Thread Drift: Spider-Man and Social Justice

[boots]

Sanders himself said "Medicare For All" is no insurance ezcept cosmetic surgery. So it is not exactly Obamacare. What bothers me about the Left is I get tbe impression from too many of their leaders ( Louis Farrakhan, Michael Moore, Linda Sarsour and Al Sharpton to name a few) that because I am Christian, Hetro-Sexual, male, white and Conservative I am not only inferior but the enemy. So much for Dr King's quote of "judging people by the content of their character, rather then the color of their skin."

hmm, if that’s your takeaway then there’s not much i can say

and coming from a happy country with medicare for all, i highly recommend it. though it would probably mean shows like “breaking bad” wouldn’t get made. sad face.

and bringing it back to spidey, i feel like jjj would be the classic conservative there.

[boots]

Holding these people up as leaders of the left is a bit like me saying Tucker Carlson, Bill Oreilly, Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter are leaders of the right. Actually probably less so, since Farrakhan hasn't had much power to his voice since about the 90s early 2000s, and Sharpton's been little more than a pundit for the last decade.

damn. direct hit

[boots]

Spider-Man in the Lee-Ditko era was quite apolitical. Ditko tended to show cops as competent, and capable and more on Spider-Man's side than Jameson. Then Lee-Romita (inconsistently I will add), made Spider-Man and his relations to cops less testy, which made him come across as more anti-authoritarian. The Sam Bullitt 2-Parter in ASM 91-92 is the height of that.

Gerry Conway was an open lefty. And he made Spider-Man lean left but he also co-created in run, the Punisher, the Marvel character who is most popular among conservatives today and is often seen as Marvel's "red-state baiting" character. There's a perfect irony in Ditko co-creating characters like Spider-Man and Dr. Strange that were adopted as counter-cultural icons despite being a Randian while Conway who was a liberal co-created the Punisher. That's how art ends up happening most times. In Conway's run, the character Tarantula, who is a Delvadian fascist who oppresses immigrants and refugees is attacked and slammed by Spider-Man for being a traitor to "the Delvadian revolution" and giving the cause a bad name, something which bemuses The Punisher since he was teaming up with Spider-Man against him.

Then after Conway, you had Wein and Wolfman and Stern and Defalco who I think are all liberal-leaning, as is Michelinie, JMS, Slott. Len Wein reinvented Aunt May as an elderly rights activist who also defends civil rights and helps African-Americans. That's one way writers infused politics, since while making Spider-Man take causes might rub people the wrong way, supporting cast who do so, and who Peter is close to, allow him to be liberal without actually becoming liberal.

One weird wrinkle I brought up before. Spider-Man is consistently established as anti-totalitarian, he oppposed Tarantula, condemned Dr. Doom as a war criminal in JMS' run, and then in Slott's Worldwide run he's off making business deals in China. Unironically and so on. If Spider-Man is supposed to, in Slott's Worldwide, represent some kind of silicon valley type but transplanted to New York City, then that still doesn't work, since Google came into major conflict with the Chinese government's repression. Google shouldn't come across as the more principled brand than Spider-Man is what I'm saying.

thanks for the trivia, it’s interesting to track in regards to this conversation (and more compelling than using it to justify that a character or story only works because some dude wrote something in the 70s). the majority of creative and entertainment industry does tend to skew left...journalism too. where does the bugle sit in that dichotomy? and peter’s support cast by extension.

wonder what that would mean for mj as an actress too.

though i worry about the idea of not being able to depict business relations with developing countries, which by dint of that development will have more (obvious) corruption

and to be real, google shouldn’t be throwing stones there

[Revolutionary_Jack]

thanks for the trivia, it’s interesting to track in regards to this conversation (and more compelling than using it to justify that a character or story only works because some dude wrote something in the 70s). the majority of creative and entertainment industry does tend to skew left...journalism too. where does the bugle sit in that dichotomy? and peter’s support cast by extension.

