Stan Lee Stands Up For White Spider-Man; Says Create New Characters

Leave it to Stan Lee to tell it like it is.

Marvel Comics as of late has been changing their characters to mold them into politically correct versions.

The latest is that the Black Puerto Rican version of Spider-Man, Miles Morales, will be the headliner of the new Spider-Man series launching in the Fall.

The writer on the new Spidey series, Brian Michael Bendis, even went so far as to call white children racists by stating they wouldn’t let their friends of “color” pretend to be the white characters Batman or Superman (of course Bendis didn’t mention any white Marvel characters like Iron Man).

Now Stan Lee sets the record straight and says they should leave the characters alone and just create new ones.

“I wouldn’t mind, if Peter Parker had originally been black, a Latino, an Indian or anything else, that he stay that way,” Lee told Newsarama. “But we originally made him white. I don’t see any reason to change that.”

While Bendis apparently believes kids aren’t allowed to pretend to be a hero of a different “color,” Stan Lee thinks that one of Spider-Man’s stengths is that his costume enables anyone to potentially identify with the Web Crawler.

“What I like about the costume is that anybody reading Spider-Man in any part of the world can imagine that they themselves are under the costume,” Lee said. “And that’s a good thing.”  

Lee continues that it’s not about being anti-gay or anti-black, and even mentions what may fans have stated, which is they wouldn’t want to see the black characters changed as well.

“It has nothing to do with being anti-gay, or anti-black, or anti-Latino, or anything like that,” Lee said. “Latino characters should stay Latino. The Black Panther should certainly not be Swiss. I just see no reason to change that which has already been established when it’s so easy to add new characters. I say create new characters the way you want to. Hell, I’ll do it myself.”