Dark clouds gathered over Gotham. Crime is rampant, despair is widespread and no one is safe. Who will save the city from itself, fight the forces of evil and save the good people of the city?
Why don't you do it?
Many of us love to fight for truth and justice - if only we had magic powers or mutant genes. We all love superheroes.
Batman's alter ego, Bruce Wayne, is an old money heir and the owner of Wayne Enterprises, a massive international conglomerate of technology. In Forbes Fictional Fifteen, they estimated his net worth at $ 6.3 billion. If he was a real guy, he would be the 28th richest person in America, just behind News Corp. 's Rupert Murdoch.
Wayne uses his wealth and business to develop connections with the latest and greatest in military hardware, and uses those tools to help fight the bad guys as Joker, the Riddler, and Ra's Al Ghul.
But you do not need to be a billionaire to become a crusader exit. Using training facilities available in trade, technology and home help, the average guy could conceivably equip himself to become a superhero in the real world, provided he has found at least a few million to spare. (*)
source: forbes
Batman Wannabe
Become A Superhero, Why Not?
Look up in the sky! It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s ... you?
Why not? Who hasn’t dreamed about casting off the bonds of gravity and soaring through the air like Superman or sticking to the side of buildings like Spider-Man?
Unfortunately, physics has a way of ruining a good fantasy. After all, superheroes only exist in comic books and movies. People can't really fly, shoot laser beams or bench-press pickup trucks.
Or can they?
Traditionally, heroes develop their powers in unusual ways--radiation exposure, mutant genes, even deals with the devil. As a result, they can lift cars, control the weather or change their appearance. Is any of this even remotely plausible? Do any of the comic-book methods for gaining superpowers actually work?
Can a radioactive spider really give you superpowers?
Superman was lucky enough to gain his powers as an accident of birth. Born Kal-El, the sole survivor of the destroyed planet Krypton, his alien anatomy is supercharged by the light of our yellow sun, giving him abilities as varied as flight, heat vision and bullet-proof skin.
Much of Superman's story doesn't ring true, says Phil Plait, an astronomer who runs Bad Astronomy, a Web site dedicated to correcting misconceptions about our universe and promoting good science. "I can't think of any way of making a planet explode," he says. "It would take a huge amount of energy."
But there could be a kernel of truth to the Superman legend. "Krypton orbited a star that was a red giant," says Plait. "The difference between a red giant and our sun is that a red giant is cooler. There are other things, but a star like the sun is hotter, so it puts out more light in the ultraviolet, in the blue part of the spectrum. So if you could think of some way that ultraviolet light would take someone like Kal-El and make him able to fly around, then more power to you."
Of course, those of us born here on Earth have to find other ways to fuel our superpowers. Spider-Man, The Incredible Hulk and Daredevil all benefited from exposure to radioactive materials--what about giving yourself a dose of some unstable atomic nuclei to jump-start your powers?
Not a good idea, according to radiation safety consultant George J. Vargo. "The bottom line is, what all of this stuff does when it enters the body is collide with atoms and molecules," he says. Small doses of radiation cause damage that can easily be repaired. A little more can make you very sick or result in the loss of limbs through amputation. Crank up the dosage past 600 rem (a standard unit for measuring radiation)--an amount 1,600 times what the average person is exposed to every year--and you'll be dead within 14 days. "That's a one-way trip," says Vargo. "You damage the cells that line the small intestine, begin to lose one of the body's most important fluid barriers, and quite literally you leak out the gut."
Given enough money, you could probably buy your way into the crime-fighting game. Batman doesn't have any superpowers--just a superwallet. The Caped Crusader's alter ego, Bruce Wayne, is the owner of Wayne Enterprises, a massive international technology conglomerate. In our Forbes Fictional Fifteen listing of the richest fictional characters, we estimated his net worth at $6.3 billion. If Wayne was a real guy, he'd be the 33rd richest person in America, tied with Fidelity Investments' Edward Crosby Johnson III, and right behind News Corp.'s Rupert Murdoch.
