Marvel Comics fans everywhere are still waiting to see the likes of Reed Richards, Tony Stark, Hank Pym, Bruce Banner, and T'Challa share a room someday. In the meantime, fans like mechanical engineer, Darian E. Robbins’ have made mock magazine covers for Marvel Studios’ upcoming “Black Panther” and they have become a viral hit. He even gives some nods to Storm (Ororo Munroe), another character that Marvel would benefit from, if they owned the rights.
"I chose these covers because I was thinking about how to bridge the gap of fiction to reality to help world building and character introduction," Robbins told Polygon.
"The idea came from the first Iron Man movie when they showed a montage sequence of Tony Stark on various magazine covers. Wired Magazine, for instance."
That sort of connection between the world of superheroes and our world allows us to connect to the characters.
"It helped establish his character for the audience and how he would be covered through media outlets that exist in reality," Robbins continued.
"I felt that you would have to do the same with T'Challa as well. However with social media and other media outlets you don't have to wait for a movie to do it. In fact, Marvel shouldn't wait to do so. The audience is waiting and in want."
"In the comic book universe T'Challa is equal to Stark in intelligence and heroism and surpasses him in others: technology, wealth, and leadership," Robbins said.
"For the non-comic book readers it might be hard to understand the latter, so hopefully the mock covers and other media would help people get up to speed."Everyone would be talking about him, from technologists to politicians to the military. That's a bit harder to communicate to people who don't know the character.”
Check out Darian’s site here,
Art of Darian
And, his twitter here at
Darian Robbins