Since Unfortunate Implications require citation and I can't find any online sources. Just gonna leave this here for now.
Unfortunate Implications: Deliberately averted with Infidel. While discussing the character with Alex Ross, Kurt Busiek rejected the idea of making him Arabic because they had not yet had a Middle-Eastern hero and he felt it was better for the first character of a particular race to be a hero so it wouldn't be offensive. They already had established black heroes, though, so they felt it was safe to make Infidel black. Early concept art of Infidel had Islam's star and crescent thing as his symbol, but the final design was a more abstract "superheroey" symbol.
Since Unfortunate Implications require citation and I can't find any online sources. Just gonna leave this here for now.
- Unfortunate Implications: Deliberately averted with Infidel. While discussing the character with Alex Ross, Kurt Busiek rejected the idea of making him Arabic because they had not yet had a Middle-Eastern hero and he felt it was better for the first character of a particular race to be a hero so it wouldn't be offensive. They already had established black heroes, though, so they felt it was safe to make Infidel black. Early concept art of Infidel had Islam's star and crescent thing as his symbol, but the final design was a more abstract "superheroey" symbol.
You fell victim to one of the classic blunders!