14380: Stan Lee (1922-2018).

The late Stan Lee is best known for his comic book creations. Yet he was a heroic equality defender too.

12497: Pascal’s Prestigious Penance.

The New York Times reported soon-to-be-reassigned Sony Chair and closet racist Amy Pascal will be working on the studio’s Spider-Man series. Hey, maybe she’ll support the fans on Twitter calling for a Black Spider-Man.

Amy Pascal to Work on Sony’s Spider-Man Team

By Brooks Barnes and Michael Cieply

LOS ANGELES — Amy Pascal may be giving up the Sony Pictures crown, but she’s keeping the jewels.

In a deal announced late Monday, Ms. Pascal will join the producing team for Sony’s most important film property — the Spider-Man series — when she steps down as the studio’s movie chairwoman in May. Landing the blockbuster franchise ranks her alongside Hollywood’s most prominent producers.

Ms. Pascal will also board the studio’s high-profile “Ghostbusters” remake, according to people briefed on her exit package who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss deals that are still private. She is additionally expected to tackle “Cleopatra,” an epic starring Angelina Jolie that has long gestated at Sony.

Sony also said on Monday that Kevin Feige, the president of Marvel Studios, which is owned by the Walt Disney Company, will join Ms. Pascal in producing the next Spider-Man film. As yet untitled, the movie will be released in July 2017. It will not continue the story set out in “The Amazing Spider-Man 2,” which Sony released to mediocre results last year.

Together, the deals with Ms. Pascal and Marvel signify a structural transition at Sony, which was struggling with uneven box office results long before it suffered a devastating cyberattack in November. Like other studios, Sony will become less an operation run by an auteur chief — for the last 18 years, Ms. Pascal — and more a federation of powerful filmmaking arms competing for coveted release dates.

Whoever succeeds Ms. Pascal will have to play broker among the fiefs. Ms. Pascal, lured by the attractive new deal and drained by the pressures of the hacking crisis, announced her departure last week.

Thomas E. Rothman, the former chief executive of Fox Filmed Entertainment, is now in charge of Sony’s rejuvenated TriStar division. Jeff Robinov recently brought his Studio 8, financed by China’s Fosun Group, to Sony after leaving his post as the top movie executive at Warner Bros. Another Sony division dedicated to lower-budget urban comedies and horror films, Screen Gems, is run by Clint Culpepper.

Mr. Rothman and Mr. Robinov have only just started to assemble what are expected to be dozens of films that — alongside the contributions of Ms. Pascal — will shape Sony’s creative signature through much of the next decade. Mr. Rothman and Mr. Robinov will work together on one early film, Ang Lee’s “Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk,” an Iraq war veteran story.

Ms. Pascal’s exit deal, among the richest in Hollywood history, will guarantee her income of between $30 million and $40 million over four years, according to people briefed on its terms. Her package also includes a percentage of profits on movies she produces and roughly $9 million annually for office costs and discretionary acquisition of scripts.

The agreement ranks in opulence with the farewell 20th Century Fox package given to Peter Chernin when he left as president of the News Corporation in 2009. Among the prime Fox properties Mr. Chernin joined as a producer was the reimagined “Planet of the Apes” series, which went on to generate more than $1 billion at the worldwide box office.

Ms. Pascal’s presence on so many films will inevitably crowd producers who might otherwise have had her slot. Notably, Avi Arad and Matthew Tolmach, both of whom were producers of the last two Spider-Man films, will transition to lesser roles on the next Spider-Man movie.

Spider-Man is a Marvel character, but Marvel sold Sony the movie rights in 1999 and has had almost no involvement since. As part of the agreement with Marvel announced Monday, Marvel can include the Spider-Man character in its own movies — starting, perhaps, with “Captain America: Civil War,” which will arrive in May 2016.

Sony will continue to finance, distribute, own and have final creative control of the stand-alone Spider-Man films.

The Spider-Man series came to Sony when Ms. Pascal helped connect the project with Laura Ziskin, a friend who resigned as president of Fox 2000 in 2009 and quickly set up shop as a producer at Sony. With the immense success of “Spider-Man,” which had about $822 million in worldwide ticket sales after its release in 2002, Ms. Ziskin helped reinvigorate the studio. (She died of breast cancer in 2011.)

