Word: superheroics
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...credibility. And Hellboy, who is back this summer for a sequel, is hardly your standard man in tights. He smokes cigars, drinks Red Bull and collects kittens. "Kids aren't kids anymore," says Hellboy creator Mike Mignola. "They're so exposed to everything. They wouldn't accept really simplistic superheroes." It's likely that a superhero movie like Watchmen or The Dark Knight couldn't be appreciated by audiences without the simpler fare that came before it. You can't deconstruct the superhero until someone has constructed him, rubber nipples and all. "Watchmen is thick and complicated and violent...
...creations of oddball loners like Millar scribbling at drafting tables have also become the movie industry's most reliable development tool. Thanks to the box-office success of A-list superheroes like Spider-Man and the X-Men, Hollywood's appetite for comics-fueled material is insatiable. Titles from the darker corners of the genre, including gritty graphic novels like Wanted and Alan Moore's watershed deconstructivist superhero tome Watchmen are getting the big-screen makeover. Stories and characters first written for an audience of a few hundred thousand geeks at most are reaching, at the box office...
...Sixth Sense (1999) was a triumph of O. Henry-suspense and also an essay on the solitude of grief. Unbreakable (2000), a comic-book superhero battle told at an art-film tempo, was nearly as good and had another terrific, weighed-down performance by Willis. Signs (2002) was a letdown on the alien-invasion front, but it had Mel Gibson playing his own form of domestic desolation. The Village (2004), a sort of Amish retelling of Shirley Jackson's The Lottery, was the first of his films to test - and break - the viewer's patience. And The Lady...
Some claim the act of knuckle-bumping began in the 1970s with NBA players like Baltimore Bullets guard Fred Carter. Others claim the fist bump's national debut occurred off the court, citing the Wonder Twins, minor characters in the 1970s Hanna-Barbera superhero cartoon The Superfriends, who famously touched knuckles and cried "Wonder Twin powers, activate!' before morphing into animals or ice sculptures. One might also credit germaphobics for the fist bump's popularity. Deal or No Deal host Howie Mandel reportedly adopted the gesture as a friendly way to avoid his contestants' germs...
...problem. He broke with his party on climate change after the 2000 election, when the Republican mainstream, including Bush, was still in full-blown denial mode. Pestered during the New Hampshire primary by a global warming activist who called himself Captain Climate and dressed in a red cape and superhero tights, McCain soon began holding hearings on climate science and traveling to the Arctic to see the damage for himself. "It was a period of real self-education, and John came away convinced," says Lieberman. McCain and Lieberman co-authored the Climate Stewardship Act of 2003, the first serious attempt...