Superhero comics started out with broken ethnic misrepresentation as part of the melting pot and the whitewashing afterwards. A couple of Jewish guys hopped up on Doc Savage novels come up with Superman; a Jewish guy creates The Spirit; Jacob Kurtzberg basically makes Marvel what it is. Names like Romita and Perez don't strike me as particularly whitebread either. And yet it's not till the 60s that we get our first openly Jewish superhero to go along with our first batch of Black supers.

I'm now wondering whether 40s/50s vintage readers just accepted that most of their heroes really were that WASPy or whether they were willing to assume politely whitewashed identities.

I get the impression that the Civil Rights movement of the 60s, happening at the same time as a big boom in comics, really opened up this idea that heroes didn't need to be white; I don't see why not open that possibility up to some of the established heroes, especially as an acknowledgement that the guys behind the pencils aren't necessarily white either. What's changing the guy in the suit going to do, make canon more of a mess? I have problems keeping it straight whether or why Charles Xavier can walk at any given time, I don't necessarily need Spidey to be recognizably Peter Parker from the 60s.