Hollywood's Fascination With The Comic Book Superhero
By Dave Gieber, Fri Dec 9th

Movie production companies and TV have been creating featurelength movies, movie serials and TV shows for years exploitingthe public fascination with Superheroes. But as special effecttechnology and costume designs became better and better,Hollywood kicked it up a notch with feature-length high budgetproductions. Superman, the Movie and the 3 sequels started inthe 1970s and the '90s and beyond brought us Batman, The Hulk,the X-Men and the now infamous Spider-Man, to name a few. Whyall this interest in producing Superhero movies? Big bucks!! Thetwo Spider-Man movies alone have netted about 800 milliondollars apiece in worldwide ticket sales. That's not chickenfeed. This kind of income could not be generated without an avidpublic interest in Superheroes. So if you feel you are alone inyour voracious passion for your own comic book collection, thinkagain.

And now a new twist has been added. Directors, screenplaywriters, and even actors are writing for, of all things, comicbooks now. Big name Hollywood writers are helping to sell morecomics. For example, Joss Whedon, perhaps best known forcreating Buffy the Vampire Slayer, has written stories forMarvel in the series Astonishing X-Men. Back in the 90s, whowould have known that all these fan boys had been hiding in theHollywood woodworks waiting for comics to gain some culturalcredibility?

If you haven't followed some of the comic news of the lastseveral months, Stan "the man" Lee has been fighting hispersonal battle with His life long employer, Marvel Comics. Stanis probably one of the most well known character creators in thecomic book industry. He has characters like Batman, Spider-Manand the Hulk credited to his creative imagination. Seems

Stanhad a contractual agreement with Marvel for 10% of any revenueacquired by Marvel from movies and TV projects centered on Stancharacters. But apparently the high dollar superstructure of thecorporate mind doesn't want to part with all their income. Nowthis is nothing new, but Stan Lee managed to win the first roundfor the little guy. The judge presiding over Stan's case agreedthat Stan should receive his share of the agreed on profits. Nowmaybe Stan will get his share and maybe he won't. Sounds likeMarvel will be appealing the decision. At any rate, if thereweren't big bucks involved in the production of comic bookSuperhero movies, this case would not have been such an issue.

I believe the near future is going to bring many more of myfavorite heroes to the silver screen. I have already started myown DVD collection and as more heroes get transferred from thescreen to round disc, I will continue to increase the size of mycollection. Do you think a DVD superhero collection will beworth as much as a comic book collection in the future? Probablynot, but that won't stop me from building my collection anyway.

About the author:Dave Gieber, a former rocket engineer, has decided to take upresidency on the Internet. He is the owner and editor of severalwebsites, one of which was built around one of his childhoodpassions; www.comic-book-collection-made-easy.com . You canvisit here to keep up to date on the world of comic books andcomic book collecting. Feel free to sign up for my comic bookezine atwww.comic-book-collection-made-easy.com/comic-book-ezine.html