Comics
Stan Lee stands in support to keep Spider-Man ‘white’
Much talk has been going around on Spider-Man both on the MCU and comic book front, and it seems Stan Lee, the co-creator of many of Marvel’s characters including Spider-Man, weighed in on what he felt about Miles Morales becoming the main Spidey the All-New All-Different Marvel.
Lee says that he imagined the character to be white and created him as such; and didn’t see the need to change that:
I wouldn’t mind, if Peter Parker had originally been black, a Latino, an Indian or anything else, that he stay that way. But we originally made him white. I don’t see any reason to change that.
Morales is of course half black / Latino and much to the disappointment of ‘PC decriers’ looked unfavourably at the move from Marvel. This is also in light of leaked Sony emails where Marvel erected strict parameters to protect Spider-Man’s IP, including that Spider-Man / Peter Parker had to be Caucasian and heterosexual, but age was a bit more loose (mid-high school to entering college).
Stan Lee went further to say the idea of Spider-Man masked would give any reader despite race a chance to identify with the character:
What I like about the costume is that anybody reading Spider-Man in any part of the world can imagine that they themselves are under the costume. And that’s a good thing…It has nothing to do with being anti-gay, or anti-black, or anti-Latino, or anything like that…Latino characters should stay Latino. The Black Panther should certainly not be Swiss. I just see no reason to change that which has already been established when it’s so easy to add new characters. I say create new characters the way you want to. Hell, I’ll do it myself.
“So what do you think about what Stan Lee said? Should Spider-Man always be Peter Parker, ergo white? Should Marvel do away with Morales, and by extension Gwen and any other the wall-crawlers? Does having a character of colour always translate to filling some PC quota? And if Marvel goes the “new characters” route like Stan suggests, will it give these new characters a fair shake and the support it needs to take off, much unlike the black DC characters spawned in the 1990’s? Still the final frontier. Let us know what you think in the comment section below!”
