DEFENDERS #25: The Sons of the Serpent backer is... Pennyworth!

[starwolf_oakley]

The lead up to DEFENDERS #25 had the Defenders (and guest star Luke Cage) battling the Sons of the Serpent, Marvel's go-to white supremacist group. Nighthawk has found out who has secretly been funding the group.



Six and 1/2 pages of 22 page story.



"Hey, this office looks familiar... oh, darn."



What a way to reveal your secret identity to your teammates.



So, the guy funding the white powers group is... wait, what?



...Wait, what?
Wasn't there something similar to this in GREEN ARROW #125-126 when Connor Hawke was the main character?



Uh... Why is *Daredevil* surprised?



Some extra info. J.C. Pennyworth was originally in DEFENDERS #15 in a story written by Len Wein. Wein would create Lucius Fox, who is similar to Pennyworth aside than embezzling money from his boss to run a white supremacist organization, in BATMAN #307 a few years later.

There is a two-page spread of the Defenders fighting the Sons of the Serpent. It is a very one-sided fight. Then...





Suggested tags:
char: daredevil/matt murdock, char: nighthawk/kyle richmond, char: power man/luke cage
char: hulk/bruce banner, char: son of satan/damion hellstrom, char: Valkyrie/barbara norris, char: yellowjacket/hank pym, creator: steve gerber, creator: sal bucema
title: defenders

Comments

[btravage]

Ha ha "oreo". Too bad he wasn't fat and then he could have been called "doublestuff"

[psychopathicus_rex]

I could be wrong, but I think that actually IS a term in use to denote someone who is 'white on the inside'.

[cricharddavies]

You're not wrong. The same thinking gets people called things like "banana" (Asian) and "apple" (Native American).

[psychopathicus_rex]

'Apple'? As in 'red on the outside, white on the inside'? But some apples are orange or yellow - or, for that matter, GREEN. It strikes me as an awfully iffy metaphor. (For that matter, what do they call someone who's 'red' both outside and in - a cherry?)

[cricharddavies]

And there are Oreos that have chocolate flavored filling. The whole thing is stupid, so if you're actually expecting reason and consistency from it, you're nuts.

[psychopathicus_rex]

While you have a point, of course, comparing Oreos to apples doesn't really work. True, there are a million different varieties of Oreos nowadays, but there is one single variety that everyone automatically THINKS of when they think of an Oreo, and that's the variety with the white filling. That was the original, and all the other types are variations of it. (There's even a song about it - 'The White Stuff'. This is true; I'm not making it up.) Apples, on the other hand, have a great deal of natural color variation, hundreds if not thousands of different varieties, including types that differ from country to country - basically, everybody has a different mental picture of what color an apple is. (Mine is a sort of yellowish color.) So while of COURSE the whole thing is stupid, the 'apples' metaphor strikes me as a good deal stupider than the 'Oreos' one.

[buttler]

I just love that Marvel's formerly criminal Batman clone has a guy named Pennysworth working for him. A little on the nose, don't you think?

[psychopathicus_rex]

This is rather interesting, really - Pennysworth's philosophy, while obviously deeply flawed and amoral, is an unusual one for someone in his position to take - and, moreover, one with a disturbing amount of truth to it. What he's saying, basically, is 'why should I feel kinship with all those other people who happen to share my skin color? They've got nothing to do with me, personally - they're just people'. And technically speaking, of course, he's RIGHT - they DO have nothing to do with him, and they ARE just people. If you look beyond background and skin color, he has no reason whatsoever to feel kinship with them.
So basically, he's not wrong in his attitude towards his own race, he's wrong in his attitude towards PEOPLE, in general. If you take a color-blind look at the situation, that still leaves you with the fact that civil war would kill millions of people, of ALL races. It's kind of stripping things down to the essentials - we assume he's wrong about TWO things, whereas he's really only wrong about one, but that second one's the kicker. It's really an interesting way of looking at things.