You don't have to be in San Diego to get your geek on.

Strangely absent from the Super Bowl's batch of movie trailers was a teaser for The Amazing Spider-Man, the impending reboot of the lucrative Spider-Man movie franchise with Andrew Garfield taking over web-slinging duties from Tobey Maguire. The movie has certainly piqued the interest of fans, from the fact that it sends Peter back to high school and re-tells the story of how he became Spider-Man to the decision to swap the series' previous love interest Mary Jane out for Gwen Stacy (Emma Stone) to the darker tone suggested by the first trailer. (Also? No more organic web shooters. Andrew's clearly got a bigger brain than Tobey.) We haven't seen any other footage from the film since that two-minute teaser debuted last July, but that changed today, when Sony held a simulcast of a new trailer and sizzle reel from The Amazing Spider-Man (due out July 3) at select theaters around the word. We attended the New York screening -- there were also presentations in Los Angeles, London and Rio de Janeiro, Berlin and Tokyo -- and here's our take on what we saw.

Between The Amazing Spider-Man, The Avengers, The Dark Knight Rises and... um, Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance, 2012 is shaping up to be the biggest year for comic-book movies in the genre's history. And while those giant-sized blockbusters are sure to provide plenty of F/X-driven spectacle (and, in the case of Chris Nolan's final Batman flick, some potentially provocative political commentary), perhaps the year's most intriguing, creatively ambitious superhero picture is the one that's not based on an established, long-running four-color title. I'm talking about Chronicle, the feature filmmaking debut of director Josh Trank and screenwriter Max Landis (son of John) that Fox is releasing in theaters today with surprisingly little fanfare. Applying the "found footage" conceit that's almost exclusively been used for horror movies ever since The Blair Witch Project to the story of three ordinary teenagers that accidentally acquire special powers, Chronicle has its issues (a complete lack of subtly chief among them) but overall it's a clever, entertaining spin on the typical superhero origin story. Here are five reasons why comic book fans should vote with their wallets this weekend and make Chronicle the year's first big hit.

There's a clever gag early on in The Adventures of Tintin that effectively passes the baton from the title character's comic-book origins in the 1930s to his 21st century incarnation as the hero of a lavish animated blockbuster. In the scene, investigative journalist/globetrotting adventurer Tintin (played here by Jamie Bell via the magic of motion capture technology) is sitting with his back to the audience, having his picture drawn by a flea market street artist. The illustrator puts the finishing touches on the portrait and hands it over to his subject, saying proudly, "I think I've captured your likeness." With that, Tintin turns towards the camera and we see the character's past and present in the same frame. On the canvas is a sketch of Tintin as Belgian artist Hergé first drew him all those years ago. Next to that is the version of the character the animators at Weta Digital -- the New Zealand effects house operated by Peter Jackson, one of the primary creative forces behind this new movie, along with its director Steven Spielberg -- have come up with. While these two faces aren't precisely mirror images of each other, the mo-cap figure is still recognizably Tintin. In a single shot, the filmmakers convincingly lift this iconic character off the two-dimensional comics page and turn him into a walking, talking movie star.

A movie literally decades in the making, The Adventures of Tintin began its trip to the big screen in 1983, when Steven Spielberg first reached out to Belgian comics artist Hergé about acquiring the film rights to his most famous creation, the intrepid journalist/adventurer Tintin. But for a variety of reasons, the project kept falling by the wayside, that is, until Spielberg teamed up with Peter Jackson in the wake of the New Zealand director's epic Lord of the Rings trilogy. Together, the duo decided that doing full justice to Hergé's comics meant eschewing a conventional live action adaptation in favor of the animation process known as motion capture, whereby live actors perform the characters on set and then computer animators translate their work onto digital models. Jamie Beard, a veteran employee of Jackson's New Zealand-based effects house Weta Digital, served as animation supervisor on The Adventures of Tintin and played a significant role in overseeing the design of the film's world and its characters. He spoke with us about bringing the motion capture Tintin (played by Jamie Bell) to life and why he sometimes made the actors walk on futon mattresses on set.

They're heeeeere! Joss Whedon's all-star adventure The Avengers is still seven months away from hitting theaters, but Disney is wasting little time getting footage out there to the superhero-starved masses. After a new batch of photos hit the interwebs last week, here comes the movie's first official trailer, which offers a far more substantial peek at the movie's scale and set-pieces than that short teaser at the end of Captain America: The First Avenger did. Here's our instant reaction to a trailer we're sure we'll be watching over and over again in the run-up to the movie's May 4, 2012 release.

Ever since striking out on their own to bring their back superhero catalog to the big screen, one of the things the folks at Marvel Studios have done particularly well is matching the right actor with the right colorfully-clad avenger. Learning from such casting bloopers (most of which were committed by other producers/studios) as Ben Affleck's Daredevil, Halle Berry's Storm and Ed Norton's Hulk, the company boldly tapped Robert Downey Jr. (who, at that point, was still primarily known for his off-screen antics) to headline their first independent production, 2008's Iron Man, and then handed the title role in Thor to the untested Australian actor, Chris Hemsworth. Both of those bold picks paid off big time, as Downey and Hemsworth proved to be the best things about their respective movies. The latter's imposing size and fierce sincerity were a great match for the Norse God of Thunder, while the former's irreverence and nimble wit made him the ideal man to portray a daredevil weapons manufacturer-turned-self-employed superhero.

Most comic-book movies set their virtuous heroes and dastardly villains loose in the present day. But there are also quite a few that rewind the clock and transport audiences back to another time and place. Case in point: the latest Marvel movie Captain America: The First Avenger, which takes place almost entirely during the early years of World War II and pits Cap against a squad of Nazi-affiliated soldiers led by a Hitler-esque bad guy, Johann Schmidt a.k.a. The Red Skull. Here are some of the other comics-inspired features that double as period pieces. (One note: We're looking at outings involving colorfully clad heroes only, so more serious comic-to-film translations like From Hell and Road to Perdition have been left on the cutting room floor.)

There's an interesting conceit at the core of Green Lantern, the otherwise overstuffed and clumsy superhero outing starring DC Comics' ring-wielding interstellar cop. Instead of pitting Hall Jordan and his emerald knight alter ego (played by Ryan Reynolds, in his third comic book-inspired outing after Blade: Trinity and X-Men Origins: Wolverine) against a bad guy bent on world domination, the screenwriters -- a four-man team that includes TV veteran Greg Berlanti and comic book scribe Marc Guggenheim -- make his primary enemy his own fear and self-doubt. Okay, so technically the film does feature a bad guy bent on world domination, an enormous yellow space cloud named Parallax that's floating towards Earth with plans to feast on the terror of the entire populace. But thematically, Parallax is just a giant, gaseous manifestation of Hal's shaky confidence in himself and his ability to be the hero his world requires. When he stares into the cloud's vaguely demonic face, he doesn't just see a villain that needs defeating -- he sees his own inadequacies reflected back at him.

The superhero Green Lantern was original created way back in 1940, while a 1959 update cast Hal Jordan as the lone human representative of the galaxy-spanning Green Lantern Corps. Made up of a physically diverse group of aliens, the Corps acts as a sort of interplanetary police force, with a pair of partner Lanterns assigned to each sector of space. And while I've been reading the comics for years, it's only with the onslaught of footage from the upcoming Ryan Reynolds movie that I've started to realize how much another movie borrowed from them 25 years ago.