"Marvel"

As I'm dead certain was the case for many, many other people, I was completely awestruck by the newest trailer for Joss Whedon's The Avengers. I am also dead certain that there are dozens of blogs, written and filmed, that have also taken the time to gush about the contents of the trailer and what they portend for the movie that will officially kick off the 2012 summer movie season in America.

For me, though, there was one thing about the minute-long trailer that grabbed me even more than the stunning visuals and the promise of wall-to-wall butt-kicking action. All movie trailers begin (or more or less begin) with the logo of the studio distributing the movie being advertised. Even when the actual maker of the film is different from the distributor, the distributor's logo still gets top billing, as it were. From 2008 to 2011, for example, Paramount Pictures and Universal Pictures distributed, between the two of them, five films that were produced entirely by Marvel studios, and the trailer (and actual movie) of each of those films featured, quite prominently the logo of either Paramount or Universal, followed by the Marvel banner.

During the new Avengers trailer, however, the only banner to be seen, despite the fact that Marvel is owned by the Walt Disney Company, which has its own film studio, was that of Marvel itself. This wasn't being marketed as a Paramount Picture, or a Walt Disney Picture, or a Columbia Picture, or as anything other than as a Marvel Picture.

This year it will have been 26 years since the Howard the Duck movie opened in theaters and proved to be such an abysmal failure with critics and audiences the world over that its stink clung to Marvel Comics for years. When Batman was breaking box-office records a few years later, Marvel characters were appearing in direct-to-video feces such as Albert Pyun's Captain America (1990) and Mark Goldblatt's The Punisher (1989). I was already a fanboy back then, and I was crushed, especially since it was back then that the Spider-Man movie experienced one false start after another.

How things change in a couple of decades; since Stephen Norrington's Blade adaptation knocked Saving Private Ryan off the top of the U.S. box-office in the summer of 1998, films based on Marvel Comic books have been going from strength to strength. Since then, twenty movies based on several different Marvel Comics characters have opened at number one at the U.S. box office, eighteen of them have gone on to gross more than $100 million each at the U.S. box office, seven of them have managed to gross more than $200 million each at the U.S. box office, and five of them have even managed to gross over $300 million each. Sure, rival comics company DC Comics still holds a number of individual records with 2008's The Dark Knight being the highest-grossing comic-book adaptation ever, but considering that over 30 years after Christopher Reeve took audiences' breath away in Richard Donner's Superman, DC and their parent Warner Brothers have been unable to sell films based on characters other than Superman and Batman, what Marvel have done in ten years is quite a feat.

Notably, these films aren't all purely commercial affairs made to pander to the lowest common denominator; several of the films based on Spider-Man, Iron Man and the X-Men are quite highly regarded among critics, for their narrative substance as well as their visual panache. In short, there has been a concerted effort not just to churn out movies based on Marvel Comics, but the best possible movies that could be based on Marvel Comics, with the best directors, cast and crew in place.

Audiences the world over have rewarded these efforts with their tickets, and as a result Marvel Studios has become a brand name unto itself. That parent company Disney would recognize the power of the brand to the extend that it would decline to stamp its own logo on The Avengers is compelling testimony to the faith they have in Marvel as a distinct product.

To someone who grew up grinding his teeth because of how bad movies like The Punisher were, the degree to which one of the biggest entertainment companies in the world respects and supports Marvel is a soothing balm, one that more than makes up for decades of silent suffering.

It's a good time to be a Marvel fan.