Word: comical
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Though Maguire says he never read the comic book until he got the part, he saw in the character "a really good-hearted, typical underdog who I could certainly relate to." Like Peter Parker, Maguire comes from a broken home. After his parents' divorce when he was 2, he spent his childhood being shuttled up and down the West Coast, from parent to parent, school to school. His mother encouraged her angry, rebellious son to study acting, and he soon began appearing in one-line parts on sitcoms. After ninth grade, he dropped out of school to become an actor...
...Shakespeare repertory troupe trying to jazz up Hamlet: Batman went from dark avenger to straight arrow to campy TV star and back to dark avenger. So if every generation needs to remake its screen superheroes in its own image, why not just replace them with new ones? Partly because comic books aren't supplying them. After Marvel deconstructed the superhero, the comics' top talents started creating more personal, nonsuperheroic work, from R. Crumb's counterculture Zap Comics to Art Spiegelman's Holocaust story Maus to the haunting graphic novels of Chris Ware and Daniel Clowes...
Some of these literary, niche comics have inspired movies: last year's From Hell and Ghost World, this summer's The Road to Perdition. But they weren't introducing new men in tights to the mass consciousness. And with few exceptions, superhero comics became cartoon hackwork. "With Steve Ditko, Spider-Man had these sexual undertones to it that read as being the work of a singular artist," says Clowes. Today's successors, he says, are "just a 10th-generation regurgitation of the same stuff over and over." The comic crowd became older, insular and cultish while kids turned to video...
...video-game characters are, literally, dumb: they have no animating intelligence except what the player provides, and so--as in last year's Tomb Raider--their superpowers don't help in lifting heavy movie narratives. Instead, our decades-old comic heroes continue to move through the pop-culture cosmos--Ang Lee's The Hulk comes out next year--like the constellations, the movie shows of old in which people once inscribed the stories of their own superheroes. Then, as now, the lights would go dark, and people would gather round for stories they never got tired...
...blow up civilians on a bus, drive tanks through refugee camps, molest children or plot to destroy America," wrote a relieved Virginian. "I'm content to focus on events that take place a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away." Agreed a New Yorker: "A little comic relief is frequently necessary for survival, when we consider the times we live in." And a North Carolina teen asked, "Can't this crazy world learn a thing or two from that sagacious Jedi master, Yoda...