A long time ago when the world made sense, there were two kinds of comic books: DC comics and Marvel comics. And while Marvel reigned supreme at the comics shop, the company dearly wanted to break into the lucrative and ego-stroking business of licensing it characters for major motion pictures, and it was there that DC pantsed Marvel and took its lunch money. While DC was the home of Superman and Batman, Marvel was the home base of Howard the Duck. For years, Marvel's role in the Hollywood fod chain was epitomized by the 1994 Fantastic Four movie, a cheesy, cheap-looking affair that Marvel put into production without bothering to inform the people who worked on it that they had no intention of releasing it to theaters or even home video but were contractually obliged to make something if they wanted to hang onto the film rights to their own characters. All that started to change in 2000 with Bryan Singer's X-Men, whose success the director was unable to duplicate with his later stab at rebooting Superman. A couple of years later, Sam Raimi's take on the Marvel flagship hero Spider-Man launched a major franchise and proved that Marvel could sire a blockbuster movie without Singer or Hugh Jackman modeling a haircut that could open bottles and cans. Since then, Marvel has had varying degrees of commercial success with a for-real Fantastic Four movie and its sequel, as well as Ghost Rider, Daredevil, and Elektra, a bust in theaters but more of an earner as a DVD release that allowed film connoisseurs to conduct a close study of Jennifer Garner's moist eyes and washboard abs in the tranquil setting of their own fortress of solitude. Even The Punisher managed to make it into theaters with John Travolta on the poster, which helps to set it apart from the 1989 straight-to-video version, with Dolph Lundgren grunting his lines as if his tight skull-face T-shirt were cutting off his circulation.

Stage two in Marvel's renewed campaign to take over the film industry goes into effect on May 2 when Iron Man, the first official production of Marvel Studios, is released to theaters. As reporter Geoff Boucher puts it, this marks "the first step in the company's quest to go from intellectual-property fount to a stand-alone Hollywood player that can greenlight big-time popcorn movies." Studio chairman David Maisel crows that "We're the first since DreamWorks started 14 years ago that can greenlight its own $100 million movies. It doesn't happen very often." In some ways, Marvel might still look pretty small to the big guys: the "studio" is modestly staffed and will rely mostly on Paramount to distribute their finished films. What they do have is the backlist of established characters, many of them created back in the golden days when the legendary Stan Lee and the uber-legendary Jack Kirby were striking sparks together, despite Marvel founder-publisher Martin Goodman's attempts to rein in his brainstorming boys by reminding them that their reading base consisted of "children and a few illiterate adults." (Boy, the more things change, the more things stay the same, huh?) As Maisel puts it, "We're not in the movie business, we're in the Iron Man business right now. Marvel owns the intellectual property. We have an Iron Man video game coming, the toys, the comics, we have an animated television show coming, a direct-to-DVD animated Iron Man movie last year. We're going to have an Iron Man ride at an amusement park in Dubai in a few years." They're also in the Ant-Man business--Edgar Wright, the director of Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, is said to be ready to direct a film about the wee fellow--and of course, they're still in the Spider-Man business, with plans by Julie Taymor (Across the Universe) to launch a Spider-Man musical on Broadway. What may be most impressive is that they're in the Hulk business, too. Ang Lee's 2003 The Hulk movie was perhaps the highest-profile misstep of the new Marvel movie era, an ambitious, poker-faced effort that confused critics and disappointed audiences, though it did have the dignity of being a flop of the misguided-art-house variety instead of the underfunded direct-to-video sort. Now, just five years later, Marvel is going to reboot The Hulk with Ed Norton in the lead. The fact that Marvel is taking a second crack at the "property" so soon after the release of a film whose reception might have encouraged lesser mortals to sweep the Hulk under the rug for a generation or three shows an impressive degree of faith in their own product. Can another run at Howard the Duck be far behind? Has anybody run any tests to see how Hugh Jackman would look with an orange beak?