The Avengers

“If anything, Avengers is sort of a second-generation 9/11 movie. The aliens attack, but it is ... a rich capitalist, a Norse god, a Russian spy, an American black ops assassin, a lost scientist, and a World War II-era hero who defend New York (and by extension, the world), not the US government,” he says.

The superhero origin story of Joss Whedon goes like this:

Whedon, b. 1964, grows up surrounded by teachers and writers. His grandfather wrote for The Donna Reed Show in the '50s; his father, Tom Whedon, wrote for The Electric Company, Benson, The Golden Girls. His mother, Lee Stearns, who died in 1992, was an English teacher, a political activist, and a novelist.

After his parents' divorce, Joss goes to boarding school in England, studies film at Wesleyan, then moves out to California to try to write movies. Eventually he does. But first he works in a video store and bangs out TV spec scripts, one of which gets him hired as a staff writer on Roseanne, a job he'll later describe, on different occasions, as a valuable learning experience and "baptism by radioactive waste."