Baltimore Native Writing Captain America Comics

On the heels of the wildly successful "Black Panther" series, Ta-Nehisi Coates is taking on the challenge of writing about another superhero: Captain America.

Coates, who grew up in Baltimore and has a self-described "conflicted history" with the idea of the American dream, says he is looking forward to letting Captain America speak to him in the creative process, answering the question: "Why would anyone believe in The Dream?"

He wrote that he was "excited to take on Captain America," in a piece in The Atlantic, for which he is a national correspondent, announcing his new endeavor on Wednesday.

"What is exciting here is not some didactic act of putting my words into Captain America's head but attempting to put Captain America's words into my head," Coates wrote.

He has a history of channeling the national dialogue in new ways.

In 2015 he won the National Book Award for a collection of essays on race called Between The World And Me that was structured as letters to his son; and his 2017 New York Times bestseller We Were Eight Years In Power: An American Tragedy provided new context for former President Barack Obama's time in office.

The editor of Marvel Comics said that Coates was clearly the right person for the job of taking on the national icon.

"...when it came time to hire the new hand to guide Captain America, we just knew it had to be Ta-Nehisi Coates," C.B. Cebulski, editor in chief of Marvel Comics, said in a statement to the New York Times.

The new Captain America comic will be released on July 4.

Writer Ta-Nehisi Coates speaks onstage at the New Yorker Festival on Oct. 4, 2015, in New York City. (Photo by Anna Webber/Getty Images for The New Yorker)