A biography for Cheo Hodari Cokerhasn’t been written yet.
“'Clockers' - as much as it is a very focused crime drama, it sprawls.”
“This is a country that I love and that I believe in, but at the same time also believe that you should, as a part of this country, have the right to be able to talk very clearly about the issues that are happening, going on.”
“With 'Luke Cage,' we all, as a collective wanted to tell the truest story that we could but, at the same time, also be very true to the comic book genre.”
“For me, I was never really obsessed with Luke Cage. My obsession was Wolverine.”
“When you're a black superhero, you can't erase the notion that you're black. If you're black, living in the community, and you want to change things, there are going to be things that happen. That's true of anybody. I mean, you could use celebrity as a similar metaphor.”
“I'm a hip-hop showrunner.”
“Even though I've got this really brawny, masculine reputation, I'm a Shondaland Thursdays kind of guy.”
“For 'Luke Cage,' of course, I was familiar with Power Man and Iron Fist. I read the comics. That was really more stuff that you read for fun. It wasn't that you read either of those comics for profound moments, although they have profound moments.”
“The reason that Shaft has a dominant theme song is because James Bond has a dominant theme song.”
“Television has power.”
“Hip hop fans are obsessed, and they're geeks about hip hop. Comic book fans are also geeks, and when you can meld the two, then you open the world up to, I think, communities that will just take to each other.”
“I wanted Season 2 of Luke Cage to be Ice Cube's 'Death Certificate,' or Fugees' 'The Score,' or Public Enemy's 'It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back,' or my favorite, 'The Low End Theory' by A Tribe Called Quest.”
“You have to tell a super story that has some fantastical element, but the human element is what's going to keep people watching.”
“To me, Harlem is one of the most important places on the earth, particularly when it comes to talking about African Americans.”
“There aren't a lot of African-American superheroes. I've been reading comics since I was eight or nine years old. Luke Cage stood out.”
“When you're writing about cops from the perspective of cops, that level of sarcasm about their job and how they treat people will color the writing to a certain extent.”
“I think the fact that 'Black Lightning,' 'Luke Cage' and 'Black Panther' have each made noise in their own way will only lead to different superheroes and different genres.”
“The first time that I met B.I.G. was in 1994, summer of '94 - I believe it was August. I think it was right after 'Ready to Die' came out.”
“The power that you have as a storyteller is to be able to tell stories that are at once entertaining but also never lose sight of what's going on in the real world.”
“It's better to write a pilot rather than write a spec show. In some cases, you have to do both, but more often, writing a pilot and having an original voice is more important.”