“The whole idea was a little bit off”: Stan Lee on Making a Black Superhero the Richest Man in the World

While Stan Lee may have created history alongside Jack Kirby after introducing Black Panther as the first mainline Black superhero in comics, the initial idea was a bit different. In a past interview with Changes (via toombrevoort), he said that he didn’t think a Black superhero from Africa would’ve been accepted by the readers back then, saying:

Yeah, so the whole idea was a little bit off. I told Roy Thomas what I’d like to do with him is have Roy write the Panther so he teaches underprivileged children in the ghetto and uses his own knowledge and his own force and leadership to help these kids.