Word: superheroics
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...second time in a year a hit movie has been made from a non-superhero comicbook. Topping box-office grosses this past weekend, "From Hell," starring Johnny Depp and Heather Graham, directed by the Hughes brothers follows the summer's indy-hit, "Ghost World." But unlike "Ghost World," in which the comicbook's creator, Dan Clowes, extensively participated in the movie, the authors of "From Hell," Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell, had little to do with the film. The difference shows...
...have even drafted them into war, as when Captain America famously punched out Hitler. And as TV horned in on the comics audience, its superheroes reflected our moods in war and peace. The 1950s had its straight-arrow Superman; the 1960s, a campy Batman. After Vietnam, we saw comforting images of super-Americans (Wonder Woman, the Bionic Man and Woman); after the cold war, postmodern parodies (Space Ghost). Call it coincidence or prescience, but a new generation of prime-time superhero is arriving for a new decade and a new war. Smallville (the WB, Tuesdays...
Like Smallville, director Barry Sonnenfeld's parody The Tick bets that old-fashioned superhero tales will not, so to speak, fly today. The dim-bulb hero (Patrick Warburton, Seinfeld's Puddy) is a font of cockeyed metaphors ("I will spread my buttery justice over your every nook and cranny!"), and in the pilot he fights a Soviet robot built in 1979 to kill Jimmy Carter, as if to admit that the very idea of the infallible superhero is decades outdated. Based on Ben Edlund's cult comic, this is exactly the kind of highly ironic, hero-puncturing entertainment that...
Mainstream publishers Marvel and DC may feel the impact most of all. They are both located in New York, but that's not the reason why. They both specialize in a kind of entertainment, superhero books, that suddenly seems off-key. Who can now abide the fantasy of an evil madman's nefarious plot to kill thousands of people being foiled by a muscle-bound troglodyte? This question compelled Warner Brothers to indefinitely postpone the release of the Arnold Schwarzenegger movie "Collateral Damage." Superhero publishers don't really have that option since nearly all of their product follows this premise...
...industry has hardly curled up into a ball. Like many other entertainment companies, comicbooks are rushing to provide special benefit issues. Marvel will likely be the first when it publishes "Heroes," on October 17. Sub-titled "The World's Greatest Superhero Creators Honoring the World's Greatest Heroes," it will be a 64-page posterbook of art depicting the heroics of firemen, EMS rescuers and ordinary citizens. Then later in December Marvel will release "Moment of Silence," a wordless comic based on actual stories from the disaster. DC, Darkhorse, Image and Oni will collaborate on a benefit book titled "September...