Jameson is most interesting because of how our perception of media has changed. I think Jameson was conservative, or is conservative leaning but he is also someone with liberal sentiments and commitments. In the Sam Bullitt 2-Parter (ASM #91-92 which is up there in the most political Spider-Man stories), when gathered at George Stacy's funeral, Jameson remarks that he disagreed with Stacy for his liberal commitments, and in that story liberal means liberal. Jameson is initially drawn and tempted by Sam Bullitt but then he finds out by Robbie that he's a white supremacist with ties to hate groups and Jameson cuts him off and goes after Bullitt hard, proving himself to be the mensch he is deep down. Jameson in other comics is also said to be pro-mutant rights. On the other hand Slott in his run tended to show Jameson as more extreme, so he's into guns and vigilantism and being tough on crime and so on. And later on he's equated to and the PS4 game equates him with Alex Jones which strikes me as wrong.

wonder what that would mean for mj as an actress too.

Well in the Raleigh for President story, published originally in the non-canon Spectacular Magazine and then adapted in the early Conway run, Mary Jane and others supports Richard Raleigh, a charismatic Kennedy type who is secretly living a double life, a little Harvey Dent-ish. Raleigh's public facade is liberal though MJ mainly supports him because he kind of looks nice at least that's what she says in this early period. She's definitely more left-leaning after that. She was interested in the plight of undocumented immigrants and she was an open feminist. She also works in the fashion and arts scene and a bohemian crowd, so that means she's used to working in a diverse space. And of course, Mary Jane's wedding dress as selected by her in-page and chosen externally was made by the real-life Willi Smith, an LGBT African-American designer, who died of AIDS two months before the wedding issue and in fact MJ's wedding is the last thing Smith worked on when he was alive.

though i worry about the idea of not being able to depict business relations with developing countries, which by dint of that development will have more (obvious) corruption

and to be real, google shouldn’t be throwing stones there

Well you need Dr. Doom to face off against the Beyonders, you need Google to stand for free speech against China.

[boots]

Jameson is most interesting because of how our perception of media has changed. I think Jameson was conservative, or is conservative leaning but he is also someone with liberal sentiments and commitments. In the Sam Bullitt 2-Parter (ASM #91-92 which is up there in the most political Spider-Man stories), when gathered at George Stacy's funeral, Jameson remarks that he disagreed with Stacy for his liberal commitments, and in that story liberal means liberal. Jameson is initially drawn and tempted by Sam Bullitt but then he finds out by Robbie that he's a white supremacist with ties to hate groups and Jameson cuts him off and goes after Bullitt hard, proving himself to be the mensch he is deep down. Jameson in other comics is also said to be pro-mutant rights. On the other hand Slott in his run tended to show Jameson as more extreme, so he's into guns and vigilantism and being tough on crime and so on. And later on he's equated to and the PS4 game equates him with Alex Jones which strikes me as wrong.



Well in the Raleigh for President story, published originally in the non-canon Spectacular Magazine and then adapted in the early Conway run, Mary Jane and others supports Richard Raleigh, a charismatic Kennedy type who is secretly living a double life, a little Harvey Dent-ish. Raleigh's public facade is liberal though MJ mainly supports him because he kind of looks nice at least that's what she says in this early period. She's definitely more left-leaning after that. She was interested in the plight of undocumented immigrants and she was an open feminist. She also works in the fashion and arts scene and a bohemian crowd, so that means she's used to working in a diverse space. And of course, Mary Jane's wedding dress as selected by her in-page and chosen externally was made by the real-life Willi Smith, an LGBT African-American designer, who died of AIDS two months before the wedding issue and in fact MJ's wedding is the last thing Smith worked on when he was alive.



