Re: This pretty much ends all possibility of debate regarding Quesada's motivations:
Okay, yeah. That was quite ill spoken on Quesada's part. What the hell?
But... he's talking about statements he makes, not the content of comics. Add that to the fact that there there's no evidence he wrote the joke under discussion, that there are plenty of other people who could have written that line -- not least of whom is the writer -- and I'll stick to my statement that there's no reason the line needs to be anything more than a harmless joke, no different than the "yellow spandex" line from the X-Men movie.