It’s a bird … it’s a plane … No — It’s a distraction from the economy!

Here at HowStuffWorks.com, one of our all-time favorite topics is superheroes. That’s why I jumped at the chance to blog about it when I ran across this CNN piece, which discusses how the first superheroes were born out of the Great Depression. At the tail end of the Depression (and as war was starting in Europe), Americans created such larger-than-life characters as Superman and Batman.

In Los Angeles, the Skirball Cultural Center is holding a new exhibit of these classic superheroes. Curators of the exhibit say that the characters were a form of escapism for a public who was losing faith in the American Dream.

A similar thing was already happening in America’s movies at the time. Throughout the Depression era, Hollywood produced lavish flicks that historians often chalk up to “escapism” to distract from the tough economic times.