There are a couple of things that need to be said to put this statement, and your excerpt regarding the French bistro in Ohio that is losing business (apparently because of the France's war stance), into perspective.

First, the whole issue of war-related boycotting was started by peace activists in Europe, including in France. Those boycotts had an identical adverse economic impact on the hapless European business owners who were selling overtly American products-- including McDonald's franchise owners. The boycotts against "French" products in the U.S. occurred as a reactionary response many weeks later--after the French Government openly undermined the U.S.-led war effort. This doesn't make the counter-boycott right, but those are the facts.

What I'm getting at is that I think it would be more accurate to have said that any boycott in this instance probably hurt the boycotter's countrymen far more than it did any of the governments involved.

Your TONY POLLS [May 10] about possible conflicts of interest when a critic simultaneously writes for a major publisher reminded me of a situation involving some of Marvel's own flagship titles as well, in which personal biases were apparently written in, but were not made identified as such by the writers.

For example:

In AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #36, which dealt with 9-11, I recall a panel in which J. Michael Straczynski seemed to suggest that the US was to blame for the attacks. He asked a "what should we tell our children" question and responded that "perhaps we tell them that we are sorry. Sorry that we could not deliver unto them the world we wished them to have. That our eagerness to shout is not the equal of our willingness to listen. That the burdens of the distant people are the responsibility of all men and women of conscience, or their burdens will one day become our tragedy."

I was astonished when I came upon this, since, at one point, I think he seemed to be giving a critique against people who made similar statements, such as Pat Robertson, and then, Straczynski went along and made a similar suggestion himself which was just as damaging. Just when he had the chance to at least impress the readers on a moral level, he goes and cancels it out by talking out of both sides of his mouth.

Then there's the Marvel Knights rendition of CAPTAIN AMERICA, which you wrote about last February in your TONY'S ONLINE TIPS at Perpetual Comics. The writer, John Ney Reiber, implied that the US was the aggressor against the enemy regimes that had attacked it, and that the terrorists were simply seeking revenge for the United States' supposed hostility, rather than targeting and murdering innocent civilians out of racism. Not only did Cap not condemn the actions of the terrorist leader Al-Tariq, but he also revealed his secret ID, supposedly because it would keep any other terrorists from targeting innocent US citizens and make them want to come after him alone.

To say the least, it's simply devastating that Marvel would allow its writers to inject some loathsome biases into the pages of its most beloved mainstream characters, all without even making their standings clear to the reader in the first place. It's one thing for a writer to have a bias in favor of the comics company, but it's another to have one that's against the better interests of democratic countries.

In a case like this, one could argue that it's a conflict of interest between the writers and the readers.