Saturday, September 3, 2011

The rise of the mixed-race superhero and the big headed ‘Marvel’ director

This concept of “Fighting Back” or “The spectacle of the other” by Hall, can be shown through a recent newspaper article I found in the New Zealand Herald. This article is introducing the new ‘half Black half Spanish’ Spider man (Miles Morales) to play the main character in Marvel’s comic ‘Spiderman’ after the original ‘White spider man (Peter Parker) was killed off, in order to make way for the new multi-national super hero. Marvel’s Chief editor Axel Alonso stated that they created the concept of changing the character Spiderman to a multi-national Spiderman when Barrack Obama was running for President. However they were waiting for the right time to make it public (when Barrack came into power and when they decided to kill off Peter Parker). Alonso then went on to say “Going into this we knew we wanted to make a statement about the 21st century. Im mixed race. I remember what it was like to grow up mixed race.” I found that this was a strong sense of the ‘left’ fighting back against the “white eye” and Axel Alonso even took a very personal approach within his own history. In my opinion to create a new multi-race super hero is just silly… and even though this can be strongly related with ‘Stuart Hall’s’ concept, the main idea was from a big headed ‘Marvel’ director. Read the full story here. Article by, Nick Allen in Los Angeles.