I’ve long thought that a large part of the universal appeal of Spider-Man was the costume. Not just Steve Ditko’s brilliant design, but the fact that its full-face mask completely obscured his identity, allowing every reader to identify with Spidey, and project themselves behind the mask, no matter what their ethnicity.
It wasn’t until I opened BLASTOFF that I realized how important it was for readers, young and old, to really see themselves in the heroes in these pages. To see heroes that “look like me.” I see it now in the kids who come in wearing their Miles Morales costume, in the young girls who come up to the register with their copies of Wonder Woman and Ms. Marvel, in the new readers who look up at our wall of Silver Age comics and see that Black Panther has been around as long as Iron Man and Thor, and was always just as important.
Now more than ever, comics look like the world around us, and that’s nothing but a good thing.
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