Obama meets Spider-Man

As if becoming president isn’t enough, Barack Obama gets a chance to fulfill “his other childhood dream,” too, said Susan Davis in The Wall Street Journal online. A collector of comics as a child, Obama is featured in a Jan. 14 bonus issue of Marvel Comic’s Amazing Spider-Man series, set to coincide with his inauguration. Marvel, and Obama’s fellow comic book enthusiasts, are apparently excited to have “one of their own in the White House.”

In more ways than one, said Debbie Schlussel in Big Hollywood. Comic book writers used to be “against Nazis and Hitler and were very up-front in supporting America’s fight against them,” and now DC and Marvel have “embraced left-wing politics.” So “get out the barf bag”—now “Spider-Man is in the tank for Obama.”

“Yes, there’s a fist bump,” said Tirdad Derakhshani in The Philadelphia Inquirer, but at least the writers include slightly subversive humor: "In one panel, the superhero says he mistook veep-elect Joe Biden for the villainous Vulture.”

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Fictional villains aren’t Obama’s problem—he has enough on his hands with the global economic meltdown, said Gerald Baker in The Times of London. What he really needs is a real-life “superhero to help him to rescue the U.S. economy.” The U.S. consumer, the regular “hero of the global economy” over the past decade, is on strike.

The Obama issue of Spider-Man might help with that, too, said newswire ANI in Thaindian News. U.S. merchandise hawkers are “cheerfully making a mint by selling Barack Obama-branded articles,” including T-shirts, collectible plates, boxers, hot sauce, “Yes Pecan” ice cream, and now, comic books. Not all of it is in good taste, but it’s worth “hundreds of millions of dollars” to an economy that needs it.