135 Teabaggers Angry About Cap Comic

Happy snow day!

This post is a little less comic related and a bit more political, but as it turns out a few teabaggers were offended by the latest issue of Captain America, in which Cap and the Falcon come across a tea party protest. The scene in question is after the jump.

012 Friday Wrap-up for the week of 1/11/2009

• Comics Fairplay posted this interesting breakdown of the economics of buying your floppies every Wednesday. In the current financial climate it’s something to think about.
• The Telegraph chooses an unfortunate title for their article about Stan Lee’s new gay superhero. Do your homework people!
• It appears we may not see Samuel L. Jackson in the Marvel movie universe again after all, due to an “economic crisis in the Marvel world” (read: Sam’s trying to put them through the ringer.) Here’s a funny bit of unintentional racism: the address used by that LA Times article, entitled Nick Fury No More?, gets cut off. It just reads, “Nick Fury No Mo”. WHY’S IT GOTTA BE ABOUT EBONICS, LA TIMES?
• Here’s a pretty sweet blog where comix artists re-draw and sometimes re-imagine famous comic covers.
• Not one to be outdone by those American pigs (or black people), Nicolas Sarkozy and his wife Carla Bruni are starring in their own comic book.
• While we’re on the subject, Erik Larsen is pissed that Marvel “stole” his idea to put Obama on the cover of a comic:

“The thing that Marvel is attempting to do is to frame the argument. To say “we’ve featured presidents in the past–this is what we do–it’s part of a pattern.” But that’s a false argument. The “stunt” was an alternate cover featuring Obama– which was something no publisher had done with any president in the past and one that received a lot of press when I did it. If Marvel had done alternate covers with Bush and Clinton or any of the others– they could legitimately claim that they were following a pattern and doing what they’ve done in the past– but that wasn’t the case. And theirs is not simply the appearance of a president in a comic book but one on an alternate cover– and one concocted to try and get some of the same attention that (I) got.”

• Oh hey, look, Marvel’s Steve Wacker responded:

“Reading Erik’s statement, he wisely (if you want to cut off all logical arguments) proclaims that the actual truth of the matter — that Marvel has a history of showing presidents in our books — is a “false argument,” but I’m going to ignore him and make the point anyway because, well, ignoring that fact is as silly as his pretend outrage.

Marvel DOES regularly show politicians and we have for years. That’s the whole point. In fact, Marvel has spent the past year putting a fake presidential candidate in most of our books. The idea that we’d follow that up by putting a Spidey-fan-made-good on our cover can’t really come as a huge surprise to anyone smart enough to be a publisher.”

Steve’s kind of twisting Erik’s argument there, but regardless I don’t think marvel “stole” the idea necessarily. The thing that really scares me here is that Wacker, a man in the comic industry, says he’s never read an issue of Savage Dragon.

• Looks like Watchmen will actually be coming to the big screen after all. Somewhere in the UK right now Alan Moore is beating his head against a wall.
• I feel like I’ve been doing this too much lately; Ricardo Montalban and Patrick McGoohan died this week. Montalban is best known as the star of Fantasy Island, as well as the title character from Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. Patrick McGoohan was the star of the 1960′s TV show The Prisoner.

007 PRESIDENT ELECT SAVED BY SUPERHERO!

For those of you who don’t know, you heard it here first: Barack Obama is the President elect. No, no, silly! Not just on THIS Earth; also on Earth-616!

Marvel has this habit of mirroring the real world. For example: Did you know Richard Nixon was a terrorist? And although this was sort of copied from Savage Dragon, this morning USA Today has announced that Barack Obama will appear in the latest issue of Spider-Man. The plot of the story is that the Chameleon takes the form of Obama, because I guess he’s trying to discredit or embarrass him. And his big plan is to… I dunno, say racist shit? Kick Joe Biden in the balls? I honestly didn’t pay much attention to the plot. I skimmed the article, and generally this sort of thing kind of leaves a bad taste in my mouth, because it always seems so forced and gimmicky. But this time I had a completely different issue with the whole ordeal:

BARACK OBAMA IS A TERRORIST IN THE MARVEL UNIVERSE, TOO!!!

Just look at that terrorist fist jab in action! And Spidey! How could you?! You helped save NY on 9/11! Was it all a ploy to lull us into a false sense of comfort? With great power comes great responsibility, indeed.

Noticing this, I decided to look — and I mean, take a good hard look — into some of the other, less obvious ways Obama has tried to hint at his comic-book related terrorism. Hey I don’t shy away from controversy. I’m here to break the real hard-hitting stories, you know? But honestly, looking at these images, how could we have all missed it?

On the campaign trail with Lex Luthor!

Promoting Magneto’s anti-human agenda!

Catching some R n’ R on the beaches of Latveria with Victor Von Doom!

Just pallin‘ around with MODOK!

Was my family right all along?! Is Barack Obama plotting to smash the state and overthrow the leaders of the free world from the place we’d least expect it– the comic shops?? All I know is we probably shouldn’t have elected him anyway. I mean, his middle name is Hussein and his last name rhymes with Osama. Duh, people.

(Big thanks to my good friend and collaborator Matt Occhuizzo for wasting his time creating these images for me. This stuff totally doesn’t do his work justice, so please go here and check out how good he really is.)