Spider Man Encounters Affirmative Action

Spider Man Encounters Affirmative Action

It shouldn’t come as a big surprise since we already have an affirmative action president but that misguided social policy has now become a really major issue: Marvel Comics has killed off Peter Parker, aka Spider Man, and replaced him with another alliterated superhero, person of color Miles Morales.

The good news for Spidey fans is that Parker only dies in Marvel’s Ultimates series but lives on in its standard series so comic book aficionados can still enjoy his exploits in the latter. The bad news is inherent in the question, Why did Marvel feel it necessary to have the Green Goblin kill poor Parker in any series and supplant him with Morales?

The only rational explanation–if reason is applicable with comic books–is that Parker, who had evolved over the years from a bumbling teenager through various transformations to college kid, teacher, and neurotic freelance adult photographer, suffered from a significant, contemporary liability: He was white.

The Spider Man franchise had prospered from its sketchy 1990 days through 2003 and was the inspiration for a multitude of plays, toys, Tobey McGuire movies, and its ultimate achievement, the disastrous, accident-prone Broadway musical, “Spider Man: Turn Off the Dark.”

In short, Peter Parker was a big moneymaker for Marvel. Why else but a shortage of melanin call him a wrap and turn over his fame to melanin-rich Miles Morales?

CBS inadvertently comments on the ratonale without providing a social context: ”Miles Morales is a half-black, half-Hispanic super-powered teen who gets into the hero game after being inspired by Parker’s death.” Marvel writer Brian Michael Bendis elaborates with a few key observations: “He’s younger than Peter Parker, he’s coming from a completely different background, a completely different world view.”

Hmmm. Younger sells in our youth-oriented culture as do varied backgrounds in our increasingly diverse land and in those ways Miles makes sense. However, . . .
(Read more at http://www.genelalor.com/blog1/?p=5163)