The Four Color Media Monitor

Proving Marvel's still got some social justice gimmicks running amok, the UK Guardian wrote a puff piece about a solo book they're launching starring a Latina character named America Chavez (a possible allusion to Venezuela's Hugo?), who also happens to be a lesbian:

Young, queer, Latina … and strong enough to punch star-shaped holes in reality. America Chavez – AKA unmasked avenger Miss America – is a welcome departure from outdated superhero archetypes. Since 2015, she has enlivened Marvel’s heavyweight super-team the Ultimates with her determined, no-bull attitude and unparalleled street style (instead of the usual unchanging crimefighting costume, Chavez favours a freewheeling wardrobe of covetable shorts, hoodies and jackets united by red, white, blue, stars and stripes). Marvel has finally realised her potential as a standalone hero: this month’s America #1 launches Chavez as the headliner of her own ongoing comic series. Taking time out from team-ups, she has enrolled at Sotomayor University, an advanced campus that includes a Department of Radical Women & Intergalactic Indigenous Peoples and a Fifth Element-obsessed sorority called the Leelumultipass Phi Theta Betas. Before long, she is teleporting through time and space to ace a tricky homework paper, in the process offering a fairly definitive position on the morality of punching Nazis.

Which, in the minds of moonbats like the Guardian's contributors, is a thinly veiled code for punching conservatives. It may be one thing to make the new Miss America Latina, but making her a lesbian as well is only stuffing in far too much ultra-leftism, and makes the political leanings far too obvious. Which the paper is already doing when they talk about "outdated archetypes". Well if that's what they think, then there's no need for them to read any superhero comics; they can go right back to reading Judge Dredd with its bizarre depictions of the USA as a colossal totalitarian police state in the far future.

If that all sounds rather more exuberant than the usual superhero fare, it might be because of the atypical creative team behind the project. Artist Joe Quinones has previously explored some of the more absurd corners of the Marvel universe while working on the irreverent Howard the Duck series. Writer Gabby Rivera, on the other hand, is making a very high-profile comics debut. But as the young, queer Latina author of YA novel Juliet Takes a Breath, she seems indisputably qualified to plot the reality-hopping adventures of Miss America. (“I’ve always dreamt up wild, powerful and carefree superheroes that look like me and my family,” Rivera recently told the Washington Post: “Thick, brown, goofy, beautiful.”) And if there was any doubt about the fierce direction of the series, Quinones’s cover for April’s second issue is a righteous tribute to Beyoncé’s Formation video.

Well at least we know where the writer's coming from. But which doesn't make this new take on one of Marvel's early superheroine creations from 1943 (Madeline Joyce) any better. All it does is give strong hints the writer's using this as a platform for her leftist politics. It should also serve to remind everyone how ill-advised it is to think Marvel's moving away from leftist politics so easily.

Labels: marvel comics, moonbat writers, msm propaganda, politics