BUILDING a superhero from scratch is noisy and hazardous. "Let's find a place where it's quieter!" The man shouting was Kevin Feige, the president of production for Marvel Studios, the Hollywood start-up that takes flight on May 2 with its first film, "Iron Man." Feige was walking, carefully, through one of the film's massive Playa Vista sets where a whirling metal saw was kicking up a cascade of bright orange sparks.

Once in a quieter corridor, Feige gushed about its special effects, but then said the greatest asset of the film is a hero with weakness hard-wired into his psyche. "That's what makes Marvel characters special, they are people who become heroes but also have flaws and they struggle with them," he said. "Look, the costumes can easily beGoodman decided to take a flier on this new "comic book" craze. The venture hardly looked like the stuff of history -- the pragmatic Goodman had a fairly low opinion of his newsstand products. "Fans," Goodman once said, "are not interested in quality."

Still, that first issue produced two lasting characters, the Human Torch and Namor the Sub-Mariner, and they were soon followed by patriotic World War II creation Captain America. But it wasn't until the 1960s that Marvel seized on an identity that really mattered in American pop culture. That's when Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko and the other creators in the self-styled "House of Ideas" gave the world its first soapy superheroes, masked men who saved the world but somehow lost the girl, bounced their rent