Not Comics: Todd VanDerWerff On A Unifying Theory For This Century’s Big Superhero Films
The writer Todd VanDerWerff looks at modern superhero movies as a way for culture to replay 9/11 under safe or even advantageous terms. I assume this is a part of their appeal in general, just as the monster movies of the '50s and '60s had an element of nuclear bomb horror and the original Superman movie can be seen as a reaction to 1970s masculinity and disappointing authority figures. Those movies are such large enterprises that I wonder if they aren't more the other way around, and that the way we interpret violence now isn't just wrapped up in 9/11 imagery for better or for worse. I'm not sure that comics ever recovered from the effect of having its dramatic levels recalibrated after the towers fell.