Well you need Dr. Doom to face off against the Beyonders, you need Google to stand for free speech against China.

you should write a crib notes, i’d read it

would you say support cast are given more latitude in regards to their political alignment than superhero protagonists?

decent analogy re doom and google but just like doom saving the universe so he can rule it, i believe google is less interested in “freedom of speech” over freedom of reach.

especially considering that internal google memo re maotai that effectively offered spy tools for the chinese government to exploit.

i’d also be careful applying western concepts to a traditionally confucian culture. while confucianism advocates political free speech, it doesn’t extend as far as the western ideals

[Revolutionary_Jack]

you should write a crib notes, i’d read it

I actually have tried to get published some places, but got rejects. I have also added a lot of stuff to the tvtropes Spider-Man page. I am especially proud of summarizing in chronology every single Spider-Man run and event in 616.
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.p...Book/SpiderMan

I also added a collection of quotes to represent Spider-Man there:
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Quotes/SpiderMan

Stan Lee gets multiple entries but I have gone one for each for every major writer.

would you say support cast are given more latitude in regards to their political alignment than superhero protagonists?

That's generally the case across the board for both DC and Marvel. There's also hierarchy in that flagship characters (Superman, Batman, Spider-Man) are more protected than those that are obscure. So you can do more stuff to the latter. For instance you can't show Reed Richards be a self-destructive abusive husband that subtextually he comes across a lot in the Lee-Kirby era, but you can do it textually with Hank Pym because Hank isn't a major hero and a protected character like Reed is.

Jim Shooter forbade Bill Mantlo from making Felicia Hardy the mother of Spider-Man's illegitimate child citing the number of contracts with morality clauses Marvel signed with kid friendly products to license Spider-Man, and Quesada nixed Peter father Gwen's kids in JMS' run. On the other hand, Jessica Jones and Luke Cage could have a baby before marriage because Luke Cage was a minor character and Jessica was introduced in a MAX Series.

Spider-Man fundamentally exists in a very sanitized corner of Marvel. By the nature of his genre. So his stories don't deal with rape, prostitution, or even stuff like strip clubs (see ASM Wedding Annual #21 where Peter, Harry and Flash's bachelor's party is hanging in a college dive and going on about how old they've become...which is more or less what strip club visits amount to). In the Marvel Shared Universe, Peter exists with Jessica Jones, Punisher, Daredevil and their stories touch on all this but not Spider-Man. The reason is well you can't sell Peter whining about "parker luck" when in a story he comes across a rape victim or people who have actual misfortune and suffering.

That also limits stuff you can do with Spider-Man politically and socially. So Peter's supporting cast, a la Star Trek where Kirk has to decide between Spock and Scotty also navigates his supporting cast in different ways and to similar effect.

i’d also be careful applying western concepts to a traditionally confucian culture. while confucianism advocates political free speech, it doesn’t extend as far as the western ideals

Isn't Dr. Sun Yat Sen one of the revered founders of China a guy who insisted on freedom of speech? I don't think confucianism or any such thing is justification for totalitarianism. After all freedom of speech wasn't something inherent to Western society, I seem to recall society being made to accept it after much blood and tears.

[boots]

I actually have tried to get published some places, but got rejects. I have also added a lot of stuff to the tvtropes Spider-Man page. I am especially proud of summarizing in chronology every single Spider-Man run and event in 616.
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.p...Book/SpiderMan

I also added a collection of quotes to represent Spider-Man there:
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Quotes/SpiderMan

Stan Lee gets multiple entries but I have gone one for each for every major writer.



That's generally the case across the board for both DC and Marvel. There's also hierarchy in that flagship characters (Superman, Batman, Spider-Man) are more protected than those that are obscure. So you can do more stuff to the latter. For instance you can't show Reed Richards be a self-destructive abusive husband that subtextually he comes across a lot in the Lee-Kirby era, but you can do it textually with Hank Pym because Hank isn't a major hero and a protected character like Reed is.

Jim Shooter forbade Bill Mantlo from making Felicia Hardy the mother of Spider-Man's illegitimate child citing the number of contracts with morality clauses Marvel signed with kid friendly products to license Spider-Man, and Quesada nixed Peter father Gwen's kids in JMS' run. On the other hand, Jessica Jones and Luke Cage could have a baby before marriage because Luke Cage was a minor character and Jessica was introduced in a MAX Series.

