Word: comic-book
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After seeing the box-office receipts for Spider-Man and reading about superheroes who have made the leap from the pages of comic books to the big screen [BLOCKBUSTER SUMMER, May 20], I wonder if comic-book readers will finally get some respect. Will the public thank us comic-book fans for keeping these characters in print and alive for decades? What would the film world be like if George Lucas and young directors like Kevin Smith hadn't been inspired by comics growing up? I am grateful to anyone who has ever written or drawn a comic book...
...they would pay to see it again. (You usually have to bomb Baghdad to get that kind of approval ratings.) People have always liked Spider-Man: compared with the ultrasquare alien Superman and the brooding millionaire Batman, Spidey's an accidental superhero, a geeky and self-doubting teen, a comic-book character who seems a lot like a comic-book reader. Forty years after Spider-Man's birth, Marvel is still selling four different monthly Spider-Man titles that together add up to about 500,000 copies. "Everybody identifies with him," says Amy Pascal, chairwoman of Sony's Columbia Pictures...
...Toyota Camrys were driven off the lot that first week. But movies, as our proudest and most exciting cultural export, are monitored by Americans the way they used to watch the NASDAQ. There's a kind of pride that we can blow $115 million in one weekend on a comic-book movie; Spider-Man was our May Day. And if $115 million of fun was going on in one weekend, people want to be at the party...
...crossbreeding of Spider-Man with new film technology--part of Marvel Comics' adventure in big-budget movies, which began with the hit Blade and X-Men entries--seems a natural. On the printed page, comic-book action hero is an oxymoron; a man can fly only in the reader's complicitous mind. Films make the fantastic real; they are, after all, called motion pictures. In the new Spider-Man, our friendly neighborhood arachno-human can execute some cool moves as he trapezes above New York City. In these aerial scenes (a combination of acrobatic stunt work and digital derring...
Figuring out which superheroes have this kind of appeal gets marginally tougher. A lot of heroes are already popular with the comic-book crowd. But some heroes have that all-important mass appeal. What makes, say, Wolverine infinitely more attractive than Mr. Fantastic? I posed this question to a few diehard fans and they pretty much focused on the samething: the superpower. It has to be spectacular. What guy doesn’t want rip-roaring brawn, the ability to heal himself and 12-inch retractableclaws? On the other hand, Mr. Fantastic can-what, stretch himself...