The Hollywood blockbuster season is heating up and so is a series of superhero movies.
And we'll be looking at the superhero trend all this week on CNN.
And first up is the franchise that perhaps started it all -- Superman.
Now, the latest installment, Man of Steel, debuts in New York on Monday.
And Neil Curry looks at why comic book heroes are just so popular.
Comic book heroes, our fascination with them can begin from a very early age and can last a lifetime.
The thing about superhero stories, they're like fairy tales for grown-ups.
Every child loved reading fairy tales when he or she was a child. They were stories about monsters and witches and giants and magicians.
Well, superhero stories have that same flavor, but they're done for adults as well as for children.
The characters he helped to create for Marvel Comics more than half a century ago have stood the test of time.
He's the prime reason this person is dressed like this.
I picked Spider-Man, because I've always been a fan of Spider-Man.
He's a real guy, like, you know, he's got problems like everyone else does.
And, you know, he has to deal with it all and being a superhero at the same time.
If, as has been said, clothes make the man, then presumably superhero clothes make the Superman, or at least the Iron Man.
How long did it take you to do this costume?
About approximately 300 hours added together.
Everything goes beyond just the comic book now,
because it's not just a book, it's a comic book that's tied in with a video game, that's tied in with a movie, and it broadens the reach.
Thousands of people, they are exposed to comic books through movies, as opposed to through comic books to the movies; it's going the other way.
They enjoy the movie, then they get the comic book.
Comic book sales in North America alone were close to half a billion dollars last year.
So far this year, they're up almost 20 percent.
A comic book is essentially a movie with an unlimited budget.
It's a place where you level the playing field, where a creator just with a pencil and pen
can kind of create worlds imaginable, destroy those worlds and recreate them in three pages.
At the other end of the playing field stand the movie makers, armed with $100 million budgets.
Their pen and pencils replaced by [a] sophisticated team of special effects.
They, too, can create, destroy, and recreate worlds, not in three pages but in 3-D.
I think Marvel Comics in general, you know, they're just... they're telling stories of, you know, kings and betrayal and, you know, they're the grandest soaps there are.
The Avengers is the third-biggest film of all time, $1.5 billion worldwide.
And Iron Man 3 is probably gonna be the fourth-biggest film of all time, around about $1.3 billion worldwide.
And I think Man of Steel has the potential to outdo maybe both of them. I think the saturation point is some way away yet.
It depends on the cleverness of the filmmakers.
I think the innovation that we see and the degree to which people continue to up the stakes, change it up, use different approaches,
there's always going to be another superhero movie.
And he's not wrong. In this case, the superhero in question is this fellow.
My father believed if the world found out who I really was, they'd reject me.
Seventy-five years after D.C. Comics introduced Superman to the world, he's being reintroduced to movie audiences as Man of Steel.
I think the superhero genre is so popular today, because quite simply this is the new mythology for us.
They... these people, superheroes, are our Greek gods, they're our Roman gods. And they're just very, very cool.
So the gods smile, a printing press rolls, and a new superhero adventure will soon be delivered to our doors and comic stores.