Spider-Man fundamentally exists in a very sanitized corner of Marvel. By the nature of his genre. So his stories don't deal with rape, prostitution, or even stuff like strip clubs (see ASM Wedding Annual #21 where Peter, Harry and Flash's bachelor's party is hanging in a college dive and going on about how old they've become...which is more or less what strip club visits amount to). In the Marvel Shared Universe, Peter exists with Jessica Jones, Punisher, Daredevil and their stories touch on all this but not Spider-Man. The reason is well you can't sell Peter whining about "parker luck" when in a story he comes across a rape victim or people who have actual misfortune and suffering.

That also limits stuff you can do with Spider-Man politically and socially. So Peter's supporting cast, a la Star Trek where Kirk has to decide between Spock and Scotty also navigates his supporting cast in different ways and to similar effect.



Isn't Dr. Sun Yat Sen one of the revered founders of China a guy who insisted on freedom of speech? I don't think confucianism or any such thing is justification for totalitarianism. After all freedom of speech wasn't something inherent to Western society, I seem to recall society being made to accept it after much blood and tears.

i enjoy the tropes pages and i’m greatful for your contributions. that being said, their biases [edit: by “their” i mean tropes as a whole] do show through but not in any amount that stops me from getting a lot out of them. your passion for the topic is undeniable

as for being published, as someone who struggled years in the creative industries before booking work regularly; it’s a marathon, not a sprint. your “break” may not be too far off.

and re support cast; would it be fair to say that the reader could infer the protagonist’s politics by association? character a’s support cast is mostly fascist, therefore character a is fascist or has sympathies? or is highly tolerant of those ideals?

i take it by totalitarianism you mean the republic of china, which was actually anti confucian.

when i mention confucianism, it’s to open an understanding of how my mother’s people have thought for thousands of years, in contrast to say the greek inspired philosophy of western culture. yes, concepts of freedom of speech exist in both, but they are idiosyncratic to each culture and not necessarily the same or even approaching the same thing. that can be said for dr sun’s 3 principles too. sometimes there are no direct equivalents

[Revolutionary_Jack]

and re support cast; would it be fair to say that the reader could infer the protagonist’s politics by association? character a’s support cast is mostly fascist, therefore character a is fascist or has sympathies? or is highly tolerant of those ideals?

Sure. But not always. If you see Peter's circle he is friends with Randy Robertson who has a long history being a campus radical, yet he's also friends with Flash Thompson, a veteran of first the Vietnam War and then the War in Iraq and a volunteer in both, which means that Flash supported the justification for invading Vietnam, and Flash supported the Iraq War and Dubya's war on terror. Now of course there have been and are cases where you support and be friends with soldiers even while disliking the war and the politicians who send them in. So maybe Peter would be in that space and of course he and Flash have a complicated history. But you can also argue implictly, that Peter supported or otherwise had no problems with America's invasion of Vietnam or the Iraq War and War on Terror. The latter position would be tricky since remember that the presidential candidates of the last three elections (Obama both terms, Trump 2016) of both parties denounced the Iraq War as a mistake in campaign against candidates (McCain, Romney, Clinton) who supported it. It's that unpopular.

Then you have Gwen Stacy who served as a volunteer for Sam Bullitt's campaign after her father's death, basically on the promise that Bullitt would extra-judicially kill him. Somehow Gwen Stacy supporting a far-right politician is never brought up by later writers, as is her association with white supremacy. Yet everyone comes on and talks of how noble she was.

