Marvel’s Blade is Getting a Badass New Lead

This past weekend, thousands of comic fans gathered in San Diego for the 46th Comic-Con International. Guests roamed the main exhibit hall, saw exclusive sneak peeks for their favorite shows and movies, and attended panels filled with esteemed authors, illustrators, directors and more. This year’s Women of Marvel panel happened on Sunday, the last day of Comic-Con, and was filled with women panelists “from multiple disciplines in the creative process at Marvel.” During the panel, Sana Amanat, a Marvel editor, announced a new Blade series—and it has us pretty excited.

For the first timeBlade will feature a woman lead.

Amanat explained that the main character is a teenage girl, Fallon Grey; she’s the daughter of the original Blade, Eric Brooks.

Discussing the new series, writer Tim Seeley described Grey as “a 16-year-old girl that has some of his [Blade’s] powers…she has more elevated abilities than he does.” Illustrations from the new series depict Grey as athletic, with dark hair and skin (and a cool leather jacket)—just like her dad.

Seeley continued:

My goal was to sort of create this anti-Peter Parker in that she’s not a loser, not a nerd, she’s super popular [and] the expectations on her are very high. I think those are great characters to tell stories about. So she’s sort of dealing with those people who think she’s perfect, and some day[s] she’s trying to save the world, so she’s dealing with all of that pressure as opposed to the lack of expectations.

He also revealed that there are plenty of crazy new monsters for the father-daughter duo to fight.

Amanat helped create the current Ms. Marvel, Kamala Khan. Ms. Marvel is the first recurring comic book series featuring a Pakistani American girl, so it’s no surprise that Amanat would be the one to announce a new Blade series with a black teenage girl as its protagonist. Committed to diversity in the comic world, Amanat said in a May interview that she saw women and people of color as “being bigger power players in companies like Marvel” in the future.

“Marvel has always supported a push for diverse voices on all sides of the business, and that has come across in particular in the past few years,” she added. “In a few years, as both our stories and creators become more diverse, I expect that to become industry standard.”

The new Blade series is set to launch in October.

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Photo taken from Marvel’s Twitter

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Emma Niles is a recent graduate of the University of California, Santa Cruz and an editorial intern at Ms. Follow Emma on Twitter @emmalorinda.