I try not to overdo it here with the super-hero stuff, but this I had to write about. Forbes reports on the reaction to Marvel’s recent — and typically gimmicky — decision to “kill” Spider-Man’s longtime alter ego Peter Parker and replace him with Miles Morales, a young kid whose ethnic heritage is half-black, half-Hispanic.
The article points to this post at I’m Not Racist But… which captures some of the public reaction to this decision. It’s not pretty.
Notwithstanding the fact that when comic book publishers sentence major characters like these to death, they never stay dead and they always return in some form, I think any furor over this is ridiculous. First, the original Spider-Man was a kid from Queens, New York, and it makes all the sense in the world that a kid from Queens, New York, circa 2011 would be half-black and half-Hispanic. Second, the beauty of these characters is that we get to constantly reinvent their origins in new and interesting ways. This may not be a great example of pop reinvention, but it’s a perfectly legitimate one.
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