Marvel Entertainment Group Inc., the comic book giant, has agreed to stop depicting its superheroes as smokers in a line of company-sponsored trading cards after a 7-year-old boy complained to the New England Journal of Medicine.
In a handwritten letter published in the prestigious medical journal, Sammy Blum of Houston, Texas, said he found that five of the 100 Marvel Masterpieces cards he bought showed characters smoking."Some of them were villains and some were heros (sic)," the boy wrote. "Why do they make cards for kids that show people smoking?"
The question came following research showing that the cartoon character "Joe Camel," who promotes Camel cigarettes, is as recognizable to children as the Walt Disney Mickey Mouse character.
Critics of the tobacco industry say that role models who smoke cigarettes or cigars give children the false impression that smoking is part of a healthy, glamorous lifestyle.
One Marvel card shows a long-haired superhero, "John Blaze", calmly firing a rifle from his motorcycle, a lit cigarette dangling from his mouth.
Another shows hard-bitten combat veteran "Nick Fury" with a burning cigar as he prepares to aim a gun.
In a letter responding to Sammy Blum's complaint, Marvel Entertainment's Terry Stewart said the boy's letter has prompted Marvel "to omit smoking materials from all future Marvel trading cards."
He did not say whether the ban would be extended to Marvel comic books, where at least one other superhero is known to smoke.
Stewart said in his letter that "no Marvel trading card was ever intended to suggest approbation of smoking. We are simply storytellers, and we lend credibility to our characters by placing them in dramatic situations where their behavior mirrors behavior found in our society."
That includes showing characters who "demonstrate foibles and frailties. . . . We present our characters warts and all," he said.
The cards are distributed by SkyBox International, which also produces several other lines of trading cards.