And from what I've read, African-American community has claimed
Spider-man for years, because they find him not only relatable, but his
full body costume allowed kids to pretend he was Black. Nothing
about him screamed white, until he took off the mask.
---
Where did you read that? I've been African American for 40 years, and I've
never heard such a thing.
---
Neither have I, Corey. I have read the claim that for years Spider-Man's
full body costume allowed that sort of identification with the hero because
not many knew what he looked like under the mask. This changed when
artists started drawing him with his mask raised. If I correctly recall, JB has
said something similar on a number of occasions.

++

Wally escaped Barry's shadow. Tim Drake escaped Dick Grayson's shadow.

••

Even if that were true, which I would dispute, those were White characters "following" White characters, which puts them in an entirely different category. No tokenism involved, for a start.

I know that this story was given by the creators when TRUTH came out as justification for their depiction, but they were wrong about it and drew the wrong conclusions about it. It was one of the reasons I quickly stopped reading the series.

••

Beyond that, the use of the Tuskegee Experiment as a model for the "Black Captain America's" origin completely ignored the mentality that made the Tuskegee Experiment possible in the first place.

The worst case scenario of the Tuskegee Experiment was a lot of dead Black men. That was of little consequence to the people who conceived the experiments. It is hard for anyone who grew up in the past few decades to even conceive of a time when racism was so pervasive, and so casual, but that is, alas, an accurate portrait of this Nation until very recently in its history.

Applying the same mentality the Super Soldier project simply does not work, because there the "worse case" scenario would not be failure, but success. The last thing White Americans wanted in the late 1930s was a SUPER POWERED Black man in their midst. There is no way the Government would have tested the formula on a Black man (even setting aside Joe Simon and Jack Kirby have established that Steve Rogers was the first and only subject) for fear that it might WORK!!

I don't really mind, given that  it si Ultimate Spider-Man. To me it's the same as DKR to Frank Miller:  Bendis can do what he wants with this version of the characters.

 Of course it is based on pre-existing characters, but it is an independant universe, and if there's a place where a writer should be allowed this kind of liberty, it is on a series he started and has been the only one to write, like here. I don't know if it is a great idea, but i consider that relatively legit and fair, to the writer.

Ultimate Spider-Man is Bendis' thing, as much as it can be when the writer doesn't own the character of course. So no problem.

••

And we know things like that never do any long term harm.

This, like so many things Marvel has done in recent years that have made headlines, smacks of Marvel patting itself on the back and saying "Look what we did!" rather than just telling good stories like they used to do.

This quote, from the end of that USAToday article,  "Maybe sooner or later a black or gay — or both — hero will be considered something absolutely normal." really irritates me. Are we not past the point where anyone should consider it abnormal? Intentionally creating "diversity" is the opposite of sincere diversity.

When I first discovered the Marvel Universe 25 years ago, there were heroes of various races and nationalities and it never once seemed abnormal or shocking or was anything I gave a second thought to. The Falcon, Captain Marvel, Storm, Power Man, etc. were all black, but I never thought of them as "black heroes" any more than I thought of Captain America as a "white hero" or thought of my friend Oliver as "the Asian kid." 

••

One Black, one Asian, one Scot, one Russian. Out of a normal compliment of a dozen or more. And by you that's "crammed" and "unrealistic"?

What did you just tell us about yourself?

This quote, from the end of that USAToday article, "Maybe sooner or later a black or gay — or both — hero will be considered something absolutely normal." really irritates me.

••

Speaking as the guy who created the first Gay superhero to appear in mainstream American comics and NOT be there for comedy, and who did so THIRTY YEARS AGO, I think it might be time for whoever spouted that line to CATCH UP.