Dan Slott said in an interview that very early during BND they discussed making one of Peter's supporting cast a racist or a bigot of some kind. They considered Aunt May but then someone pointed out Len Wein's run where she was progressive and supported Civil Rights. Slott said that he tried to work that in by making May into an albeist when she reacts negatively to Anna Maria Marconi but I still don't think that was done well, and I don't think May should be conservative. The woman who said that Mary Jane would make a good wife for Peter in the '60s even if MJ was certainly not by the standards of the time, marriage material (evidenced by the prejudices of many writers after that who aren't as wise as May) wouldn't be as narrow-minded. She would be big hearted in fact. As Ta-Nehisi Coates pointed, "Mary Jane is not the girl you take home to mother, unless you had a mother like mine or Peter." So May was open and accepting, and warm-hearted and loving.

[Agent Z]

Then you have Gwen Stacy who served as a volunteer for Sam Bullitt's campaign after her father's death, basically on the promise that Bullitt would extra-judicially kill him. Somehow Gwen Stacy supporting a far-right politician is never brought up by later writers, as is her association with white supremacy. Yet everyone comes on and talks of how noble she was.

Because not everyone has an axe to grind against Gwen for standing in the way of Peter and MJ. Every character has bad stuff in their history that gets forgotten or ignored. Hell, you mentioned Flash supporting the War on Terror and I don't see anyone else bringing that up and I'm sure a lot of Peter's fans wouldn't like the implication he supported the Vietnam and Iraq Wars.

[Revolutionary_Jack]

Because not everyone has an axe to grind against Gwen for standing in the way of Peter and MJ.

Try not to derail this topic and thread. And I should think Gwen fans would welcome any chance for her to be a more nuanced and flawed character. In any case, I mentioned that in a long survey about Spider-Man's supporting cast and where different people fit over the years based on in-canon stuff. Talking about Gwen supporting Sam Bullitt, where at the end of the story, she doesn't morally denounce Bullitt the way Jameson does, is more than fair.

Every character has bad stuff in their history that gets forgotten or ignored. Hell, you mentioned Flash supporting the War on Terror and I don't see anyone else bringing that up and I'm sure a lot of Peter's fans wouldn't like the implication he supported the Vietnam and Iraq Wars.

With Peter, the idea that he was quasi-Objectivist is the tough pill. Supporting the Vietnam and Iraq Wars is take-or-leave it since both Democrats and Republicans supported those wars. Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton supported the Iraq wars. And people still like them a lot. Hillary Clinton remember won the popularity vote by a ridiculously big gap, for all the good that it did her.

There's that line in the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie, "There are things a man can do and a man can't do. You can either accept that your father was a pirate and a good man, or you can't."

So you know for some Spider-man fans either they accept that his main creator, Steve Ditko, was both an immensely talented man, a creative genius, who intuitively understood the story and theme, and yet also supported an obnoxious ideology like Objectivism. You can either accept that or you can't. Same with others.

[NC_Yankee]

Try not to derail this topic and thread. And I should think Gwen fans would welcome any chance for her to be a more nuanced and flawed character. In any case, I mentioned that in a long survey about Spider-Man's supporting cast and where different people fit over the years based on in-canon stuff. Talking about Gwen supporting Sam Bullitt, where at the end of the story, she doesn't morally denounce Bullitt the way Jameson does, is more than fair.



With Peter, the idea that he was quasi-Objectivist is the tough pill. Supporting the Vietnam and Iraq Wars is take-or-leave it since both Democrats and Republicans supported those wars. Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton supported the Iraq wars. And people still like them a lot. Hillary Clinton remember won the popularity vote by a ridiculously big gap, for all the good that it did her.

There's that line in the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie, "There are things a man can do and a man can't do. You can either accept that your father was a pirate and a good man, or you can't."

So you know for some Spider-man fans either they accept that his main creator, Steve Ditko, was both an immensely talented man, a creative genius, who intuitively understood the story and theme, and yet also supported an obnoxious ideology like Objectivism. You can either accept that or you can't. Same with others.

