All of The Fun Found In Shazam! Comes From Total Creative Commitment

Considering that the modern conception of the superhero movie has been running since the 1998 release of Blade, you'd think this subgenre would be running on fumes by now. Perhaps it is to some, but from my vantage point, the superhero movie subgenre seems to be flourishing in recent years simply because producers, perhaps in an attempt to prevent the superhero movie from getting long in the tooth, seem to be willing to let filmmakers take both new and old characters into fresh new directions. Just look at what Taika Waititi did with the Thor mythos or the work done by the cast & crew of the first solo Black Panther movie or anything related to Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse.

In Laman's Terms: The Evolving Depiction of Identity In Superhero Storytelling

In Laman's Terms is a weekly editorial column where Douglas Laman rambles on about certain topics or ideas that have been on his mind lately. Sometimes he's got serious subjects to discuss, other times he's just got some silly stuff to shoot the breeze about. Either way, you know he's gonna talk about something In Laman's Terms!

SPOILERS FOR SPIDER-MAN: INTO THE SPIDER-VERSE AND CAPTAIN MARVEL FOLLOW 

All the way back in 1938, Superman's debut appearance in Action Comics #1 defined our modern conception of the superhero. Part of that definition was the establishment of a superhero secret identity. Superman was an all-powerful God-like entity with a multitude of superpowers, but his human alter-ego was Clark Kent, a nerdy newspaper reporter who no one could ever imagine running particularly fast, let alone leaping tall buildings in a single bound. Plenty of other superheroes soon followed with their own alter-ego's in hand, most notably Batman, who by day is a charismatic billionaire. In the 1960s, Spider-Man took things to the next level by making the alter-ego of a wall-crawling superhero be a puny teenager who gets bullied at High School.