It’s hard to be a fan of superhero comic books sometimes.
For example, the Associated Press release – about the appearance of Prime Minister Gordon Brown in Captain Britain and MI:13 #1 (which you can read at Newsarama) – was picked up (and reported in an identical fashion) by the British press: The Sun [EDIT: dead link], The Mirror, The Mail [EDIT: broken link], The Telegraph, The Metro, The London Paper [EDIT: website no longer exists]. This is mostly done for comedy effect of juxtaposition – the papers don’t like Gordon Brown at the moment, so they can laugh at someone suggesting that he is a good guy.
Some of the items are more embarrassing than others (The Mail is the only one to stoop so low as to use the ‘Kerpow!’ subhead) but, unfortunately, you get used to that when it comes to dealing with how comic books are treated in the mainstream, especially the press. The worst was the piece shown at the top of this post, from the (free) London Paper, which is a subsidiary of The Sun.
It should be pointed out that the ‘Watercooler Moment’ is a regular item that is supposed to be a ‘funny’ look at a piece of news. I know that a journo isn’t going to actually read a comic, but to get completely the wrong end of the stick from a short Associated Press piece is something else: ‘plays a superhero’? ‘cartoon strip’? ‘renamed Captain Britain’?
Dear London Paper Twat
Gordon Brown isn’t an actual superhero in the comic book you haven’t read, and he hasn’t had his name changed to Captain Britain because there is another character (the star of the actual book, with his name in the title) who already has that name. Please don’t be so fucking stupid and try to remember that your job is supposed to be concerned with facts. Oh, and by the way, jokes relating to Dad’s Army, which was first shown 40 years ago, are considered extremely dated.
Yours sincerely
Brigadier Photosynthesis Molybdenum Jones (Mrs)
It’s just so depressing sometimes …
I’m not British and don’t know much about Gordon Brown, but I do know enough about journalism to know that writing that a Prime Minister is “useless at running the country” without backing anything up is both lazy and uninformative.
Also, it’s interesting that the writers chose to put a real life leader like Gordon Brown in “Captain Britain.” Marvel usually opts out of making it clear who the President of the United States is, but I guess they chose to be specific in the case of the United Kingdom.
Gordon Brown isn’t mentioned specifically by name, and I thought you have to squint a little to see the likeness, so perhaps Marvel were covering themselves. It was only the writer Paul Cornell specifically stating it was Brown in the Associated Wire piece that got everyone chomping at the bit …