What in our nature explains our enduring fascination for superheroes? Nitin Nair goes in search of the answer.
Just three years
More bad news for the world's poorest. The World Bank expects the cost of staples to remain high for a few more years. "This is not a few weeks, few months thing. It could be two or three years," said World Bank managing director Juan Jose Daboub.
With the dirham linked to a weak US dollar, the price of imported food isn't pretty for consumers in the UAE either. The Emirates Consumer Protection Society predicts a 40 per cent hike in food prices this year unless there's strong government intervention.
But the hardest hit will be those in developing countries. Over the past two years, 100 million people have fallen below the poverty line due to food price rises, said Daboub.
For a minute, let's assume that you grew up without having known the world of superheroes. Would mum have been relieved now that she didn't have to fix you up after little Superman crash-landed while taking off from the front porch?
Would you rather have done something better in those teen summers than watching re-runs of Michael Keaton's Batman? In a boy's dream, you even helped Wonder Woman fight the baddies, or did you?
Think about it. Your childhood wouldn't have been half as much fun, would it? Or your perceptions of good and evil as a child so lucid, so black and white? And then one day, you grew up, your little action figures went into the attic. Just like that.
But it looks like we are nowhere near done with the guys in spandex, if Hollywood has its way. There are more caped crusaders headed our way, in the next 12 months than ever before - Christopher Bale's sophomore Batman release, The Dark Knight is already the most eagerly awaited release this year.
Iron Man is already the biggest surprise at this year's box office - earning more than $100 million in its opening weekend.
Will Smith is a superhero with an attitude problem in Hancock; Snake Eyes and Co. are set to thrill in the GI Joe movie; Marvel roped in the versatile Edward Norton to star in its reboot of The Incredible Hulk; Guillermo Del Toro reprises the Hellboy franchise with Hellboy II; Zack Snyder, the man who helmed the cinematic adaptation of Frank Miller's graphic novel 300 is now wrapping up work on the 2009 release Watchmen, based on the critically acclaimed graphic novel by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons.
The truth is we are such suckers for superheroes. Hollywood certainly thinks so.
Comic book culture
Though comic book culture has a place in many countries, the phenomenon of the superhero comic books was largely an American concept that began with the June 1938 issue of Action Comics - the holy grail of comic books, the inaugural issue of Superman.
"I think the popularity really comes from the blockbuster movies, not the comics themselves," says Dr Gene Kannenberg Jr, the director of comicsresearch.org and chair of the International Comic Arts Festival, an annual conference dedicated to the study of the comic arts from all over the world.
"Superheroes play a limited role in the comic book cultures of other countries (such as Japan, France, Mexico, India, Belgium, Italy or Argentina). Comics in other countries tend to grow around different character types and formats, like Tintin and Asterix in the Franco-Belgian comics world and Tezuka's more Disney-influenced approach to manga in Japan."
But what explains our enduring fascination for these extraordinary characters? Does the squeaky clean Superman symbolise our need for a saviour, someone who can protect us and deliver us from evil? Does the vigilante justice of a character like Batman strike a chord?
Douglas Wolk, author of Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels Work and What They Mean thinks the appeal of superheroes lies in the fact that the good ones are all walking metaphors.
"They're ways to talk about difficult or complicated subjects and be entertaining at the same time," he says in an email interview.
"Spider-Man is a way to talk about the relationship between power and responsibility; the X-Men are ways to talk about otherness and bigotry and puberty; Green Lantern is a way to talk about the action of will in the world... in other words, superhero stories are stories about what mankind can do to rescue and guard itself."
Dr Kanenberg Jr thinks that a powerful draw of superheroes is that these characters can act as wish-fulfilment.
"Rather than wanting to be saved 'by' them, we want to be 'like' them. Like the heroes of myth, superheroes are, to varying degrees, examples of humanity at its noblest.
"The down-trodden can look to heroes as examples of how they could fight back against their oppressors; the already-powerful might believe they can see themselves reflected back from the heroes.
"Film, I think, helps this identification process because of its universal popularity. The fact that these characters are portrayed by popular, attractive actors and actresses also helps a great deal, of course," he adds.
Gotham Chopra, chief creative officer, Virgin Comics has a theory on why we relate so well to the superhero theme.
"Often the dramas and conflicts that superheroes find themselves in are reflective of the same sort of emotional and existential dilemmas that we face both on a personal and social level.
"Like a Spider-Man or Batman, all of us must choose at times between our own personal ambitions or desires and our responsibility to our families or communities. Superheroes just often make it more dramatic!" Chopra said via email.
Mature treatment
Early superhero screen outings were downright campy. George Reeves had a memorable spell as Superman in the 50s TV series The Adventures of Superman, the show best remembered for the cheesy tagline - "Look, up in the sky. It's a bird! It's a plane! It's Superman!"
If you thought introductions like 'Faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive' were silly, the 1966 television series Batman starring Adam West and Burt Ward as the "Dynamic Duo" took 'campiness' to another level.
The shows were peppered with corny dialogues that would make Christian Bale cringe in his batsuit and a narrator who reminded viewers about tuning in at the "same Bat Time, same Bat Channel" for the next episode. Batman fans hated it.
Their dark, brooding vigilante was now mouthing dialogues like, "I never touch spirits, have you some milk?"
But all this changed in the 70s when director Richard Donner roped in Mario Puzo (to write the screenplay) and big tickets stars like Marlon Brando and Gene Hackman to star alongside newcomer Christopher Reeve in 1978's Superman, the movie that revived the superhero genre.
"Big names gave the project enough clout to make its way through the Hollywood system. Later, Jack Nicholson's casting as the Joker was key to getting Tim Burton's Batman made and a great source of its popularity," observes Dr Kannenberg.
