“The most interesting thing about the popularity of superhero movies is that they are insanely expensive to make, yet they spring from a plebian, populist artform,” The Guardian‘s Joe Queenan wrote two days ago. “Comic books, at least until recently, were cheap. They were beautifully drawn and exciting, but they were still basically cheap. That was the point. Movies are not cheap, especially not in 3D. Comic-book heroes, like football players, have lost all contact with their proletarian roots.
“Some people will read all this and say: ‘You’re over-intellectualizing. You’re reading too much into it.’ This may be true. But these charges are always made by people who never over-intellectualize anything, who never read too much into things. They are made by people who want you to take the X-Men seriously, as legitimate fiction. And then when you do, they say that you are over-intellectualizing.
