You can't really say that Bushmaster or Mariah Dillard is a bigger bad, because they both do some pretty heinous things.
The Luke Cage you saw in Season One was a reluctant hero. He was trying to figure out if he wanted to be a hero in the first place. And then fate intervened and forced him to step up his game.
Hip hop fans are obsessed, and they're geeks about hip hop. Comic book fans are also geeks, and when you can meld the two, then you open the world up to, I think, communities that will just take to each other.
The thing about being black in a mostly white industry, particularly as a black male, is you can't lose your temper in the same way. Essentially, you are an angry black man losing his temper in a way that's unprofessional, as opposed to an industry that has protected unprofessional white males in perpetua.
I just felt that Danny Rand within the Luke Cage universe... I just felt that he was going to be dope.
Even though I'm not Jamaican, I've always loved Jamaican culture because, to me, it's the island of magic, it's the island of politics, of resistance.
The power that you have as a storyteller is to be able to tell stories that are at once entertaining but also never lose sight of what's going on in the real world.
The reason I keep making so many musical metaphors with 'Luke Cage' is that I don't view it as much a television show as I do a concept album with dialogue.
The thing is, so much of the African American experience is about the redefinition of roots because of slavery. We were uprooted, and there's so much about our whole legacy that was stolen and that we lost in the Transatlantic slave trade that we'll never find out.
I just always feel that any black art should address our perpetual struggle for progress and freedom, period. There's no way around it. The thing is you can never predict what the next injustice is going to be. Unfortunately, it's part of being black and conscious in America.
One of my favorite comic books of all-time is the graphic novel 'God Loves, Man Kills.'
My grandfather was a Tuskegee Airman. He flew with the 100th Fighter Squadron.
One of my biggest influences, of course, is David Simon and his work on 'The Wire.'
All black art is always judged to illuminate our experience and prove that our stories and our history and our lives matter. And that goes back to Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston - take your pick.
The only thing police patrol cops - in certain situations - are expert at is spotting anomalies. When you are a black person that is driving in a place that you stick out, that's all they're going to see.
It's much easier to talk about racism when you're able to use mutants as a metaphor. People would much rather talk about Charles Xavier and Magneto than they would about Martin Luther King or Malcolm X.
I was a huge fan of comics: not necessarily 'Luke Cage.' I was more of an 'X-Men' head. I was always more Chris Claremont, Frank Miller, John Byrne.
The thing that was fascinating and frustrating about Pac was that he clearly knew better than to go down the gangster road that he went down. Pac knew - and he was right - that thug energy could be redirected into fearless positivity.
'Daredevil' is haunted by Frank Miller, from the standpoint of the Frank Miller run on 'Daredevil' is so insurmountable.
Spike Lee is one of my biggest influences. What I love about Spike, other than he's just a fun guy to hang around, is that Spike is fearless. As much as people talk about him being politically outspoken, let's not forget that he's one of the best screenwriters, ever, in addition to being a visual master.
