In The Transmedia Construction of the Black Panther: Long Live the King, Bryan J. Carr explores and analyzes the evolution of the Black Panther character since his inception in the 1960s across comics, film, television, video games, and music. The Black Panther, Carr argues, is the sum of the creative works of countless individuals across various media that have each contributed to the legacy of the first mainstream Black superhero, all happening against a backdrop of social and cultural upheaval, global political struggle for equality, and the long shadow of colonizing Western attitudes. The Panther's existence is a complex one that not only illustrates in microcosm those same struggles in the historically white superhero space, but also offers a perfect case study for media trends of representation then and now. Carr addresses a number of questions: Does the Black Panther really represent a powerful counter-narrative to long-standing regressive attitudes toward Black identity and Africa? Who were the key contributors to our understanding of the character? And finally, how can we use the character to understand the complexities of our modern consolidated media systems? Scholars of media studies, film and television studies, comics studies, cultural studies, critical race studies, and African studies will find this book particularly useful.

The popularity of cable news, satire, documentaries, and political blogs suggest that people are often absorbing and dissecting direct political messages from informational media. But entertainment media also discusses the important political issues of our time, though not as overtly. Nonetheless, consumers still learn, debate, and form opinions on important political issues through their relationship with entertainment media. While many scholarly books examine these political messages found in popular culture, very few examine how actual audiences read these messages. Parasocial Politics explores how consumers form complex relationships with media texts and characters, and how these readings exist in the nexus between real and fictional worlds. This collection of empirical studies uses various methodologies, including surveys, experiments, focus groups, and mixed methods, to analyze how actual consumers interpret the texts and the overt and covert political messages encoded in popular culture.