Tim Cornwell: Marvel at the movie lives of superheroes

This phenomenon has been gathering pace over the last few years. It has been driven at least partly by advances in digital special effects, which enable film-makers to show superpowers, such as flying or mutating into some other shape, far more convincingly than ever before.

But April 2012 is a landmark month in the history of comicbook superheroes. It sees the culmination of a long-term strategy by Marvel Studios to package up several superheroes in a single movie under the collective title of The Avengers.

Nothing to do with Emma Peel and John Steed, it brings together Iron Man, Captain America, Thor, Hulk and several other lesser-known superheroes. Black Widow, played by Scarlett Johansson, is eagerly anticipated by both fanboys and fetishists.

It is easy to forget that Marvel was teetering on the brink of collapse before teaming up with Columbia Pictures to make the original Spider-Man movie a decade ago. Its film company has upped the stakes over the last year or so, with a series of solo superhero films leading up to Avengers Assemble, which is costing $300 million, according to some reports.

Of course this is not just a package of superheroes, it is a package of merchandising and marketing deals as well. Tie-ins include Visa, Dr Pepper, Hershey, Symantec and Harley-Davidson. They even have a deal for a new range of superhero perfumes.

But spare a thought for the men behind an auction that was reported only briefly by the world press this month. This story goes back to the dawn of the superhero concept in the 1930s when Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster created Superman.

Their original Super-Man was a bald villain. Siegel and Shuster subsequently reworked Superman as a hero. They spent years trying to find a publisher before he finally made his debut in 1938 in issue number one of Action Comics.

The publishers gave them a contract for future instalments and a cheque for the princely sum of $130 in return for all future rights to the character.

That cheque sold this month in an online auction for more than £100,000. The anonymous purchaser was buying not just an old cheque, but a little bit of cultural history, and a lot of irony and pain.

Siegel and Shuster could not foresee the development of computer imagery and the current boom in superhero movies. The talkies were only a few years old when they first conceived of Superman.

They did however live long enough to see Superman become a cultural icon in comics, on television and in earlier big-screen incarnations and they realised that they might have held out for a bit more than $130. That original deal was the subject of litigation stretching over decades.

No-one really knows anything when it comes to the value of an artistic creation. Catch-22 was turned down by a string of publishers. Decca famously passed on The Beatles. Van Gogh sold one painting in his entire, troubled life.

No-one can possibly say where this fascination with costumed superheroes will end, but they are now as firmly established within American popular culture – and by extension western popular culture – as cowboys and Indians were back when Siegel and Shuster thought up Superman.

Filming has been taking place on a new Superman movie and Warners have been mulling for years over the possibility of a Justice League movie that would unite Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, the Green Lantern and the Flash. If Avengers Assemble is as big as expected, that project could suddenly be moving through development faster than a speeding bullet.

The phenomenon will probably end when audiences tire of the sight of men flying through the air and leaping over buildings and decide they would rather follow the story of some new character unlike anything anyone has ever seen before.

He or she could be out there now in some manuscript making its way from publisher to publisher, rejection to rejection, waiting for someone to spot the potential or just take a gamble.

• Avengers Assemble opens on Thursday