So what to do if you're not a billionaire or an extraterrestrial? The good folks at DC and Marvel comics have come up with lots of ways to turn man into superman. (*)
Superhero is the Hero
You remember Quasar, the superhero created by artists and writers at Marvel comics back in 1978?
Of course you don't because he didn't have the staying power, so to speak, like many of the superheroes that still are brilliantly being splashed on the pages of their own graphic novels decades after they were first introduced to the world.
These are the ones making it to the big screen and the ones appearing in videogames.
These are the most enduring of all time. But who is at the top of that list? It quite possibly could be, and should be, Superman, who turns 70 this year.
Why The Man of Steel? Not because he's invincible and always seems to come out on top, whether it's against criminal mastermind Lex Luthor or Doomsday, who nearly killed him in 1993.
Superman's greatest victory has been his ability to withstand the test of time, something Spider-man and Batman have done, too. Sorry, Quasar.
Comic book legend and the truest of "true believers," Stan Lee told Forbes.com that there's no real math to figuring out why certain characters, good or bad, don't take.
"I'm not sure I have the full answer, but my guess would be in many cases it's just the quality of the writing, or the artwork or whatever," Lee said.
"For example, take Sherlock Holmes. There have been millions of detective stories over the years. Many of them are forgettable. Somehow Sherlock Holmes has endured, mainly because no one could write a detective story as brilliantly as (Arthur) Conan Doyle, and nobody could come up with a character as interesting and flawed as Sherlock Holmes."
Bottom line, Sherlock sold books just as say, Captain America does for Marvel, which is one of the major reasons he's making a comeback.
David Gabriel, senior vice president of sales and marketing at Marvel, said what he admitted as being "horribly clichéd," some of the best stories are when they kill somebody off.
Gabriel said it's tough pushing some books on a consistent basis. People in his business have the blockbuster movies and videogames to thank for bolstering demand. With the exception of the diehard fans, this is what gets people into the 3,500 or so comic book shops nationwide these days. Slap the death and resurrection of a flagship character in there, and you've got a surge in the franchise.
Such a turn of events helped make Captain America the most popular graphic novel in 2007, according to data collected by Diamond Comic Distributors, based in Timonium, Md.
Currently, Marvel Comics claims 44.7% of the overall industry market share, while DC Comics holds 34.7%, Diamond reported. The runners-up include Dark Horse Comics (4.5%), who publishes Buffy the Vampire Slayer books, and Image Comics (3.4%), publisher of Todd McFarlane’s anti-hero, Spawn.
Much of the success of industry-leading publishers relies heavily on the evolution of existing characters. Maybe it's time for something new.
Contrary to popular myth, Lee can't predict the future. But he suspects there will be new heroes, and villains for that matter, that exhibit the same characteristics that draw people to the likes of the present ones.
"There are many wonderful writers and artists in the world," Lee said. "They're doing new things. Some of them just have to catch fire. I'm sure of that." (*)
source: forbes
Iron Man and promotional opportunity
It's a summer blockbuster formula that studio heads and marketers dream of. This summer, the big money is on Iron Man, the film adaptation of the long-running Marvel series, which opens May 2. Marvel is bullish enough that it's making Iron Man its first independently produced feature film.
But it's not just a movie: It's a promotional opportunity. And along with the usual marketers, who will be pushing Iron Man-labeled paraphernalia, tech firms starting with LG Electronics and Sega are vying to get a piece of the promotional action, too.
The draw, the companies say, is the combination of a charismatic character with a penchant for slick gadgets and a built-in fan base. Iron Man is actually Tony Stark, an industrialist playboy and inventor, who builds a high-tech armored suit after he is wounded and kidnapped in combat. (The original 1960s Marvel comics placed Stark in the Vietnam War; in the film, which is set in the present day, the setting is Afghanistan.) Back home in California, Stark continues to battle crime in ever-more sophisticated armor.