Two more sequels, both starring Tobey Maguire as the title character, delivered mammoth ticket sales. But Sony’s last outing with Spider-Man — its original deal with Marvel requires the films to keep coming — did not perform as well as its predecessors, taking in about $706 million at the global box office in 2014.

While Sony has struggled to keep Spider-Man vibrant, Mr. Feige has delivered hits like “Guardians of the Galaxy” and “Captain America: The Winter Soldier.” “We always want to collaborate with the best and most successful filmmakers to grow our franchises,” Michael Lynton, Sony’s chief executive, said in a statement.

12016: You Da Spider-Man.

From USA TODAY…

Spider-Man ‘can be anybody’ — and now he’s Donald Glover

By Brian Truitt, USA TODAY

Donald Glover grew up with Spider-Man as his No. 1 superhero, and while he doesn’t get to wear web-shooters or red and blue tights, at least he’s getting to voice a precocious version of Marvel Comics’ iconic wall-crawler.

The new season of Disney XD’s animated series Ultimate Spider-Man: Web Warriors will take Peter Parker through various parallel worlds, including one where he meets Miles Morales, his half-Hispanic, half-black counterpart, voiced by Glover. The season premieres Sunday (9 a.m. ET/PT), and the “Spider-Verse” arc of episodes airs next year.

In 2011, Miles was introduced to comic-book readers in Marvel Comics’ Ultimate Spider-Man series by Brian Michael Bendis, after the writer saw Glover’s Twitter campaign to play Spidey in a live-action movie — and witnessed Glover dressed up in Spidey pajamas on the NBC sitcom Community.

“I don’t think it’s hit me necessarily yet how big of a deal that is,” Glover, 30, says. “I’m very grateful for that, and it’s cool to read the comic now.”

The cartoon Miles is very close to the comic-book version: The 13-year-old is still getting used to being a superhero when he meets the dimension-hopping Peter (Drake Bell), who’s trying to stop his old nemesis the Green Goblin from collecting the DNA of various Spider-Men — from Spider-Man Noir to the porcine hero Spider-Ham — for nefarious reasons.

It’s an emotional moment for Miles, though, because in his world, Peter is dead.

“He meets someone who is his hero, and that comes across completely in Donald’s performance,” says Stephen Wacker, a former Spider-Man editor at Marvel Comics who’s now vice president of Marvel Television’s animation division. “He’s got a real warmth that suits the character really, really well.

“If you’ve read Miles Morales comics, Donald’s voice nails what you’ve been reading.”

Miles is also a character cut from the exact same cloth as the original Spidey, Wacker adds. “He’s a kid you can root for, who you want good things for, who suffered some loss of his own, and we’re seeing him come to terms with his new powers and how to use them.”

Miles is a high school student who tries to balance a family life with moonlighting as Spider-Man, Glover says, “and it’s a lot of pressure for a kid to be yourself and have all this responsibility. Miles is really brave, and that’s a cool attribute to have when you’re that young.

“I admire anybody who allows themselves to be themselves. Especially a kid.”

Glover, who has a high voice, didn’t have to pitch it up too much to play a teenager with a heap of youthful optimism. Actually, there wasn’t a whole lot of pretending to be someone else needed.

“That’s the great part about the Spider-Man costume: He can be anybody,” Glover says. “Spider-Man could be a girl. Spider-Man could be an old man. You don’t know. So I just tried to be as me as possible, because you’re always just going to bring it back to yourself when you watch the show.”

Kids come up to Glover at his Childish Gambino concerts asking him to sign their Miles Morales comics. The actor can relate since he, too, was a Spider-fan from way back.

“I never liked Superman that much, because I was like, ‘Yo, this dude can’t die. It’s too easy,’” Glover says. “Batman is pretty fly. He’s a close second, just because he doesn’t really have powers. He’s just a justice-driven vigilante.

“Spider-Man is the best because you just don’t know who he is, and he’s funny and he’s poor. I understand Spider-Man a lot on that level. He’s just trying to make it.”

Glover still gets a kick out of how much has come from one comment about wanting to don tights and be Spider-Man. Voicing Miles is not exactly the same thing, he says, “but it’s pretty good. I’m still holding out, though.

