Ubiquity
The other day I went to my bank and found the comic pictured to the right on the front table right as you walk in. A comic teaching children the value of saving money as several popular heroes team up to defeat a villain that seems to have an impulse buying problem; afterall to afford a variety of gadgets that large, you’d need to be the primary shareholder of Stark Industries or Wayne Enterprises.
Comics have a long history of being used to create age appropriate PSA’s, but this is the first time I have seen them at a financial institution. Super heroes have suffused modern culture.
According to my Social Media feeds, I am one of the few people that is excited about seeing The Amazing Spider-Man 2 tonight. Given the quality shown in the trailer that ambivalence surprises me, regardless of how this film is received though, comic movies are definitely here to stay. At present, 3 of the top 10 highest grossing films of all time are comic book based, and in the last 6 years, the year’s highest grossing filsm have been comic book movies two thirds of the time.
What accounts for the recent popularity of such things? Comic books as a medium, and super heroes an idea have been around quite a while, but they have not exactly been booming in recent years. Indeed, by a variety of metrics, the medium has been quite stagnant.
That is not to say of course that a quarter of a billion dollars is anything to sneeze at.
Is it just that technology has finally caught up to the imaginations of artists then, or is there more too it? I have no idea, but I would love your thoughts on the subject.
Caffeineforge 
I have no idea what you are asking there at the end. Is *what* just that tech has caught up? The decline in comic book sales? The recent popularity of superhero movies?
I would accept conversation on any of the above, though my focus was intended to be about the explosion in popularity over the last half decade. Why the boom?
It’s not just superheroes that got popular. It’s comics and fantasy and roleplaying and larping and scifi and so on and so on. The feelgood Age of Aquarians grew up and had their own kids, which they let explore all of those themes. No more “be a man – play a sport”. No more “girls like pink and ponies”. Not that there’s anything wrong with either of those; it’s just that the peacenik hippies let their kids break the mold, if the kid wanted to.
Then those kids grew up and starting making movies, writing books, etc. Singer and Abrams and Whedon are all harbingers of the Age of Geerkarius.