I think Steve Benen gets the best of this exchange with Dave Weigel and Matt Yglesias; Spider-Man 2 was in fact the best comics adaptation of the ’00s. Indeed, it’s pretty much an iron law of the universe that superhero sequels are always better than the original, for one reason: origins. Structurally, the first movies have to spend the first 30 minutes or so getting through the origin and then restart the narrative with less time for the main story. Comic book origin stories also tend to fairly boring and predictable, falling into one of two archetypes: 1) Weakling / outcast is suddenly given great powers (i.e. pure adolescent wish fulfillment). Examples include Spider-man, Thor, Captain America, Daredevil, Dr. Strange, a the Hulk. 2) Child is cut off from his or her family via death or exile. Examples included Spider-man, Batman, Wonder Woman and Superman. The problem is that these experiences are so transformative and happen so quickly that we know and care little about the pre-heroic characters. To heck with Donald Blake, in other words; I want to see Thor bring the hammer down. Thus, Superman II is better than Superman, The Dark Knight is better than Batman Begins, X2 is better than X-Men, Spider-Man 2 is better than Spider-Man, and so on and so forth.  This is also why making an entire movie about Wolverine’s origin was such a bad idea.

While Yglesias is correct in identifying Elektra as the worst comic movie of the decade (if I hadn’t mistakenly watched Love, Actually on an airplane it would have been my worst movie of the decade, period), he’s wrong in saying that Daredevil is worse than the two horrifyingly bad Fantastic Four movies. Daredevil is by no means a good movie and it squanders one of the best stories Marvel comics ever published, but it’s credible and intermittently entertaining in a way the aesthetic crimes that are the FF movies are not.

Meanwhile, this notion that Iron Man was the single best comics movie of the last ten years is strange and wrong, because, first, see above about origins. Second, because it lacks a compelling villain. Third, the underlying message is kind of disturbing. Here I’ll quote Garth Ennis, who wrote:

[With Iron Man] you got an odd blend of ham-fisted engagement and at the same time avoidance of the issues, which I found at best meaningless and at worst borderline offensive. Example: Iron Man is invulnerable to enemy fire and can selectively take out his opponents without harming civvies, which is the precise opposite of our troops’ experience in Iraq and Afghanistan. At the same time, the question of his company’s war profiteering is never quite resolved.

Iron Man was good mainly because of Robert Downey Jr.’s world-weary charisma; I fully expect Iron Man 2 will be much better because they’ll spend a lot more money on it, Mickey Rourke is going to tear it up as Whiplash, and Samuel L. Jackson will be in the mix as Ultimate Nick Fury. Then they’ll make Iron Man 3, which will be even more expensive and will unwisely try to cram in even more villains, plotlines, and supporting characters, and thus won’t be as good as Iron Man 2 in the same way that the third Spider-man, X-Men, and Batman movies weren’t as good as the second ones.  That’s just how these things work.