Spider-Man Attacks Eric Gill Statue in London, Outside The BBC

An unnamed man wearing a Spider-Man mask has come down from a vigil since 4 am this morning, outside BBC’s Broadcasting House in Fitzrovia, London. He had been using a hammer to hit a statue carved by the late sculptor Eric Gill of Prospero and Ariel from Shakespeare’s play The Tempest, which has stood outside the radio broadcasting centre since the 1930s. It’s not the first time that the statue has been damaged, after it was revealed that Gill wrote in his diaries that he had sexually abused his daughters. The graffiti written around the statue targets the BBC for having employed abusers such as Jimmy Savile, Gary Glitter and Rolf Harris.

Spider-Man is a famous enactor of street vigilante justice in Marvel’s comic books, and this is one of many examples of people using superhero imagery when committing such acts of justice in their eyes. It may have been the Fathers 4 Justice group who brought this to the mass media’s attention for the first time, dressing as superheroes and holding protest vigils demanding greater parental rights for fathers. But since the explosion of superhero coverage across the media in the last twenty-five years, such protest cosplay has become more common. Anonymous and the Occupy movements used V for Vendetta masks, as designed by David Lloyd, a lot, and that still remains popular as a protest mask today. Women’s Marches, Black Lives Matter protests and crowds protesting against the governments in Chile and Hong Kong also started to use superhero imagery to get attention and demonstrate thems of justice and self-agency.

Gill, whose work appears across London including Westminster Cathedral died in 1940, but a 1989 biography including his confessional diary entries, and recently the claims and the links to the statue, were brought to the fore after a number of other scandals.  The statue, which features a young named male was damaged by other protestors last year and was in the process of being repaired.