I love comic books, always have and always will, and while works like Alan Moore’s Watchmen or Neil Gaiman’s Sandman are often cited as masterworks of sequential storytelling, I believe that genuine pathos and inspiration can be found across the entire spectrum of comicdom. Stories are stories, drama is universal, and I believe that as readers, we get out of them what we put into them. We have to want to be moved. We have to want to feel what the character feels.

Inside these flamboyant pages are stories that go beyond costumed people punching each other. Stories of love and loss, of responsibility and sacrifice, determination, hope.

Spider-man is a great hero, not because he puts on a costume and beats up bad guys, it’s the man underneath. The best spider-man stories are not Spider-man stories at all. They’re Peter Parker Stories. They deal with his life and his family. His responsibilities as both a hero and a person. Work/Life balance taken to an extreme end.

In the earliest Stan Lee Spider-man issues, Peter Parker is continually late for school or behind on his homework. He’s struggling to care for a sickly Aunt May while striving to use his powers to help those that don’t have the power to help themselves. In J. Michael Straczynski’s seminal run in the early 2000s, Peter is older, but life is no easier. Now he’s missing work and behind on his rent. He’s separated from his wife and struggling to reconcile. And still he patrols the city looking for ways to make it better. To keep it safe. You can remove the costume and cast Peter as, say, a police officer or a fire fighter and the story remains unchanged.

Batman is an example of a character who has become a victim of his own success, appearing in multiple titles each month with an almost god-like ability to defeat any obstacle. But again, the best Batman stories are the ones that focus on a shattered psyche who traded pain for vengeance and called it justice. Or a man, fragile and human yet determined to stand with gods.

A while back Martin Scorsese, who, don’t get me wrong, is one of the preeminent filmmakers and storytellers of our time, lambasted the superhero genre in an interview still being talked about today. Everything he said was true to an extant, but his comments also struck me as the views of someone looking at the genre from a distance. He called the movies ‘theme parks’, and like driving past a carnival, if you don’t stop to look, all you see is spectacle. Light and sound.

You don’t see the face of a child alight with magic or wonder. You miss the painted on smiles of the clowns and the cloying bark of the carnies, sweaty and stained and tired-looking. You miss the smell of the popcorn and the earthen miasma of the animals.

You’re not walking through the midway with a girl on your arm, sweaty palmed and nervous with the air electric with her touch and her smile. Winners and losers. Games of chance. Love and violence and everything between.

My children and I have been watching super hero movies. Some new, some classic. One particular favourite is Christopher Reeve’s Superman. I think to in order to experience what a superhero movie means you have to watch one with a child. The excitement, the inspiration. To paraphrase Aunt May herself in Sam Raimi’s second Spider-man film, Children know a hero when they see one. They know what it means to be good or bad without complexity or greyness.

There comes a point in every superhero movie where things look bad for the hero. He’s beaten. He’s fallen, and he’s sacrificed. But. He gets up. He stands. The music swells and he pulls open his shirt to reveal an emblem of hope underneath. My children cheer. Sometimes they tear up. And they learn how to rise above the world.