Folio Society Does Ta-Nehisi Coates & Brian Stelfreeze’s Black Panther

At MCM London Comic Con, the Folio Society’s booth had a big Black Panther poster prominent. Now we understand why. The Folio Society is releasing a special collectors’ edition and the first one-volume edition of Ta-Nehisi Coates and Brian Stelfreeze‘s Black Panther: A Nation Under Our Feet the week 10 days before Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, is out in cinemas.

Featuring a new introduction written by author and lifelong comic book fan Walter Mosley, Mosley shares how significant the first inclusion of a Black superhero in the Marvel Comics metaverse was for him as a young reader: “When the Black Panther appeared in Fantastic Four #52… it was a seminal moment in my ability to see myself in the world.” He speaks of Black Panther as a ‘”gift to many young black people” and praises Ta-Nehisi Coates’ ability to use the comic book format to “recast our world in a way we have often suspected but were never fully able to articulate.'”

Black Panther: A Nation Under Our Feet £75
Bound in Balathane Algora blocked with a design by Brian Stelfreeze
320 pages printed four-colour throughout
Slipcase blocked with a design by Brian Stelfreeze
10½” x 7″

Ta-Nehisi Coates has been a  a journalist for several publications including The Village Voice and Time, but it was his essays on racism and the African American experience for The Atlantic that won him global attention and critical acclaim. He has published several works of non-fiction, including a memoir, The Beautiful Struggle (2008), and Between the World and Me (2015), for which he won the National Book Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction. He has written for several Marvel Comics including Black Panther and Captain America. His first novel, The Water Dancer, was published in 2019 and he received a MacArthur Fellowship in the same year.

Brian Stelfreeze published his first comics work in 1988, drawing the sci-fi series Cycops with writer Julie Woodcock. He became a prolific cover artist for several comic book publishers and moved onto interior work with Marvel’s Domino in 2003 before starting work on Black Panther with Ta-Nehisi Coates in 2015. Stelfreeze was part of the Atlanta-based comic artist collective Gaijin Studios and is currently Art Director at indie publisher 12-Gauge Comics. He received an Inkpot Award in 2014, and a Glyph Award in 2017 for his work on Black Panther.

Walter Mosley  published his first novel in 1990, Devil in a Blue Dress, a hardboiled noir featuring African American private investigator ‘Easy’ Rawlins. Mosley went on to publish over sixty books ranging from non-fiction to science fiction, each offering a unique racial perspective on both genre and American history. Mosley has also written for television and theatre and has won over a dozen awards. In 2013 he was inducted into the New York State Writers Hall of Fame. A lifelong comic book fan, Mosley has over 30,000 in his collection.

Founded in 1947, The Folio Society it originally focused on classic literary texts – their first book was a compilation of Tolstoy stories, followed closely by editions of George du Maurier, Shakespeare and Voltaire. In 2022 fantasy is now the publisher’s most wide-ranging and highest grossing genre, with recent editions including Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere and Thor in collaboration with Marvel.