The big talk in the world of comics is that there’s a new Spider-Man. And he’s non-white.
In fact, he’s half Latino, half black, so he’s about as non-white as a person gets in comics.
There are a lot of times, in comics, when these sorts of changes are made for the sake of “changing things up.” I really hate that phrase, “changing things up.” How does making a character gay, for example, really change things up when the primary context I see him in is flying to other galaxies and punching aliens in the head(s)? Not to seem uninterested, but when the dude gets back home and is sitting on the shitter, flipping through a magazine, I don’t particularly care whether that magazine is Playboy or Playgirl. Or King, for that matter.
My basic question: Are there stories you want to tell that require this kind of change, or is the change being made in hopes that the change itself will bring about stories? Because changing something like a character’s race in hopes of bringing about stories….well, what kind of story would YOU categorize as “Half-Latino, Half-Black” stories?
I’m going to admit up front that I’m not the most racially sensitive person. When trying to type “latino” I keep typing “lotion” over and over again, if that’s any indication. But I do think it’s great to give room to characters of different races, and it can have a positive effect on the world.
As a young man, I had a fairly racially-charged experience with Spawn comics. For those of you who aren’t familiar, Spawn is about a guy who gets killed, goes to hell, comes back with powers and lives like a bum while also occasionally fighting an obese clown. His whole face and body are covered by burns, so he is unrecognizable and wears a mask most of the time. Also, his name is Al, which might win the award for most underwhelming superhero name, especially as Married With Children was in heavy syndication at the time, so it was hard not to make a comparison.
I got a collection of the first few issues one Christmas morning, and I sat down and read the whole thing twice in a row. It wasn’t until the second time through that I finally understood a scene that was bothering me.
Al decides that he wants to go and visit his wife, who’s still alive and lives nearby. He uses some of his satanic power to make himself look normal, 
and the result is here on the left. Not bad, I thought. You could do worse than a ripped dude with the hair of Ghostbusters’ Egon Spangler. Al, however, was not pleased with the new look, and it wasn’t until the second time through that I realized it was because Al, before he died, was black.
And in my little, white, suburban heart, I had to accept that I felt…disappointed.
In retrospect, I feel okay about it and understand my young self. I don’t think the disappointment was in the fact that he was black. It was that he wasn’t like me, and as a kid it was important to me that I identify with characters, and the best ways I’d found to do it at that point were superficial. It’s not uncommon. Babies like to look at picture books with photos of babies. White kids end up with white dolls.
But at the time, I felt disappointed when I found out the character was black, then kind of sad because I didn’t think it should matter, but it did to me. On college admissions essays, I would always say I was an early reader, an early writer, and an extremely early adopter of white guilt.
Thus ended Pete’s Christmas Racial Symposium of 1995.
The whole experience was kind of great. It was an early time for me to face my own racial beliefs that I didn’t even know existed. And if it weren’t for comics, I never would have confronted them. My elementary had somewhere in the neighborhood of .8 black kids in it. My high school had maybe 3. So this is not something th=at would have cropped up until way later if it weren’t for that comic where an ice cream man is killed and chained up and stabbed with popsicle sticks.
The lesson was that white is not necessarily the default.
Which brings us back to Spider-Man, and this quote from an Italian artist who helped with some design work on the new Spider-Man:
“Maybe sooner or later a black or gay — or both — hero will be considered something absolutely normal.”
That I agree with.
But there’s a really big difference between what they are doing with Spider-Man and what happened with Spawn.
Al, Spawn, was a black man. He was always a black man, and continued to be a black man (as much as is possible when 90% of your skin is burned off, I guess).
Spider-Man was white, and now is not.
The difference is, when you change a character from one thing to another, you can’t expect people not to notice and to pretend that is doesn’t matter. Because it does. Obviously it does, because otherwise you wouldn’t have done it. To use a parallel example, a man being gay isn’t a newsflash, but if you knew a man for forty years who was living a straight lifestyle, wife and kids and all that, and then one day he announced he was gay, you would still be his friend, but I think both parties would be surprised if you acknowledged the new information and then moved on immediately without talking about it. It’s even more confusing with race because in real life you can’t really change your race. Lord knows I’ve tried. They’ve got that scholarship money locked up tight, I’ll tell you what.
The other thing is that people don’t like character changes in comics regardless of who the new character is. Green Lantern has reverted ALL the way back. The Flash has been 40 different guys, but somehow the old ones keep coming back. As someone smarter than me pointed out, Peter Parker was once replaced by his EXACT CLONE and people were outraged. I suspect that the race is far less an issue than the replacement of a known character.
The story here, in my mind, isn’t that Spider-Man is half black, half Latino. It’s that he BECAME half-black, half-latino. Maybe this will be a good thing, and maybe some kid will see that picture of him lifting the mask and it will improve his life in the long run, although in the short run it kind of ruins his 1995 Christmas. But in my personal opinion, this doesn’t really open the door to new Spider-Man-centric storylines of interest, and though it remains to be seen whether the stories are great or not, I’m skeptical, as always when it comes to change for change’s sake.
And finally, I’m sure that nobody should be offended by this change, but I don’t know what is really empowering about it. These sort of changes, changing a character from white to black, straight to gay, man to woman or whatever change that’s made with no real thought other than change itself doesn’t really acknowledge the true, deep-seated cultural differences beyond a tip of the cap.