This chapter explores Ta-Nehisi Coates’ graphic novel Black Panther and novel The Water Dancer whose critique of American exceptionalism lies in their superheroisation of remembering and confronting the past to study racially disabled black histories. Through a study of Afrofuturism and American exceptionalism in the comics, we see the politics of nostalgia that fuel the desire(s) to create narratives of heroism. Following a critique of exceptionalism, The Water Dancer obliterates the idea that heroism is exceptionalist. The novel’s centralisation of black melancholia as a response to certain kind(s) of grief and trauma within stories of heroism, and a distinction between white and black melancholia, identifies the limitations of the Freudian framework of loss. It also reconfigures the politics of repair and reparation in its portrayal of a slave narrative as a narrative of black heroism.