Auteurs assemble! What caused the superhero backlash?
(The Guardian Culture News)

They´ve conquered the box office. Now it´s payback time. As they are attacked by filmmakers like Martin Scorsese, are TV and movie superheroes fighting a losing battle against reality?Alan Moore´s celebrated 1986 series Watchmen revolved around a conspiracy to kill off masked vigilantes, and in effect that´s what it did in real life. Compared with the complex, mature, literary nature of Watchmen, most other comic-book titles looked juvenile and two-dimensional. This was at a time when `comic-book movies` meant Christopher Reeve´s wholesome Superman series, and when the only inhabitant of the Marvel movie universe was Howard the Duck. The entire industry had to up its game, and a new era of mature `graphic novels` was born. Now we appear to have come full circle - which is fitting for a story so heavy with clock symbolism. With uncanny timing, HBO´s lavish new Watchmen series arrives at a moment when comic-book movies are again in what you might call a decadent phase of the cycle. They have decisively conquered our screens and our box offices, with ever grander and more improbable forms of spectacle, to the extent that we´re now beginning to question how much more of them we need. Could Watchmen kill off the superheroes once again? Continue reading...