Now when most people think of “Black Spider-Man”, they think of either Venom or Spider-Man donning his black suit as he was seen to wear in Spider-Man 3 when he bacame bad Spidey. But the buzz on twitter and the web is that there’s a push for Marvel to reconstruct the character of Spider-Man for their reboot of the series, and really make a change that will definitely shake up the comic universe.
Ever since President Obama took office, more and more doors have been opened for Black folk and other minorities to take on roles that were traditionally and historically reserved for white folks. But now a Black person possibly becoming Spider-Man…now that’s crazy!
I have to admit that I actually had this idea first; back when I was around 10 or so, and dreaming of one day becoming Spike Lee, I too had envisioned Spider-Man becoming Black one day and no, I don’t mean through some sort of metamorphosis similar to the Watermelon Man. I mean for the story and origin of Spider-Man to change and adapt to this new character.
I even had his origin back story laid out and all of that jazz but my story never materialized. I even thought about writing a script for my concept when I was in high school. The fanboy in me wanted the movie to be made some day with me at the helm. The realist in me just didn’t think that it would ever happen and so I didn’t waste my time on it. But now, with the help of Twitter, there is a considerable push for someone to carry on the dream that I once had growing up.
A grassroots movement has hit Twitter by storm and is calling out Marvel to go the African-American way. The movement actually began inadvertantly this past Friday, when a blog titled “The last thing Spider-Man should be is another white guy” and in response, commenters threw out Donald Glover’s name as a possible contender, and a Twitter campaign was born. Donald Glover is probably best known from his role on NBC’s “Community.”
Apparently Donald Glover wasn’t part of the campaign, but of course he isn’t opposed to the notion of him playing the iconic character in a future film. He even has took to Twitter himself and the Twitter hashtag “donald4spiderman” became the #3 trending topic in the U.S. and the campaign seems to be still gaining steam.
For those that aren’t comic book diehards, there are actually more than 2o different incarnations of Peter Parker and Spider-Man throughout the Marvel Multi-Universe and not one of them is any other ethnicity but White. So it actually wouldn’t be hard to add another incarnation of Peter Parker, with him being a Black man, or just simply give him another name altogether.
What do you guys think of Spider-Man being played by Donald Glover or of Spider-Man ever becoming a different race other than a White man? Hey, it worked for Catwoman…ehhh nevermind.
