Obama appears in Spider-man comic

For his legions of admirers who think Barack Obama has already achieved super-hero status, further confirmation comes with his appearance alongside Spider-Man, a childhood favourite of the President-elect, in a special issue of the Marvel comic.

The story begins with Spider-Man's alter-ego, Peter Parker, taking photographs of the inauguration ceremony outside the White House. Suddenly spotting two identical Obamas, he decides "the future president's gonna need Spider-Man" and springs into action, using basketball, the President-elect's favourite sport, to determine the real Obama and knocking out the impostor.

Obama thanks him with a jockish fist-bump, a nod to the furore caused last June when a Fox News presenter, E.D. Hill, was taken off the air after she accused Obama and his wife Michelle of greeting each other with a "terrorist's fist jab".

All of this will thrill the President-to-be, who as a child collected Spider-Man and Conan the Barbarian comic books. Indeed, his Senate website used to have a photo of him posing in front of a Superman statue. However, Joe Quesada, Marvel's editor-in-chief, sees Obama more as an anorak than a super-hero. Of his love of the comics, he says: "How great is that? The commander-in-chief-to-be is actually a nerd-in-chief. It was really, really cool to see that we had a geek in the White House. We're all thrilled with that."