Who is Luke Cage, you ask? A new and insightful featurette released today by Marvel ought to help shed some light on Marvel’s reluctant Hero for Hire.
And we do mean reluctant. From the outset, Mike Colter’s hulking giant is portrayed as character that is quietly comfortable on the sidelines sweeping up hair in an old barber shop somewhere in Harlem. It’s only after Cage catches wind of Cornell “Cottonmouth” Stokes (House of Cards star Mahershala Ali) that our lead begins to stand up and take notice, as he sets about crippling Cottonmouth’s illicit gun-running enterprise from the top down.
But this featurette is really designed to lay the groundwork for newcomers and ardent fans alike, focusing instead on the troubled history of Luke Cage himself, who becomes imbued with powers that he didn’t ask for soon after falling in love with a gay woman. The fun doesn’t stop there, though, after Colter’s lead is sentenced to prison for a crime he didn’t commit. All in all, by the time we’re introduced to Cage on the streets of Harlem, it’s fair to say that Netflix’s new superhero poster child is harboring a chip or two on that hulking shoulder of his.
Luke Cage, the third standalone series to come tumbling off the Marvel and Netflix conveyor belt, will light up the small-screen on September 30. It’s the final Marvel series to do so in 2016, before attention turns to the introduction of Iron Fist and, through time, the long-anticipated Defenders ensemble show.
