Rescuing the Heroes.

• Author: JAYATILLEKE, RUWAN
• Position: Comic book industry seeks revival

With supermovies booming, the aging Spider-Man and friends seek a rebirth in comic books

Jessica Vasquez, 17, flies by shoppers at a video store in New York City to grab the last X-Men DVD, then sighs with relief. "My X-Man-wannabe boyfriend has been fiending for this DVD since it came out," she says. "I would have tried to get him some of the comics, but it's just too weird being in those stores."

That's the two-faced state of comics today. The spin-off movies are hot, attracting a mainstream audience like Jessica and her boyfriend. On the flipside, comic books themselves have been foundering, attracting mainly the kind of hardcore, hero-worshipping collectors typified by The Simpsons' creepy Comic Book Guy.

When X-Men took in $157 million at the box office, ranking as the No. 6 movie of 2000, Hollywood took notice. A powerful film lineup is now taking shape. Tobey Maguire is currently web-slinging in red-and-blue tights with co-star Kirsten Dunst on the set of Spider-Man, a big-budget movie to be released next May. Ang Lee, the director of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, has signed on to make a big-screen Hulk incredible. AOL Time Warner, parent company of DC Comics, is reviving the Batman movies with a planned Batman: Year One and Batman Beyond. And a list of other movies, including X-Men 2, are in the works.

But the comic book itself, a medium that has endured for nearly 70 years, has fallen into more peril than its fictitious heroes. Overall sales have slipped drastically, from $850 million in 1993 to $265 million in 2000. With most newsstands and bookstore chains phasing out comics, the best place to get them is at comic book stores, the "weird" ones that Jessica won't go into. Those outlets have hit hard times, too. There were about 10,000 stores in 1993; only 3,400 remain.

Why the downward spiral? "In the mid-'90s, the expected wave of new teen readers never showed," says Cliff Biggers, editor of Comic Shop News. "Those readers chose video and computer games as their first choice of entertainment, not comic books."

Marvel Comics, the...