that focused on a classic X-Men character during the Krakoan Era. There was a story where a super-advanced, isolated human-supremacist community called the World infected Storm by a sci fi disease. Jean Grey & Emma Frost combined their psychic powers to save her. That was the story as printed — but the original pitch would have left a huge mark on the Marvel Comics universe.

Jonathan Hickman is the X-Men writer and Black Panther’s hero. He shared the story on The X-Men. Jay & Miles X-Plain the X-Men podcast, the issue was originally going to reveal that Storm, having rekindled her relationship with T’Challa, was pregnant with their child.

“The next couple of issues would have been her having to go into [the World’s time-accelerated vault-civilization] and having the kid,” Hickman said, “who would have been raised in the World. So it would be this heir to two kingdoms who didn’t know the mother or the father.” The character would have taken inspiration from, of all places, the 2008 direct-to-video animated film Next Avengers: Heroes of Tomorrow, which featured the future son of T’Challa and Storm, Azari.

However, Ta-Nehisi Coates, a writer, was also beginning the long-running finale arc. Black Panther, “The Intergalactic Empire of Wakanda” — which was full of its own elements of cultural amnesia and relativistic time shenanigans. Hickman said that the sons of Black Panther, Storm, and the Marvel editorial denied him was the one big swing he requested during his tenure as X-Men’s architect.

As cool as a scion of mutantdom and Wakanda would have been, it’s probably fOder the best that Marvel nixed the idea. It’s generally a little odd, in the superhero comics world, for a huge development in one character’s setting to happen in a book that squarely belongs to another character or characters’ silo. And it left plenty of room for the Marvel Cinematic Universe to have its own take on T’Challa’s legacy in isolation, without the hovering context of any comic book precedent to adhere to orGet away