Word: superheroism
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...would recommend it to a friend; 70% said 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...
...probably the most repeated line from the movie Spider-Man: Peter Parker's ailing Aunt May asks her doting nephew not to work so hard. After all, she reminds him, "you're not Superman." The joke is on her, because we know that her nephew is in fact a superhero; but it's also on us, because she has pinpointed what we like about not only Spider-Man and his geeky-sweet alter ego Peter, but most of the masked marvels we've followed from the comics to the screen. We don't want our superheroes to be invulnerable Supermen...
...scene; New Yorkers refusing to be terrorized by the Green Goblin sound a note of Let's-Roll-ism. (The American flag filling the screen in the final moments, on the other hand, is as subtle as a black-widow bite.) It might be off-putting, seeing a superhero saving New York, reminding us that there was no one to catch those airliners in his supertensile webbing last year. But Spider-Man's flawed hero fits naturally into a flawed world, where sometimes the best intentions and superdefenses fall tragically short...
...Superman's 64-year journey from Man of Steel to Buffy Boy is just part of the job description. Pop culture changes superheroes to fit the times like a jaded 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...
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...