Black Panther Wakanda Forever Post-Credits Scene Twists Marvel Comics

Like almost every Marvel Cinematic Universe film before it, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever has a treat for fans patient enough to stay past the credits roll point.

You’ll be hard pressed to find another Marvel post-credits scene quite as touching as this one. But it also raises bigger questions about where the MCU is headed and how closely it will follow the comics.

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

Image: Marvel Studios

The film itself ends with T’Challa’s sister Shuri (Letitia Wright) finally being able to face her grief for her family by performing a traditional Wakanda funeral ritual. The credits scene picks up shortly after, when Nakia (Lupita Nyong’o) joins the young Black Panther and introduces her to Nakia’s secret son – T’Challa’s descendants and Shuri’s nephew. The boy says his name is Toussaint, for Toussaint Louverture, a key figure in overthrowing French control in Haiti and transforming the country 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 secretly became pregnant and decided to raise their son outside of the pressures – and the dangers Wakanda forever so emphatically demonstrated – of the Wakandan court. It’s a nice nod to the film’s themes as Shuri hugs the last member of her family she didn’t even know she had. And it’s a tearful tribute to Chadwick Boseman, former actor T’Challa: a firm statement that a hero’s legacy lives on beyond death in the actions of those who loved him.

What might make it even more special is that there’s no comic book precedent for the scene. The moment stands on its own, devoid of the threads of existing Marvel Comics continuity that the MCU has so skillfully weaponized to garner attention, interest, and ticket sales.

Wait, doesn’t T’Challa have a son in the comics?

Image: Reginald Hudlin, Scot Eaton/Marvel Comics

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

But there is a story of a Wakanda prince who never existed.

The modern Huge X-Men was a loosely organized group of extra-long one-shot comics, each focusing on a different classic X-Men character in the dawn of the Krakoan era. The books featured a story in which a hyper-advanced and isolated human-racist society called World Storm infected with a sci-fi disease and Jean Gray and Emma Frost combined their telepathic powers to cure it. That was the story in print — but the original pitch would have had a big impact on the Marvel Comics universe.

As X-Men architect Jonathan Hickman (the author who placed Black Panther at the center of one of the greatest Marvel stories ever told) shared this Jay & Miles X-Plain the X-Men podcastThe issue was originally set to reveal that after rekindling her relationship with T’Challa, Storm was pregnant with their child.

“The next few issues would have been issues she should have addressed [the World’s time-accelerated vault-civilization] and having the kid,” Hickman said, “that would have grown up in the world. So it would be this heir to two kingdoms who knew neither mother nor father.” The character would have been inspired by the 2008 direct-to-video animated film of all things Next Avengers: Tomorrow’s Heroesstarring T’Challa and Storm’s future son, Azari.

At the same time, however, the writer Ta-Nehisi Coates began his sweeping conclusion Black Panther, “The Intergalactic Empire of Wakanda” – which was full of its own elements of cultural amnesia and relativistic time shenanigans. According to Hickman, who harbored no ill will on the matter, Black Panther and Storm’s son was one of the few big swings he requested during his tenure as X-Men architect, to which the Marvel editorial board said no.

As cool as a Scion of Mutants and Wakanda would have been, it’s probably for the best that Marvel scrapped the idea. In the world of superhero comics in general, it’s a bit odd that a big development occurs in a character’s environment in a book that belongs directly to another character or another character’s silo. And it left plenty of room for the Marvel Cinematic Universe to view T’Challa’s legacy in isolation, without the floating context of comic book precedent to cling to or tear yourself away from.