Word: marvels
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...have that option - they're stuck in a time warp, reliving that awful day again and again. They make it safe for the rest of us to go downtown and breathe the air and wonder at the cool efficiency of the cleanup effort. "It's amazing," we marvel to ourselves. "It's like a clean slate." The workers are carrying our demons for us, having removed them from our sight. They'll struggle to exorcise their memories of glass and steel and gore for longer than most of us can imagine. And for that alone, we owe these...
...early 1960s, when Marvel Comics was introducing Spider-Man, X-Men and The Fantastic Four, the cold war had complicated America's optimism. Marvel's characters embodied the atom angst of the day: the Fantastic Four, Spider-Man and the Hulk owed their powers to radiation. (In the movie, the radioactive spider that bit Peter Parker is now bioengineered, perfect for the age of anthrax and cloning.) More important, Marvel characters had psychology. They were conflicted and were driven, like Peter Parker, by guilt (Peter is haunted by having inadvertently caused his uncle's death) rather than simple revenge...
...other superheroes at other companies didn't seem to have too much vulnerability," says Stan Lee, who created Spider-Man at Marvel with artist Steve Ditko. "Peter had money troubles. He wasn't that popular with girls. Getting a date was a big deal with him." If Superman is a hero who dresses up as one of us, Spider-Man is one of us, dressed up as a hero. Says Jeff Ayers, manager of New York City's Forbidden Planet comics store: "Batman's a millionaire, Superman's an alien, and Wonder Woman's an Amazon goddess. Most superheroes...
...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...
...FANTASTIC FOUR," ABOUT A SQUABBLING, DYSFUNCTIONAL SUPERHERO TEAM, BEGINS MARVEL'S REINVIGORATION OF COMICS...