[Posted by E&C on 28 Aug 2011 10:08 am]

Today's guest artist simply goes by crisgud. To see more of his work, check out his facebook page or his deviantArt page.

For the last decade or so Brian Michael Bendis’s Ultimate Spider-Man has basically been Dawson’s Creek with superpowers. That’s what I LIKE about it. It was one of my favorite super hero books of the 2000’s and I’m looking forward to where it goes from here.

As for the racists that came out of the woodwork to be awful about the changing face of Spider-Man in the Ultimate universe? I don’t know, man.

Aside from being taught not to be a piece of shit by excellent parents, one of the key reasons I can’t even understand where racists come from is comic books. I grew up on a steady, heavy diet of X-Men and Spider-Man comics and I saw them protecting a world that hated and feared them and I saw how that weighed on good people doing their best to do good things in a sometimes not-so-good world. And I never sat down and said to myself “I’ll never be a bigot!” It literally never occurred to me that hating people because of their skin tone or sexuality or super powers was an option. So when I see people getting all racisty over the very medium that taught me so well to be kind and accepting my mindhole explodes and I just think, clearly they were reading something else growing up. Maybe the KKK makes comics. I don’t know. But Wolverine and Storm and Xavier and Spider-Man taught us better than this.

Bigotry makes us small and sad and less than we are. Comics are silly and spandexy and face-punchy, but they are also, very, very often morality tales. They’ve got things to say about how we can be more. Let’s listen.

E

LOVE [Posted by TheStranger on 30 Aug 2011 05:23 pm]

to see that you heard about this too. I really want to read the new spiderman but my local comicbook store is so far away. Keep up the good work.