Dan Garret to Ted Kord, to the now current Blue Beetle Jaime Reyes a young Hispanic Boy, but the Blue Beetle is hardly a mainstream character. Some of the people to weigh in on this were people like Lou Dobbs, (unfortunately the internet won't allow me to create a link to what Lou had to say or Jon Stewarts response, and I am not living in the USA.) and Glenn Beck, I put up a more interesting video as the Glenn Beck bit was audio only.
The Washington post has an opinion piece on the subject, which talks a bit about identification with the character, which may be important to some, and it talks a bit about the importance of story telling over character appearance, but what I saw was racialization of Spider-man. Many opponents of this new Siderman are arguing that Peter Parker IS Spiderman, and have racialized him as white (or have assigned him no racial traits thus "normalizing"him as white). I would argue that Spiderman is a suit and a name and a way of thinking about the world, good vs evil and how justice should be delivered (an ideology) the race, class, gender (did I just say Spiderman can be not male, I think I did), ability, of the person who is Spiderman is only a part of what makes up the character, of course the person in the suit will bring with them a unique perspective to the character based on lived experiences but that just adds to a more rich story in developing the person independent of the Spiderman identity. Spiderman will still be swinging in to save the day and fighting super bad guys as all superhero characters do in all superhero comic books (trust me I read a lot of this genre).
I too also felt the "shake" of some of the public's reaction to the change of the main character in the spider-man series. Id like to say before explaining my opinion that I also believe this reaction from some of the public concerning the change in character and his "characteristics" a bit ridiculous.
ReplyDeleteHowever, i would argue that Marvel is trying to keep Miles in a certain stereotype as well. In the first three volumes of the Ultimate spiderman series, it shows Miles as a poor child who's family is in the working class. A member of his family has a previous history of stealing, things that people my explain as a stereotype.
I understand some of the steps that Marvel are taking. From what I understand Marvel is creating a "character who can be a positive role model for minority children". Which is obviously directed at those in the working class.
If Marvel wanted to create a truly diverse character, they would have to either have spider-man never take his mask off(like a master chief effect from Halo) or incorporate many different "races" without the stereotypes attached to them.
I can see where you are coming from with your point about stereotypes, but I would counter that by placing Mile's family amoung the working class they are capturing the lived experience of not only many racialized people, but of white working class people as well (we are the 99%). I will point you to the school lottery at the start of issue one http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tKGNmvhqxzs this is a link to the trailer for the documentry waiting for superman. To ignore that many racialized people in the US find themselves among the working class would be a dis-service and would ingore the syetemic racism that exists in society. To your point about the criminal element among Mile's relations, while maybe not needed it does highlight a larger problem in society and that is of the over representation of racialized people serving time in the US prison system, this being a symptom of racism in the legal justice system and the criminalization of racialized people, like the many times the penilty for crack vs cocaine has come up.
DeleteThanks for your comment
ok the link doesn't seem to work, but you can youtube search it.
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