How the West’s wokeness killed a Marvel called the comic-book superhero

It is a cruel irony when your dissent is conformity. Or when your revolution is sponsored. Or when your superheroes are created at corporate sweatshops, bonsaied by political correctness. Wokeness and cancel culture has repulsed even one of its own leading icons, Barack Obama. It is now turning off millions of Americans after phonies on social media started virtue-signalling to cover up the gratuitous looting and violence in the name of race protests. The champions of free speech have cancelled Ivanka Trump’s speech at the Wichita State University. She joins personalities like Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson who were forcibly prevented from speaking on US campuses. While America smarts from far-Left violence and intolerance thinly disguised to fight precisely those, one of the biggest casualties of this phenomenon is the West’s comic-book superhero. Political correctness has quietly killed the Ubermensch of our fantasies, with much help from smug, corporate mediocrity. Marvel’s newest crop of characters have been greeted with howls from comics fans. Superheroes capture the popular imagination because — while they start out as a regular man or tormented guy like Peter Parker or Bruce Banner (or not, like Bruce Wayne) — they go on to acquire extraordinary powers and great moral standing. They are superheroes because they present an idealised, elevated universe for billions of followers which they can access only in their fantasy. That is exactly why the new Marvel crop is such a buzzkill. The characters include a gender non-binary crimefighter called… guess what…Snowflake. Its sibling is the equally inanely named Safespace. Another one, Screentime, looks like a poor knock-off of Ben Ten. He is apparently a “meme-obsessed super-teen whose brain became connected to the internet after becoming exposed to his grandfather’s ‘experimental internet gas’”. Internet gas. Beat that. The heroes are so self-consciously multiracial (only the villain, cheesily named B-Negative, is white), physically unremarkable and gender-wise contrived that it reeks of being patronising about race, body and sexuality. The creator of these puny marvels, Daniel Kibblesmith, is hardly a Stan Lee 2.0. His Twitter timeline reveals someone who has a day job as a Dem fundraiser, and creating a politically correct, multiracial, gender non-binary toon army in his spare time when he is not writing political slogans. Legends such as Stan Lee and Hayao Miyazaki were guided by their freewheeling imagination, not by concepts and political punchlines. Kibblesmith leans on the latter. Frankly, it seems that the characters were produced in an assembly line, straight off the Marvel marketing team’s Powerpoint or whiteboard, the feet of imagination firmly chained by buzzwords like “diversity”, “multiracial” and “non-binary”. https://twitter.com/TrailerDrake/status/1240460088156000257?s=20 This is the revenge of the unelectable Left upon its habitat named democracy. Through its control of media and academia, it has been pushing its agenda of shaming at least the influential elite into being deracinated, defacing its own roots and culture, melting all diversity into pat, factory labels in the very name of diversity, weakening the glue that holds together nations and democracies. In Marvel’s monumental failure, the death of the West’s comic-book superhero, lies the grand success of that effort.