Spider-Man 2 and The Incredibles provided powerful bookends for cinematic superheroes this year. All Spider-Man 2 images: ™ & © 2004 Marvel Characters Inc. © 2004 Sony Pictures. All rights reserved. The Incredibles © 2004 Disney Enterprises, Inc./Pixar Animation Studios. All rights reserved.

There’s quite a set of bookends this superhero movie season. From May’s Spider-Man 2 to November’s The Incredibles, the cape-and-mask set have had a lot to be pleased about this year. And while the books inside the bookends (to stretch a metaphor) haven’t all been up to the standards of the ends, they’re still no slouches, either. Some have excelled in their storylines, some in their use of CG animation, but all have had something of interest to recommend them. As stories of people in peril, current superhero films can’t help but be informed by the events of 9/11. The idea of an explosion in the midst of a major metropolitan area has less entertainment value and more current event angst than it might have before that date. And yet, the stock-in-trade of super-villains — and some superheroes — is blowing things up. It’s a tough problem for filmmakers to deal with.

Historically, comics have been there for our major national crises. Superheroes reached their all-time peak of popularity during World War II. Superman, Batman, Captain America and many other heroes engaged in battle against the Axis powers. From kids on the home front to GIs on the battlefront, superheroes were entertainment and inspiration for a nation at war. With fear of saboteurs — the wartime equivalent of today’s terrorists — in the back of everyone’s minds, it was apparently reassuring to people that there was someone like Wonder Woman or Superman to deflect our society’s enemies, though even the youngest child had to know they were figments of the imaginations of writers and artists. That many of these writers and artists would end up in the armed forces fighting the battles of WWII might well have fueled the urgency of their stories and seeped through to their eager audiences.Today, for better or worse, the need for fantasy heroes is as strong as ever, but superheroes are accessed for the most part in movies, on TV and in videogames, as opposed to solely the pages of comic books (aka graphic novels). Aside from the generally declining readership of comics, the advent of the age of visual effects means that movies and TV are better suited in some ways at conveying the incredible world of the superheroes and their counterparts, the super-villains. One of the breakthroughs of modern filmmaking that make them ideal for tales of superheroes is the ability moviemakers have developed to seamlessly mix live action with CGI to create fantastical worlds that exist nowhere but inside the camera and computer.

With the exception of The Incredibles, while the current superhero films are for the most part live action, they are enhanced by the integration of 3D animation and vfx into their imagery. Cinema superheroes do their thing with the aid of CGI that make their world look much like ours, yet different enough that it inhabits a parallel dimension a step removed from our own. For instance, the New York City of these films — be it Spider-Man’s or Sky Captain’s — looks something like our own, but is cobbled together from bits and pieces of cities, some real and some that exist only inside the guts of a computer.The CGI is one part of the equation. On the photographic level, the quality of vfx, makeup and prosthetic devices have advanced by leaps and bounds over the decades so that it’s sometime hard to know at first — or even third — glance whether a character is “real” or animated. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen achieved this with its Mr. Hyde character, a character arguably more Hulk-like than the CG Hulk was in his movie. On the other hand, the Mr. Hyde of this summer’s Van Helsing looked like the Hulk of last year — like a rubberized doll whose unreality detracted from the scenes he was in. And yet, the Frankenstein Monster of Van Helsing, a creature of make-up and prosthetics, was one of the best movie monsters in memory. Scary yet sympathetic, it made many of the film’s CG effects seem less convincing by comparison. Whereas a comic book provides a jumping off point for your imagination to create the wildest special effect your brain can come up with, today’s state-of-the-art effects enable filmmakers to create characters and locations so detailed and convincing you feel like you actually could go see and touch them for yourself. If it can be imagined, it can be realized. Even things that look like they’re photographed are really created in the computer.