Marvel Didn’t Do It, Fake Defenders Image Implies Jessica Jones As Evil Jew

Just as Marvel is breaking out the champagne with Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2’s box office returns, another incendiary image has been making the rounds, this one associated with their upcoming Netflix series, The Defenders. The image at a quick glance is the rundown of four of the show’s leads, but while three of the four characters have their superhero names behind them, the fourth, behind Jessica Jones is the word Jew. Or if you want to go for the greater stretch, as you read down from the Daredevil line to Jessica and Luke’s, it reads as Evil Jew Power Man:

Coming so closely on the heels of the recent controversy where Indonesian artist Ardian Syaf was found to have been adding anti-Christian and ant-Jewish messages under the editors noses, it doesn’t look so good. In particular one frame where Jewish character Kitty Pryde is herself placed in front of a storefront reading, “Jew”. So Twitter and Facebook jumped on board lambasting Marvel for another round of being either negligent in what their creative departments are putting out or questioning if there’s some darker motive going on.

But then as the investigations continued, it turned out to have NOT come from Marvel, but rather from a Facebook fan page dedicated to the series, who themselves had just shared the image that they’d found at random online (and not taking a moment to really look at it). The fan page (who is unaffiliated with Marvel) has since posted an apology:

One thing to be said about the fan page, which is largely a curated set of trailers, stories, and information about the upcoming show. However at first glance, unless you’re looking for the little blue “official” checkmark, it looks like it could be an official page (and it has more than 26,000 likes). While that’s only 1/10th of what the official page has, it’s easy enough to mistake one from the other. Plus the official one really does look like a grunge-rock band’s page:

The Fan Page

The Official Page

When pages like this get news or information wrong, or doesn’t cite if something is fan-created or an official studio release, it brings up the specter of fake news, highlighting that even when a mistake is made in publishing something, it more often than not is assumed to be true with only nominal fact-checking.

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