If all this hasn't convinced you that Spider-Man is setting a dangerous example for the youth of today, then maybe the word of the President will be good enough for you. Moved by one teen shooting incident in particular, he declared that the problem leading this 14-year-old boy to murder was Spider-Man 3:
That's the trouble, from the beginning until the end there are more and more dead. And that's one of the series small children love most... because it's attractive, it's from comics that are attractive, the figure, the colors and movements... so much so that we finished watching it at four in the morning.
A minor detail worth mentioning is that this wasn't the President of the United States, but of Venezuela, a nation that does indeed have a violence problem. Nicolas Maduro, like his predecessor Hugo Chavez, has often spoken out against the decadent American culture as the root of his society's ills. We can only appreciate the risk he and his wife took, exposing themselves to that culture at four in the morning, all in the name of research.
T Campbell has written quite a few online comics series and selected work for Marvel, Archie and Tokyopop. His longest-running works are Fans, Penny and Aggie-- and his current project with co-writer Phil Kahn, Guilded Age.
