What If…? showrunner Ashley Bradley has started that one episode of the series will see Black Panther become Star-Lord. The animated series was one of a number of new projects announced in July at San Diego Comic-Con, and will feature a framing device of Uatu the Watcher observing events in alternate universes and relating the stories of what he finds there.

The series is based on the comics series of the same name, which saw various moments from the expansive history of Marvel Comics rewritten to explore alternate possibilities of events playing out, such as Thor becoming Galactus’ Herald, Spider-Man joining the Fantastic Four, Gwen Stacey surviving, and Doctor Doom being a hero. Most presciently, one story had Jane Foster being the one worthy of lifting Mjolnir and becoming Thor – or rather Thordis – and becoming a hero in her own right, decades before the idea was used in the main comics timeline, which Bradley initially pitched but was swiftly shot down due to the idea already being developed for Thor: Love and Thunder. The series itself will include events such as Peggy Carter being the one to take the super soldier serum and become Captain America

Black Panther becoming Star-Lord was mentioned by Bradley during a lengthy interview with DiscussingFilm. Upon being asked about the reporting of there being one episode for each of the 23 MCU movies, she clarified by explaining that each movie will be explored over the course of the series, but not always individually. The example she gave was the image of a Star-Lord T’Challa shown as part of the presentation at D23, which would combine two or three movies just by itself. She explained the appeal:

How the change in character identities came about will be an interesting one to see, since Black Panther is an inherited mantle, while Star-Lord is an artificial mystique that Peter Quill attempted – and largely failed – to construct around himself. Also, although the idea of seeing Black Panther cutting a path through villainy across multiple worlds is an appealing one, that may not be what we’ll get, since Bradley seemed careful to specify “Star-Lord T’Challa” rather than “Star-Lord Black Panther.” This would suggest that the Wakandan royal will be travelling the stars absent of his powers, while the superhero mantle remains on Earth to be held by another, possibly T’Chaka, Shuri or Killmonger.

“With Star Lord T’Challa obviously, we want to know how T’Challa ended up in other planets? What’s the story there? It’s super exciting to work on because again, it’s seeing these characters and seeing the combination of character interactions.”

The very nature of What If…? invites imagination and speculation of how its altered realities will come about, and in this specific case could end up a fascinating one. To get the character nuances right, it would not just involve the tweaking of T’Challa’s origin to send him off on a completely different path as an amoral space pirate, but would also require the story to merge two very different subsets of science fiction – the classic pulp of Guardians of the Galaxy and the Afrofuturism of Black Panther – and combine them into something new and distinct.

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Source: DiscussingFilm

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