I am solidly MJ but I am giving Gwen some slack. 1: People forget why she turned to Bullet: It was lashing out in anger over her father's death. This is a constant theme in fiction ( Death Wish is a classic example).2:Gwen was no racist, she hung out in the same crowd as Pete, Flash MJ etc. 3: She was a girl who was barely an adult, and came from a very sheltered background. ( unlike MJ who came from the "Wrong side of the tracks" and.had to work hard to succeed). She was entitled to make mistakes ( especially after her father died). I have long believed that MJ is tbe one for Pete. Why? Because when she.is well written, she is tough and can handle issues even better then Pete ( look at her in Kraven's Last Hunt)). It is not about politics, I would never be accused of being a liberal, but I am for MJ everytime. The fit is just better. Watch a movie called Definitely, Maybe with Ryan Reynolds. He has multiple women but only the very politically liberal redhead April ( Isla Fisher) is his soulmate. That is what MJ is to Pete

[Revolutionary_Jack]

Watch a movie called Definitely, Maybe with Ryan Reynolds. He has multiple women but only the very politically liberal redhead April ( Isla Fisher) is his soulmate. That is what MJ is to Pete

That's a good movie, and Isla Fisher in that movie could in another time and place, made an excellent MJ.

But anyway, my point is if you look at all of Spider-Man's supporting cast and so on, in their political association, you have to account that, warts and all. That statement was singled out and made into a shipping issue by posters who have some grudge from another thread but that's neither here nor there.

[NC_Yankee]

[QUOTE=Revolutionary_Jack;4310250]That's a good movie, and Isla Fisher in that movie could in another time and place, made an excellent MJ.

But anyway, my point is if you look at all of Spider-Man's supporting cast and so on, in their political association, you have to account that, warts and all. That statement was singled out and made into a shipping issue by posters who have some grudge from another thread but that's neither here nor there.
Once again I am hard core MJ. But I am tired of using politics to trash Gwen. Why? Gwen is far from the only person who made a mistake in Spider-Man. Look at Peter, he showed right from the beginning he is can be a flawed person who made a very bad mistake ( which is why Uncle Ben died). Of course, those flaws are a big reason he is popular over 50 years after his creation. This applies to all great fictional characters: Sherlock Holmes and cocaine is an example of this. So I do not expect ( let alone want) perfection in a character. But what I do want is for the character to overcome adversity and grow from whatever issue they dealt with. Gwen never got that chance from Sam Bullett, but she is was not as bad and arrogant like Liz Allen ( let alone Norman Osborn), which is why Marvel messed up between ASM 91-121. and failed to give her a chance to look good on her way out of Pete's Life. Even Curt Connors got a better fate then that and he killed his kid ( so much for Spider-Man being sanitized). If someone believes MJ ( or for that matter any character) is better for Pete then make that case ( based on the evidence which can only come through comics, movies, TV, games public comments by writters or some combination of the above). You can do that by showing why they are, not by trashing Gwen.

[Lee]

The comments about effectiveness were in the context of the larger goal, to which the cause and everything else is subservient.

Mets, why are you dancing around this?

"The criticism of social justice warriors isn't that they want to help people, but that they're not effective at it, and that there are serious tradeoffs to what they want to do."

To stand by that is to completely ignore how the term came into popular usage with the GamerGate crowd, the harassment campaigns that arose from that, how Breitbart adopted the terminology to groom that crowd towards their far right politics, the links between Breitbart and the neo-Nazi movement. Now in comics you have guys like Van Sciver and his followers using the term, and they're not using it in the innocuous way you're describing. It's like trying to downplay "feminazi" - "Oh but the criticism isn't that they want to help people..."

I find it incredibly poor that you, as a CBR forum moderator, are choosing to frame the conversation this way. You were around when the whole forum was reset after a comics pro and CBR columnist was sent rape threats for writing a feminist critique of a comic book cover. It's the same people, the same attitudes. You can't bring the phrase "social justice warrior" into a conversation and refuse to acknowledge the groups that have adopted it into their lexicon.

[Mister Mets]

Fellas, this is Spider-Man and Social Justice, not "or" but "and", which means you need to discuss Spider-Man comics vis-a-vis soc.justice themes and vice versa. This is just becoming another political thread.