“I still have hopes to do something like that one day. I don’t look at this as second place. Spider-Man, he’s such an icon — you have to do something with him.”

11859: USPS Amazing Bullshit.

If the USPS is in a financial crisis, why is the organization running a pricey promotion with a blockbuster movie?

10290: The Amazing Mexican Spider-Man.

Cultural Moment in The Amazing Spider-Man: Peter Parker’s inspiration for the Spider-Man mask was a poster for a Mexican wrestler.

9994: Super Diversity.

From The New York Daily News…

Marvel Comics brings together two special versions of Spider-Man, including one who is dead ringer for A-Rod

Common villain to bring the two heroes from different alternate realities together

By Ethan Sacks / New York Daily News

Comic book geeks’ Spider senses are tingling.

To celebrate the 50th anniversary of Spider-Man, Marvel Comics is bringing together two versions of the iconic character — one who is white and one who’s a dead ringer for A-Rod — in a mashup that pays homage to everyday New York.

A new five issue mini-series, “Spider-Men,” available starting in July, uses a common villain to bring the two heroes from different alternate realities.

“For the 50th anniversary of Spider-Man, what everyone was looking for was a Spider-Man story that mattered,” says series writer Brian Bendis. “Well, here you go.”

When Marvel introduced Miles Morales — a half-black, half-Latino teen — as the new Spider-Man in one of its comic lines last year, it made national headlines. Critics grumbled it was a character who would never make it alongside the original Spider-Man known to generations of fans since he was created by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko in 1962.

But Morales got a key stamp of approval from Lee. “Doing our bit to try to make our nation, and the world, color blind is definitely the right thing,” the comic book legend told The News.

Bendis agreed. “Someone had once said to me, ‘When I was a kid, I could only play Spider-Man, I couldn’t play Batman or Superman because my friends would say you’re not the same color, but I could play Spider-Man because when I fantasized about Spider-Man, he looked like me under the mask.’

“That was a big inspiration.”

Yet, despite the uncanny resemblance to the Yankees third baseman, Marvel Comics spokesman Arune Singh said “there is no A-Rod connection whatsoever.”

9120: Spider-Man Is A Black Man.

From USA TODAY…

The new Spider-Man: Half-black, all hero

By Brian Truitt, USA TODAY

We have an African-American president, so why not an African-American Spider-Man, too?

Revealed in Marvel Comics’ Ultimate Fallout Issue 4, out Wednesday, the new Spider-Man in the Ultimate universe is a half-black, half-Hispanic teen named Miles Morales. He takes over the gig held by Peter Parker, who was killed in Ultimate Spider-Man Issue 160 in June.

In his first appearance, he simply breaks up a fight. But readers will learn the true origin of Morales and how he became the new Spider-Man when Ultimate Spider-Man relaunches in September with a new No. 1 issue.

“The theme is the same: With great power comes great responsibility,” says writer Brian Michael Bendis. “He’s going to learn that. Then he has to figure out what that means.”

The new Ultimate Spider-Man series, as well as Wednesday’s Ultimate Fallout issue, will be available digitally the same day as in stores.

In the regular Marvel Universe, Peter Parker will still be the same web-swinging Spidey as he has been since his first appearance in 1962. But in the Ultimate line, launched in 2000 to tell contemporary stories, he received a new origin and a reimagined supporting cast that paralleled the Spidey in regular Marvel continuity.

Morales’ journey will be a similar vehicle for today’s fans, says Marvel’s editor in chief, Axel Alonso.

“What you have is a Spider-Man for the 21st century who’s reflective of our culture and diversity. We think that readers will fall in love with Miles Morales the same way they fell in love with Peter Parker.”

In addition to an alliterative name, Miles has a connection to his predecessor in how he received his powers. But he will have different abilities, too. Supporting characters such as Peter’s Aunt May and Gwen Stacy also will give Miles nuggets of wisdom to help his transition from young kid to New York City superhero.

Italian artist Sara Pichelli, who was integral in designing the new Spider-Man’s look, says, “Maybe sooner or later a black or gay — or both — hero will be considered something absolutely normal.”