The Design and Engineering of Superheroes

Description

Superheroes and scientists go way back in the comic-book business. Surely that tech association has helped the medium spread so far beyond the printed page. Today comics are a billion-dollar business encompassing movie blockbusters like Watchmen and The Dark Knight and TV’s Heroes, complete with merchandising, publishing, and conventions like the one next month in San Diego presented by Comic-Con International, which boasts an engineer on its board of directors.

”There’s been a long history of engineers and scientists creating all those gadgets that superheroes use, or use to become superheroes themselves or high-tech villains,” notes famed comic illustrator Bill Sienkiewicz. ”And by the mid-1970s you started seeing descriptions of how the gadgets worked and their viability in real life.”

Consider Eliot Brown, an artist who has made use of IEEE Spectrum to research his renderings of superwidgets in two books from Marvel Comics, the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe (1982) and The Iron Manual (1993). The manual gives detailed schematics of the workbench and wardrobe of Tony Stark, a.k.a. Iron Man.

Brown, who now runs the Kingston Vacuum Works, a model-making studio in Kingston, N.Y., says that the preeminent technological archetype was Reed Richards of the Fantastic Four, a rebel scientist who mutated into a rubbery body after cosmic rays blasted him in spaceflight. But he credits Stan Lee, creator of Spider-Man, for starting the tech-focused trend in comics in the early 1960s.

”In the Spider-Man comic—not the movies—Peter Parker was an honor science student who, after a radioactive spider bite, designed the web shooter that he wore on his wrists. Steve Ditko drew what it looked like; that was huge,” Brown says. ”Comics always lived in the future. But before,

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http://spectrum.ieee.org/at-work/tech-careers/the-design-and-engineering-of-superheroes

http://spectrum.ieee.org/at-work/tech-careers/the-design-and-engineering-of-superheroes