Yeah, these are sensitive questions, so it's a discussion where we should tread carefully. Policy disputes are ultimately about high stakes things.

Mets, why are you dancing around this?

"The criticism of social justice warriors isn't that they want to help people, but that they're not effective at it, and that there are serious tradeoffs to what they want to do."

To stand by that is to completely ignore how the term came into popular usage with the GamerGate crowd, the harassment campaigns that arose from that, how Breitbart adopted the terminology to groom that crowd towards their far right politics, the links between Breitbart and the neo-Nazi movement. Now in comics you have guys like Van Sciver and his followers using the term, and they're not using it in the innocuous way you're describing. It's like trying to downplay "feminazi" - "Oh but the criticism isn't that they want to help people..."

I find it incredibly poor that you, as a CBR forum moderator, are choosing to frame the conversation this way. You were around when the whole forum was reset after a comics pro and CBR columnist was sent rape threats for writing a feminist critique of a comic book cover. It's the same people, the same attitudes. You can't bring the phrase "social justice warrior" into a conversation and refuse to acknowledge the groups that have adopted it into their lexicon.

I have not brought the phrase social justice warrior to the conversation (I was responsible for making the thread drift but that's because this was an offshoot of arguments about the upcoming movie, and whether MJ should be a reporter, and we can all agree that the question isn't really about those topics.)

I responded to a point someone else made about conservative fans and social justice warriors, so I'm going with the most generous take on that phrase "conservative fans" rather than picking on the most disgusting members of a political subset. I am conservative so I don't appreciate any implication that I've got anything to do with neo-nazis or Gamer-Gate. It seems intellectually dishonest to bring that baggage to a political argument. It would be like implying all Democrats are socialists, eco-terrorists and/ or minority separatists.

If you disagree with me on the idea that the phrase is used to suggest a liberal is ineffective, we can discuss specific examples. In most cases, there is the argument that the alleged SJW isn't managing to make things better.

Jameson is most interesting because of how our perception of media has changed. I think Jameson was conservative, or is conservative leaning but he is also someone with liberal sentiments and commitments. In the Sam Bullitt 2-Parter (ASM #91-92 which is up there in the most political Spider-Man stories), when gathered at George Stacy's funeral, Jameson remarks that he disagreed with Stacy for his liberal commitments, and in that story liberal means liberal. Jameson is initially drawn and tempted by Sam Bullitt but then he finds out by Robbie that he's a white supremacist with ties to hate groups and Jameson cuts him off and goes after Bullitt hard, proving himself to be the mensch he is deep down. Jameson in other comics is also said to be pro-mutant rights. On the other hand Slott in his run tended to show Jameson as more extreme, so he's into guns and vigilantism and being tough on crime and so on. And later on he's equated to and the PS4 game equates him with Alex Jones which strikes me as wrong.



Well in the Raleigh for President story, published originally in the non-canon Spectacular Magazine and then adapted in the early Conway run, Mary Jane and others supports Richard Raleigh, a charismatic Kennedy type who is secretly living a double life, a little Harvey Dent-ish. Raleigh's public facade is liberal though MJ mainly supports him because he kind of looks nice at least that's what she says in this early period. She's definitely more left-leaning after that. She was interested in the plight of undocumented immigrants and she was an open feminist. She also works in the fashion and arts scene and a bohemian crowd, so that means she's used to working in a diverse space. And of course, Mary Jane's wedding dress as selected by her in-page and chosen externally was made by the real-life Willi Smith, an LGBT African-American designer, who died of AIDS two months before the wedding issue and in fact MJ's wedding is the last thing Smith worked on when he was alive.



Well you need Dr. Doom to face off against the Beyonders, you need Google to stand for free speech against China.

It gets a little messy applying earlier political takes to figure out the right directions for modern comics.

For the most part, we're lucky that characters haven't been on the wrong side of history. Imagine if we had the equivalent of Spider-Man supporting eugenics or prohibition.