‘Eyes Of Wakanda' Writer Marc Bernardin On Marvel's Animated Black Panther Spinoff

Forbes

6 hours ago

It's been a long winter for Marvel fans looking for the blend of memorable characters, brisk storytelling, clever worldbuilding and spectacular visuals that built the studio into a juggernaut in the 2010s. One pocket of hope lies with Marvel Studios Animation, producers of the very entertaining in-continuity series What If…? and the huge hit X-Men '97, two of Marvel's best-received projects of the 2020s. They continue that winning streak with Eyes of Wakanda, a new 4-episode miniseries that dropped this month on Disney+, that delves into the backstory of the Black Panther's homeland while weaving some loose threads in Marvel's story tapestry in with actual history and myth.
Showrunner Todd Harris, who developed the visual look for a raft of hits at Marvel and elsewhere over the past decade-plus, put together a great team around the show, including writer Marc Bernardin (Jay and Silent Bob, Star Trek), who wrote episodes two and three and is listed as a co-producer of the series.
'Todd sold [MCU head] Kevin Feige on this story of Wakanda through the ages,' said Bernardin in a phone interview earlier this month. 'As a writers room, we just started exploring where we could set these stories and how we could get the most bang for our buck.'
Bernardin says he was intrigued by the premise of the hidden kingdom of Wakanda interacting with the outside world across the wide sweep of history. The first two episodes of the series take place thousands of years in the past, while the final two are in more recent centuries.
'One story we knew we wanted to tell was the Trojan War story,' he said, referring to S1E02, 'Legends and Lies,' which he wrote. 'We knew Memnon, a character from the Iliad, was a king of Ethiopia who had something to do with Achilles, so legend already gave us a head start.'
Rather than giving us a paint-by-numbers action yarn, Bernardin uses the premise to explore the ethical compromises and hard choices that Memnon – secretly a Wakandan agent tasked with recovering a stolen artifact from Troy – has to navigate at the cost of his close personal relationships and honor. The story loses none of its depth and drama for being animated, while gaining a lot of visual panache.
Bernardin's other script, S1E03, 'Lost and Found,' involves a more cocky Wakandan agent stealing another artifact, this one from an enclave in medieval China, only to discover that he might be the one getting played.
'Todd [Harris] is a huge martial arts fan, so we wanted to do a Kung Fu story,' said Bernardin. 'We thought, 'let's do a James Bond story with Kung Fu, where the Bond girl is every bit is formidable as Bond is.' Those were the pieces on the table that we get to play with.'
In the episode, (minor spoilers), the Wakandan operative is followed back to his reclusive homeland by the woman he thought he was using to gain access to a sacred artifact. Instead, she is actually a powerful warrior trained in the 'Iron Fist' discipline from her homeland Kun Lun. Iron Fist is another Marvel character, last seen on screen in an unremarkable Netflix series from 2017, whose backstory is similar to the Black Panther.
'Kun Lun and Wakanda are almost sister cities,' said Bernardin. 'They are secret places in the world that have become advanced and enlightened, and they produce heroes with special abilities. Keeping Iron Fist alive was something [the Marvel brain trust] was interested in doing because I think it's something they want to pay off later.'
These little breadcrumbs in Eyes of Wakanda tie the series to the broader MCU without the sense that viewers need to 'do their homework,' as tends to happen in the studio's more recent live action series and features. It also keeps alive the legacy of Marvel's last bona fide solo superhero hit from the big screen – a character pivotal enough that you can almost track the change in critical and box office fortunes of the MCU to the demise of Black Panther's charismatic star Chadwick Boseman, who died in August, 2020.
'Eyes of Wakanda is definitely a way to keep Wakanda in the hearts and minds of the audience, knowing that there is ultimately a thing they can't have back,' said Bernardin. 'They wanted the Black Panther they fell in love with. So how do we give them those kinds of stories without invalidating or diminishing what they loved? We end up eliding it by saying 'we love it too, and here are some other things you might love.' We provide connections to the Black Panther in ways that feel respectful, that are still about these characters and their importance in the world.'
Eyes of Wakanda also resonates thematically with the Afrofuturist vibe that made Black Panther so inspiring. In the MCU, Wakanda exists as a counternarrative to colonial conceptions of Africa as backward compared to the west. Instead it was actually an African civilization that developed all of these technological and cultural innovations well before anyone else; they just guarded them jealously rather than imposing them on the rest of the world. The animated series makes clear that extends as far back into history as you care to go.
It was a bold premise when Jack Kirby and Stan Lee introduced it in the comics in 1966; it was bold on screen in 2018, and it remains bold, maybe bolder than ever, in the brave new world of America in 2025.
'Given a few things that have happened in the world [since the show was first conceived several years ago], I think it would be difficult to impossible to get Season One greenlit today,' says Bernardin. 'But, it did get produced. It's out there. And if it achieves some measurable success, the possibility of Season 2 becomes a business decision. Disney can read the data as well as anyone, but it would be difficult to steer away from it if it works. Fans seem to like it. Critics seem to like it. Can we give them more? Sure. There are so many place we can go, we have nothing but a broad canvas of history in which to set more stories.'