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defrogA few people have sent the Captain America/Tea Party Feud my way. If you haven’t heard that one before, it goes like this:
Captain America and Black Falcon come across an anti-tax protest that is clearly a Tea Party event, as one of the sign slogans mentioning tea bags is taken from a real-life event. Black Falcon makes an “angry white folks” remark.
Someone in the real-life Tea Party sees that issue and denounces Marvel Comics’ liberal agenda of portraying them as govt-hating racist white guys, forcing writer Ed Brubaker to say he never wrote that specific sign into the script, and Marvel editor-in-chief Joe Quesada to promise to remove the sign from all future reprints.
Frankly, I think the whole thing is silly. I’m sure Brubaker didn’t specify a familiar teabagger sign, but he definitely meant for it to be an anti-tax protest, and even with no tea reference, anyone reading it would have made a Tea Party connection. I understand Marvel/Quesada wanting to be topical without at least appearing to take sides in politics – they want to sell comics to as many people as possible – but there’s a little more to neutrality than making up generic names for real-life groups.
To be fair, Quesada has also said the Tea Party’s criticism is mostly unfair because it takes one panel (and Black Falcon’s line) out of context of the rest of the story, which isn’t really about the Tea Party per se. Okay. Still, if yr going to be topical, you kind of have to assume that some readers will get the reference. Calling it another name is just a convenient out in case someone calls you on it.
As for the Tea Partiers, I’m not the first to notice the irony of a political group whose participants aren’t above hyperbolic name-calling and borderline racism screaming foul at the slightest criticism. From a comic book, yet. Sure, no one likes to have the race card played against them, but it’s disingenuous for Tea Partiers and their supporters to not only defend caricatures of Obama as a turban-wearing Arab, but also accuse him of hating Whitey, and then complain that their critics are the ones dragging race into the debate.
So overall I’m not really impressed with either side. Still, it’s fascinating to see all this kerfluffle over what someone said in a comic book.
And you thought comic books were meaningless low-brow escapist entertainment.
Well, not YOU. But you see what I’m saying.
You can’t say that in comics,
This is dF
Captain America and Black Falcon come across an anti-tax protest that is clearly a Tea Party event, as one of the sign slogans mentioning tea bags is taken from a real-life event. Black Falcon makes an “angry white folks” remark.
Someone in the real-life Tea Party sees that issue and denounces Marvel Comics’ liberal agenda of portraying them as govt-hating racist white guys, forcing writer Ed Brubaker to say he never wrote that specific sign into the script, and Marvel editor-in-chief Joe Quesada to promise to remove the sign from all future reprints.
Frankly, I think the whole thing is silly. I’m sure Brubaker didn’t specify a familiar teabagger sign, but he definitely meant for it to be an anti-tax protest, and even with no tea reference, anyone reading it would have made a Tea Party connection. I understand Marvel/Quesada wanting to be topical without at least appearing to take sides in politics – they want to sell comics to as many people as possible – but there’s a little more to neutrality than making up generic names for real-life groups.
To be fair, Quesada has also said the Tea Party’s criticism is mostly unfair because it takes one panel (and Black Falcon’s line) out of context of the rest of the story, which isn’t really about the Tea Party per se. Okay. Still, if yr going to be topical, you kind of have to assume that some readers will get the reference. Calling it another name is just a convenient out in case someone calls you on it.
As for the Tea Partiers, I’m not the first to notice the irony of a political group whose participants aren’t above hyperbolic name-calling and borderline racism screaming foul at the slightest criticism. From a comic book, yet. Sure, no one likes to have the race card played against them, but it’s disingenuous for Tea Partiers and their supporters to not only defend caricatures of Obama as a turban-wearing Arab, but also accuse him of hating Whitey, and then complain that their critics are the ones dragging race into the debate.
So overall I’m not really impressed with either side. Still, it’s fascinating to see all this kerfluffle over what someone said in a comic book.
And you thought comic books were meaningless low-brow escapist entertainment.
Well, not YOU. But you see what I’m saying.
You can’t say that in comics,
This is dF
