Hero Wisdom

Iron Man 3 devotes a surprising amount of time to showing Tony without the suit, almost to the point where some viewers might be disappointed that he doesn’t spend more time suited up. Personally, I was thrilled because it shows an important lesson that I had hoped at least one of the movies, at some point, would show.

Choice is the most powerful force in the universe, not prophecy, not destiny, not bad genes or traumatic experiences, not anything. Hellboy chooses to be good, to resist the darker impulses that are wired within him.

Here's a list of the ten most inspiring superhero movie soundtracks. This is music to invigorate, motivate and speak to your inmost being. It aids me in my personal journey and I believe that if you listen to it with the conscious intent to better yourself in some way, they can aid you too.

Somewhere between the two archetypes of Xavier and Magneto is the key to unlocking your potential. And balancing them just may be the key to reconciling your conflicting feelings and contributing to the world while protecting and looking out for your own interests at the same time.

The X-Men's struggle is essentially your own struggle. It is the struggle to find gifts amidst one's pain—to balance the need to be true to oneself, on one hand, with the natural desire to be accepted, on the other, and through it all to shine with dignity and grace.

One of the central ideas of this blog is that superheroes are our modern-day gods and demi-gods. They serve many of the same purpose for us as the pantheons of gods served for their respective cultures. I’m speaking here from a cultural and psychological viewpoint, not a theological or metaphysical …

The bow and arrow is one of the most powerful symbols in human history and culture. Nearly every ancient civilization’s mythology has heroes and gods who favored the weapon: Artemis (Greece), Cupid (Rome), Arjuna (India) and Houyi (China). And there are beloved characters from folklore like Robin Hood leading up …

One look at Iron Man in both the comics and the movies and it’s not hard to see why, on the surface, he’s such a popular character: He’s rich, famous, good-looking, surrounded by cutting-edge technology, creatively and intellectually brilliant and armed with the funniest mouth in the Marvel universe next to Spider-Man. In short, he’s everything that women want and everything that men want to be.

There's often a thin line between what separates heroes and monsters. If you think about it quite a number of horror/thriller movies are basically superhero stories gone wrong. This post will talk about a sub-genre (or more like a sub-sub-genre) of horror that I'll arbitrarily call "superhero horror" and the morals and lessons we can extract from them.

In this post, I list the top 10 superheroes who are, in my mind, among the best archetypes to work with as tools for introspection and personal growth.

I have a yearly ritual of watching 'A Christmas Carol' that helps me recommit to my values and ideals. In this post, I suggest a way that you can use any version of the movie to do the same.

This post is about a startling and somewhat unsettling piece of hard wisdom embedded within this film that, at a very critical point in your life, you may choose to apply. This post is about how The Dark Knight Rises can save your life.

The primary message of Spider-Man the character, of course, has always been that “with great power comes great responsibility.” It’s a beautiful aphorism but the problem is that many people feel that it has little relevance for them because the last thing they feel like is powerful.

More than any other character in the Marvel universe, Captain America (aka Steve Rogers) didn’t become a hero. He always was one. This is the key when it comes to changing our own lives and that of society.

Though not usually consciously recognized as such by the majority of the media-consuming community, pop culture is myth in modern guise.The writings in this column, Hero Worship, will help you to see and recognize pop culture as modern mythology and to be able to use it - as all original myth intended - to awaken the hero within.