Avengers Nerds, assemble!
Three of the top ten grossing movies from last year, and five of the top fifteen, were based upon comic books. This weekend's release of The Avengers will likely make over a billion dollars by the time it leaves theatres. Comic books are the new mainstream.
This would shock teenage Poseur. When I was first started collecting comics, it was a fringe hobby that rarely bubbled up to the mainstream. There was an old Superman movie and Spider-Man popped up on the Electric Company for no particular reason, but by and large, comic fans inhabited their own world, well outside the mainstream of pop culture it now dominates.