15 Radical Superheroes To Diversify The MCU

Many fans of Blades first silver screen outings with Wesley Snipes (and the far fewer number of people who enjoyed 2006’s single-season Blade TV series, starring rapper Sticky Fingaz) are still unaware that the character is adapted from stories originated in Marvel comics.

That’s because Blade wasn’t exactly one of Marvel’s top tier characters when Wesley Snipes first portrayed him in 1998. Created in 1973, he’d usually been used as a back-up character, and missed half the seventies and all of the eighties before being resurrected - again, mostly as a team player and back-up feature - in the early nineties.

Far more famous now for his movie appearances, the Daywalker (half vampire, half human, all badass undead slayer) is a fixture in African American popular culture thanks to the charismatic Snipes. But the man’s 57 in July, and over the last fifteen years lurid tales of his peculiar backstage behaviour during the filming of 2004’s Blade: Trinity have become legendary.

Bringing back one of the most iconic black action heroes in cinema would almost certainly mean recasting the role.