Scans_Daily

"I start to develop Jessica Jones and asking the simplest questions about her world: Okay, she's not a super hero anymore. She's down here on the street. Who would she know? Who would she bump into? And Luke Cage popped to the top of the list. With Luke Cage I set up a situation where they're both kind of not at their best place emotionally and using each other. With that came a lot of exploration of his character. So I started really finding the inner nobility of his character, kind of scraping off all the blaxploitation elements that were being used by other writers—even in the late nineties he was still saying, 'Funky Honky' and stuff like that!

"It was time for the character to evolve past his roots without losing the thing that makes him special. [Then] I got the job to take over Avengers and really overhaul it, with what I had sold as 'the coolest characters in the Marvel Universe,' which includes Spider-Man and Wolverine. At the time I slipped Luke Cage in there. I remember I asked if it was okay if Luke Cage and Spider-Woman were on the team. Our publisher said, 'You said Spider-Man and Wolverine?' I go, 'Yep.' He said, 'As long as I see Spider-Man and Wolverine are there, you can do whatever you want.'

"Then I realized that I'm maybe the only person right now who thinks Luke Cage is the coolest person in the Marvel Universe, and it was my job inside the pages of New Avengers to prove my point—between the more intimate look of this character in Jessica Jones and the proactive superhero that [he would be as an Avenger],he could become someone with a different point of view than the other heroes on the team. I made it my doctoral thesis to tell the public why Luke Cage is the coolest." -- Brian Michael Bendis

( Scans under the cut... )