Larry, this is funny, "Captain Euro" superhero! Have you heard about the proposed comic series yet? The comic strips are said to appear next month throughout Europe.
Portions from Dec. 14th Wall Street Journal, pg. 1:
"Enter Captain Euro, Unlikely New Face Of a United Europe ---
Comic-Strip Unifier Will Teach Kids About the New Money, If Enemies Don't Zap Him"
London - When Captain Euro agreed to defend Europe from evil and "uphold the values of the Union," he expected to encounter perils.
Yet what Captain Euro didn't expect were the blows from people like Sir Teddy Taylor, a member of British Parliament. "He should be killed off," Mr. Taylor says. "I think he's dangerous."
Captain Euro was supposed to be the new face of Europe - the region's first true superhero and defender of the common currency. Launched this past summer on a Web site, the coifed-crusader will start appearing in comic strips throughout Europe next month. His superhuman task is to teach kids about the euro, make the European Union exciting and promote a common identity for a continent with many different languages and traditions.
But a group of politicians and human rights groups are trying to foil his plans. Mostly Euroskeptics opposed to the EU, the groups charge that Captain Euro is a dangerous piece of government propaganda and a waste of taxpayers' money. Moreover, they say the stories are racist, since all villains are swarthy, while Captain Euro and his pals are distinctly Aryan.
Mr. Taylor, a Tory member of the British Parliament, calls the hero "a silly publicity stunt that should be dumped immediately." The British antifacist magazine Searchlight, better known for monitoring Nazi groups world-wide, singled out Captain Euro as "amazingly racist and xenophobic," while the Belgian left-wing publication Spectre labeled it "banal, racist and just plain weird." Jonas Sjostedt, a Swedish member of the European Parliament, calls it vulger and refuses to show it to his eight-year-old daughter.
He was born of the bureaucracy of Brussels: Mr. De Santis spend more than a year studying the European "identity" for the European Parliament only to determine "there is none." So, he proposed creating a "European character" or mascot. Parliament debated the issue for months but couldn't make a decision. Eventually, Mr. De Santis gave up and decided to create it himself.
He turned to America for inspiration and settled on a superhero. Captain America, after all, made his debut in the months before World War II and helped bolster the contry's confidence. But Mr. De Santis wanted his mascot to be distinctly European. Thus Captain Euro doesn't have any superpowers and never uses violence, preferring to pummel his archenemies with "logic, language skills and his expertise in culture." According to the story line, the Captain is a former paleontologist who one day discovered a sarcophagus holding the "Spirit of Europe." (It's yellow, has two heads and is covered in cobwebs.) He formed a group called Yellow Star to "uphold the values of the Union, and set up headquarters in the space-age Atomium building in Brussels. His cohorts include a shapely Scandanavian sidekick, Europa; Helen, a miltilingual gymnast; Erik, a Nordic-looking engineer; and Marcus, a humanoid tech-whiz.
Cheers,
banco$ |