As played by Robert Downey Jr., Stark is flawed, funny and inventive--a truly human superhero. He's also a technophile on the level of James Bond. Besides his rocket-launching, jet-propelled suit, snazzy cellphone and sleek car, Stark's Malibu home
features a talking computer butler--the kind of smart house technology that tech titans like Bill Gates might have, says LeeAnne Stables, a senior vice president at Paramount Pictures, which is distributing and marketing the film. "The premise is that Stark is running a high-tech company and is an innovator, so he has the best, cutting-edge of everything," she adds.
Stark's image as "the ultimate gadget guru," is a major reason why LG signed on, says Ehtisham Rabbani, vice president of marketing for LG Mobile Phones. "His superpowers all come from technology; our phones are about giving people superpowers in everyday life," says Rabbani.
LG's campaign focuses on the technology behind Iron Man's suit and spans TV, print, online and in-store advertisements and several giveaways, and kicks off on April 14. Fans who go to insidethesuit.com will have a chance to win special-edition LG handsets, colored to match Iron Man's suit and dipped in 18-karat gold. In the film, Stark also uses an LG phone--a slider with a large screen that can be flipped horizontally.
In the past, complicated relationships between handset makers and mobile operators in the U.S. have kept cellphone-film partnerships to a minimum. Iron Man is LG's first movie tie-in. "We've had a lot of product placement in movies, but we haven't built marketing programs around them before," says Rabbani.
Paramount says having a cellphone promotion is increasingly important as phones evolve into ubiquitous, highly personal gadgets. "We've been trying to crack the code on doing a big partnership with a big handset manufacturer for awhile," says
Stables.
Rabbani is counting on a brand boost from the exposure. LG, which first began selling cellphones in the U.S. in 1998, views brand-building and marketing as key to its goal of becoming a top three global electronics company by 2010. (See: "Branding A New LG.")
Brand awareness of LG phones has doubled among U.S. consumers in the past four years to about 75%, says Rabbani. He's trying to push that figure to 100%. "That kind of growth is pretty dizzying, but there's still room to grow," he says.
Sega is wagering on the movie's success, too. It is licensing global rights to create videogames for consoles, handhelds and PCs from several Marvel properties, starting with Iron Man. Such licensed games can be highly unpredictable. Developed hand-in-hand with movie studios and released the day the movie premieres, the games' fates are closely tied to the success of the films.
Sega says it's confident that Iron Man will be one of the year's top three box office earners. Given its storied history and established fan base, Iron Man could be as big a hit--and as broad a franchise--as Spider-man or X-Men, says Simon Jeffery, president and chief operating officer of Sega of America.
That kind of hit would greatly expand the game's audience. Jeffery hopes to attract traditional gamers, fans of the comic books and more casual players who see the movie and "get caught up in its pop culture appeal."
Aided by the fact that Iron Man director Jon Favreau is a gamer, Sega and Marvel worked closely on the game. Sega drew upon the film's actors, script and special effects--developed by George Lucas' Industrial Light & Magic--to make the game look and feel like the movie, says Jeffery.
In it, players play, fly and fight as Iron Man. "We felt there was an opportunity to go back to the old school of gaming, where you fly around in fantastic environments, blowing stuff up and having a great time," says Jeffery.
Iron Man's promotional campaigns also extend to tie-ins with Audi (whose R8 sports car appears in the film), 7-Eleven, Burger King and Foot Locker . In total, Iron Man has seven marketing partners, including LG, and numerous licensees, including Sega, says Paramount's Stables. She likens the campaign to the huge push Paramount did
last summer for Transformers.
In a summer of big films, such as the latest Indiana Jones and Batman Speed Racer, Marvel and Paramount are counting on Iron Man to reel in superfans and geeks. Says Stables, "People hear 'Iron Man' and think it's a movie for men ... It's a giant, pop-culture movie that's absolutely going to be fun for anybody who's interested in technology." (*)
source: forbes