IT Insights Blog — superhero

In 2019, April 26 is still just a Friday. It's also, however, the day that Avengers: Endgame arrives in theaters, and that makes it more than just any old Friday. The way that superhero worship and comic book lore have come to dominate American pop culture in recent decades, you kind of get the feeling that we might someday have holidays that honor the made-up sacrifices of Earth's made-up mightiest heroes. It's an open secret that Iron Man (probably) dies in the new movie. April 26 = Tony Stark Day?

It seems like there are comic book movies and comic book superheroes everywhere you turn these days. Five of the six highest-grossing movies to play in theaters in 2018 were superhero movies. (Incredibles 2, technically speaking, has no antecedent in comic books, but is 100 percent in the spirit of its archetypally ink-spawned fellow feature films.) There's a Best Picture Oscar-nominated comic book superhero movie. There are two such films in the running for Best Animated Feature.

Every superhero has an origin story: an event, or series of events, that led him or her to put on a costume and start saving the world. Steve Rogers was a scrawny youth who wanted to help Uncle Sam fight the Third Reich. Then he got recruited to a secret "super soldier" project, received a dose of experimental serum, and — blam! — Captain America. Bruce Banner was a researcher assisting in a test detonation of a "gamma bomb." Then exposure to massive amounts of radiation caused him to transform into a mysterious "hulk."