- From "Hancock"

Inflation is soaring, stocks are falling, jobs are disappearing, war is flaring, murders and robberies raging, ice melting, levees breaking - what's a worried, weary populace to do?

Go to the movies and watch guys in capes and masks, with green and crimson skin and jutting jaws, bash up some bad guys?

Exactly.

It's a superhero circus right now at the multiplex. Six rings of aerial antics, mangled metal, downtowns dizzy with meta-humans fighting crooks and making a mess of rush-hour traffic. From comic books to silver screen, the undisputed champs of this summer's blockbuster blitz - The Dark Knight, Hancock, Hellboy II: The Golden Army, The Incredible Hulk, Iron Man and Wanted - are superheroes. (If you want to get fussy, in Wanted they're super anti-heroes.)

The movies have always held a mirror to our fantasies and fears, offering wishful scenarios to put our troubled minds at ease - if only fleetingly. And is there a more intoxicating fantasy than to imagine that you're bulletproof, that you can leap from sidewalk to roof, fearless in the face of danger, able to stop a speeding train, catch a falling plane, swoop down the side of a skyscraper and land on your feet, no harm done? If you're feeling hopeless and powerless, plunk down your $10 and watch the hopeful and the powerful go at it.

In Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight, which opened Friday at 12:01 a.m. to some of the biggest advance ticket sales in Hollywood history, Christian Bale's cowled crusader catapults around Gotham City in an effort to put the kibosh on the clown-faced psycho known as the Joker. (Heath Ledger's swan-song performance as Batman's anarchistic archenemy is a brilliant mashup of Brando, Cagney, Jack Nicholson and The Lord of the Rings' Gollum.)

If The Dark Knight isn't a metaphor for the Iraq war, I don't know what is: the Joker gets labeled a terrorist and is tortured in a prison cell. And he pointedly tells Batman that the only way to fight an enemy who doesn't play by the rules is to break your own rules (the Geneva Conventions, anyone?), forsake your moral code, and get down and dirty.

In Hancock - the only one of the superhero pics out there right now that isn't directly based on a comic - Will Smith has to overcome his own screwed-up, suicidal tendencies in order to do the job he was born for: help people, stop bad guys, save the whales, and work stuff out with Charlize Theron. Funnier and more complicated than The Dark Knight, director Peter Berg's Hancock has a shifting tone that confused many critics, but audiences have had no problem embracing it: After just two weeks in release, the film's domestic box office topped $175 million.

The tagline for Guillermo Del Toro's Hellboy II - adapted from the Dark Horse Comics title by Mike Mignola - goes: "Saving the world is a hell of a job." It's the kind of wisecracking, pulp-mag line that suits this over-the-top, good vs. evil romp. Ron Perlman reprises his role as the red-skinned, cigar-chompin' spawn of the Devil who now works for the U.S. government, swinging through lower Manhattan with a baby in one arm and an anvil fist attached to the other. Sleepy-eyed Selma Blair costars as his super-powered (pyrokinesis) sweetie, and the Pan's Labyrinth director piles on a fantastical menagerie of buggy, nightmarish creatures for the paranormals to do battle with. With its ancient robot armies and white-haired, centuries-old nemesis, Hellboy II looks dazzling, but I don't think the movie, or Perlman's big "Red" dude, have much on their minds. It's pure escapist fare.

The Incredible Hulk, based on the Marvel comic about a mild-mannered scientist exposed to radiation that turns him into a giant green monster, opens with an exciting, expertly staged chase sequence through the slums of Rio, and Edward Norton is moody and brainy as the superhero on the lam, hiding out from the meglomaniacal general (William Hurt) who wants to harness the Hulk's powers for military use. When Bruce Banner's pulse starts quickening - when he gets agitated, angry, threatened - he busts out of his T-shirt and blue jeans and transforms into the title character: a walking billboard for road rage, or just anyplace rage.

The Incredible Hulk introduces, in standard comic-book fashion, a super-villain (played by Tim Roth and a bunch of CG renderers) to give Hulky boy a hard time. For moviegoers, The Incredible Hulk offers catharsis along with the carnage.

Robert Downey Jr. kicked off this latest spate of superhero pics back in early May with Iron Man, a jaw-droppingly clever rereading of the Vietnam War-era comic about a guy with his very own military-industrial complex. (Iron Man's alter ego is Tony Stark, the head of an international weapons manufacturing concern.) Ably directed by Jon Favreau, Iron Man gets to have its cake and eat it, too: Downey's titanium-clad superhero rockets through the air, shooting projectiles at enemy aircraft and evil al-Qaeda-like baddies, and then gets to make a plea for disarmament, diplomacy and world peace.

At first glance, Wanted - with Angelina Jolie tutoring nerd-boy James McAvoy on the finer points of the assassination game - seems more like your everyday hit-man action thriller than a film about folks with superpowers. But crazy Russian director Timur Bekmambetov's adaptation of the Image Comics mini-series by Mark Millar is all about superpowers: the thing that distinguishes Jolie's and McAvoy's characters from the rest of the world is their ability to amp up their heart rates and adrenaline levels to a point where they can fly through the air, beat people to a pulp, and shoot guns and drive cars with a super-sensory precision that defies all rules of physics and common sense.

They're not in the business of saving lives, this elite cadre of killers, but they've rationalized what they do: as Morgan Freeman (who also shows up in The Dark Knight) intones: "Kill one, save a thousand." Yes, they murder, but with discrimination. "Destiny" is their excuse.

Of course, there have been other summers (and springs and falls) when the caped crusaders of DC Comics, Marvel and the rest showed up en masse in moviehouses. Superman, Batman, Spider-Man, Daredevil, X-Men, Fantastic Four - these freaks have been around for a while, and with the behemoth box office revenues that Dark Knight, Hancock, Hellboy II, The Hulk, Iron Man and Wanted will have collected by Labor Day (easily more than $1 billion in North America alone), it's no surprise that more superheroes will be whooshing their way to the screen soon.

Already in the works: Ant Man, The Avengers, Captain America, The Punisher, The Spirit, Thor, Watchmen, Wolverine - and, you can bet on Iron Man II, too.

It's a no-brainer, the appeal of these films. As Stan Lee, the founder of Marvel and the brains behind a mess of the comic book company's pantheon of flawed but mighty folks in tights, said in a recent interview with Forbes: "People are always looking for heroes. I think it starts when you're young. You read fairy tales and there's always the prince who rescues the princess or defeats the giant. . . . It's just something in human nature.

"We always like to identify with the one good guy who saves people from the bad guys, unless you're a natural-born bad guy" - and he laughs here - "then you probably identify with the villains."