Michael Keaton's Batman in 1989 harked back to the superhero's dark origins. This Batman was edgy and ruthless and the fans loved it. But loyalists still accused the Batman and Superman sequels of being campy, the Batman franchise hitting rock bottom with George Clooney's Batman and Robin.
Christopher Nolan's gritty, visceral treatment of Batman Begins was a marked departure from the genre, and brought in adult audiences.
And this month's The Dark Knight is said to be painted in darker tones. If the buzz is to be believed Heath Ledger's take on the Joker will make Jack Nicholson's look like a circus clown.
Earlier, Tobey Maguire's earnest portrayal of Peter Parker's 'with great power comes with responsibility' dilemma was a hit with the audience and the Spider-Man franchise has been among the most successful in movie history.
"The execution of these films has been elevated and as such, more mature audiences are drawn to them. Ultimately characters like Tony Stark in Iron Man or Bruce Wayne in Batman are now characters we can relate to. Their challenges, their conflicts, their conquests are symbols of the ones that we all struggle with," says Chopra.
Dr Kanenberg Jr points out that this "mature treatment" often involves tempering fantasy with an emotional, relatable core.
"Ang Lee's Hulk (starring Eric Bana) seemed to go overboard on the emotion for many fans, who wanted much more 'Hulk smash!' and much less 'Banner overcome father issues!'. The new Incredible Hulk supposedly contains more of the former," he says.
"The audience for superhero comic books is ageing, and stories in other media about them are consequently aiming for older viewers," says Wolk.
A mature audience like that should lap up the film adaptation of Alan Moore's seminal graphic novel Watchmen which tells the story of a bunch of ageing, flawed superheroes who are being hunted down by an unseen enemy in an alternate America in 1985 where superheroes have been outlawed.
Hancock is another film aimed at older audiences. Will Smith plays an ill-tempered, alcoholic superhero, who has to work with a PR consultant to set right his public image.
Cashing in on myths
While Hancock and characters like The Comedian from Watchmen may not be our paragons of virtue, legends and mythology have lent themselves well to the superhero cause.
The pantheon of Indian and Greek gods probably represented the first generation of superheroes. Now Virgin Comics, an enterprise started by Richard Branson, author Deepak Chopra and filmmaker Shekhar Kapur hopes to cash in on these myths.
Virgin has a series of titles that are inspired by stories set in Indian mythology. Ramayan 3392AD is an original take on the Hindu epic as we know it. The central character Ram is capable of teleportation and is fighting Ravan, a demon cyborg in this tale.
"Each of them (Indian and Greek gods) has their own respective powers, personalities, emotions and vulnerabilities. They translate very easily into the archetypal heroes that populate comics. If you ask me, the X-Men's days are numbered!" says Chopra.
Virgin has roped in an eclectic clutch of celebrities to create its comic lines. These include director John Woo, actor Ed Burns, musician Dave Stewart and Jenna Jameson, who is the creator of The Shadow Hunter series of comics.
Closer to home in Dubai, 34-year-old Sajith Ansar and his illustrator friend Shashank Acharya, both graduates of India's National Institute of Design (NID), are working on a graphic novel rooted in Indian mythology but set in the present.
"The central theme of the book revolves around the Hindu concept of salvation. A group of characters from Indian mythology who are still seeking salvation are brought together under certain circumstances to perform a task, something that could be their last shot at salvation," said Ansar, who is the CEO of IdeaSpice, a branding company based in Dubai.
"This is still a self-funded work-in-progress project.
Once the novel is ready, I plan to approach publishers in India."
The future of comics
Dr Kanenberg Jr thinks the themes in superhero comic books run in cycles. "Superman and Batman, for example, began as relatively dark characters (Batman carried a gun; villains just didn't die, they were killed) but their rapid popularity led to 'softening' them to make them less threatening and more marketable.
"The 1980s saw the rise of much, much darker heroes and stories - "grim 'n' gritty" inspired by the publication of Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen. The past 10 or 15 years have seen varying attempts to 'lighten' the approach to heroes," he says.
But not entirely. Marvel Comics has mined current real-world cultural and political situations in its ongoing 'Civil War' storyline which has strong allegorical references to 9/11 and the Patriot Act in the US.
Heroes fought heroes over the idea of government regulation, and Captain America - the leader of the superhero 'resistance' to government control - is finally killed, shot dead by a sniper in a federal courthouse.
What about the bad guys?
To understand how the villains evolved, you need to dwell into the history of the guys who created these superheroes in the 30s.
Most superheroes that we know today - Superman, Batman, Spider-Man, the X-Men, the Fantastic Four, Captain America - were created by the children of Jewish immigrants in America. So it was no surprise that Superman fought the Nazis and socked Hitler during the 30s and 40s.
Over the years, the villains have also changed with the times. "We've seen a general increase in terrorism-based stories since 9/11, but it's not an altogether new development, says Dr Kannenberg Jr.
"In the famous 'Death in the Family' Batman story from 1988-1989, the caped crusader became involved in the politics of global terrorism, he says. Chopra reckons that "as superheroes represent all that we aspire to, super villains will embody those temptations and insecurities that we most fear within ourselves."
Wolk's view is somewhat more pessimistic. "Well, we've had 20 years of dark, grim, unhappy superhero stories, and five or six years of 'terrorists' as all-purpose bad guys. I think if superhero stories are going to survive, they have to make for pleasurable reading first and foremost. We may see more joyful superheroes if we see any at all."
Whatever the future holds, as long as they are not the sort that is sent by a bank to save us from credit card sharks, we'll do alright.
