Entertainment

Jessica Who? Everyone's New Favorite Marvel Hero

by S. Atkinson

Marvel finally dropped the very first Luke Cage trailer Friday — and, sure enough, the Internet melted for about 10 seconds as bloggers and journalists took to the web to dissect the 20-second short. It was for serious Marvel fanatics only, with fans having to be in the right place at the right time to see it: They found the Luke Cage teaser at the end of the Daredevil Season 2 on Netflix, with the teaser auto-playing after viewers watched the final episode to the end. But, what was the most important thing fans should gather from the Luke Cage teaser?

Aside from the obvious — i.e., that actor Mike Colter is charisma personified and looks his best when extra surly, ideal for the character of Luke Cage — we learned something that fans of the comic and Jessica Jones on Netflix probably already know: that Cage has unbreakable skin, and as such, he mehs in the face of serious weaponry (and presumably paper cuts).

How did this come about? As fans of the comic will already know, the Hero for Hire was framed for a crime he didn’t commit and ended up incarcerated. While in prison, he volunteers for research into experimental cell regeneration and a sadistic prison guard messes with the controls of the experiment so that Cage is exposed to the electric field at far greater strength than he should be. But hey, you should never try and kill your enemy by playing with the controls of an incredibly complicated scientific experiment you don’t understand. The endgame is that Cage ends up with superhuman strength and skin that does this:

This certainly makes him the ideal person to take on keeping New York — specifically, his neighborhood of Hell's Kitchen — safe, doesn't it?

As for the line: "I'm about sick of always having to buy new clothes," is it just me or are the Luke Cage writers going extra relevant and focusing on the depressing cycle of "fast fashion" and the style industry's addiction to constant new trends? Nope, just me? OK, let's wait for the next trailer — if Luke Cage is attired in head to toe American Apparel, we'll know I was right.