Spider-Man meets ... Barack Obama?

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Barack Obama gets treated like Superman but he apparently hangs with Spider-Man.

Marvel Comics just announced that issue No. 583 of ‘The Amazing Spider-Man’ will hit the stands on Jan. 14 with two different covers, one of them a special Inauguration Day edition that shows the wallcrawler with the president-elect. Here’s a look:

It’s been quite the fanboy election. There was talk that Obama is a devotee of ‘Conan the Barbarian’ and other Marvel Comics, and then he was also the star of a graphic-novel biography that was surprisingly poignant and well-executed. There’s also that memorable portrait of him by comic superstar Alex Ross that you can see below.

Marvel Comics executives said it was a natural to put the 44th president in a heroic context.

“When we heard that President-Elect Obama is a collector of Spider-Man comics, we knew that these two historic figures had to meet in our comics’ Marvel Universe,” says Marvel’s Editor-in-Chief Joe Quesada. “Historic moments such as this one can be reflected in our comics because the Marvel Universe is set in the real world. A Spider-Man fan moving into the Oval Office is an event that must be commemorated in the pages of ‘Amazing Spider-Man.’”

There’s plenty of presidential history in the comics, such as the time that JFK appeared in the pages of Superman (the issue was written and drawn before Kennedy’s 1963 assassination but actually hit stands after that dark day in Dallas) and Richard Nixon’s 1972 cameos in ‘The Fantastic Four’ and in ‘The Incredible Hulk.’

-- Geoff Boucher

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