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Miles Morales: Meet the new Spider-Man – Metro US

Miles Morales: Meet the new Spider-Man

There’s a new Spiderman! (“Wait, what hat happened to the old one?” you may ask. He died, apparently, but only in the alternate-universe Ultimate series. It’s complicated.) And we don’t know that much about him, except for two things:

1) His name is Miles Morales.

2) He is biracial: half black and half Latino.

Guess which one people are riled up about?

Satirical website Haha, JK took issue with what it perceived as Marvel’s hamfisted attempt at creating a rough-and-tumble ‘ethnic’ character:

Move over president Obama, you’re not the highest profile mixed race kid on the block anymore. Marvel Comics revealed that the new Spider-Man will be a street tough young punk that is part African-American … The pasty white Anglo-Saxon Marvel writers admit they don’t know many Latino or African-American people so they had to use their imagination’s [sic] when creating the new character.

LA Weekly was a little more serious:

Does this reek of desperate, hasty diversification for the sake of superstar PR? We will say this: The fact that Marvel officials haven’t identified Morales as anything beyond half-black, half-Latino, which could mean a million things in America, isn’t a good starting point.

Agreed! However, we don’t want to be too down on the Miles character yet, as there’s at least one good thing about him: He might make it easier for us to finally get that Donald Glover “Spider-Man” movie we always wanted.