Ken Sheperd at Newsbusters is whining about bias in comic books because of a recent Spider-Man comic in which Spidey prevents a supervillain from interrupting Obama’s nomination. Jamison Foser remarks:
Apparently for the comic industry to remain bias-free, it must depict criminals successfully undermining Obama.
Well, the other problem is that Sheperd is just wrong. In a recent comic, Obama appears only to fire Iron Man Tony Stark from national security agency S.H.I.E.L.D, only to hand authority over to Norman Osborn, otherwise known as the Green Goblin, Spider-Man’s greatest foe. Which, if I were like Ken Shepherd, would have me whining about how Marvel obviously supports torture and believes that Obama is destroying our intelligence apparatus. One could interpret the death of Captain America during Civil War as symbolic of the Bush Administration’s disregard for civil liberties, but then you’d also have to take Secret Invasion as endorsing the idea that Muslim extremists are hiding among us, waiting to strike at any moment.
All of which is to say that while the politics of comic books are often interesting, they’re also often very incoherent, and hard to interpret as nakedly partisan.
-- A. Serwer