Comic books are for nerds.

As a lifelong nerd and longtime comic book fan, I should know.

Some readers will disagree.

They’ll tell me about erudite comic books in which cartoon rabbits are used to illustrate the plight of Syrian Kurds.

I know about these sorts of comic books and I admire them, even if – like most other comic book fans – I prefer to admire them from afar.

No, the comic books I am talking about are the ones where everything from the pectorals to the emotions to the mammaries is oversized.

In these sorts of titles, even the allegories have enormous breasts.

I am talking about the ones that Hollywood turns into summer blockbusters like “Thor” and “Green Lantern.”

My first comic book was “The Incredible Hulk,” a title that seems to have lost universal appeal over the years, if the lackluster box office figures for the two movie adaptations are any indication.

Here’s why I loved it in the ’70s.

I was teased a lot as a kid (cue the violins …or, better yet, cue the “The Lonely Man” theme from the “Incredible Hulk” TV show), so the idea of a nerd who could turn the tables on his tormentors by transforming into an angry green colossus was appealing to me.

It never occurred to any of the authority figures in my life at the time to question why I was spending so much time looking at illustrations of a half-naked green bodybuilder and that’s probably a good thing. It might have emotionally scarred me.

Instead of writing a column right now, I might instead inhabit some alternate timeline where I’d be wondering why I’d spent my life trying to sell green tea supplements to Sumo wrestlers.

When I was a kid, there were two types of boys: those who read comic books and those who played sports and picked on the kids who read comic books. Never the twain did meet.

The line between the two types has probably blurred since then, but I bet a superhero’s most devoted fan is still a kid who feels helpless and demoralized.

Perhaps the popularity of superheroes at the multiplexes this summer is a sign that many of us are feeling helpless and demoralized.

The economy has turned us all into nerds. We all feel our vulnerabilities keenly, and superhero movies offer vacations in invulnerability.

I am not sure the superheroes have been doing a very good job of saving us this summer.

I saw “Green Lantern” recently and, while I don’t want to say it’s a bad movie, I will say that watching Ryan Reynolds play a superhero was so tedious for me that he might just as well have been reading aloud out of a software engineering manual.

I only have criticism of the movie as a whole and that is that it wasn’t quite watchable enough to be endurable.

“Green Lantern” is so totally lacking in all the qualities that make a good superhero movie, that got me to thinking about what does make a good superhero movie.

I came up with three essentials, a sort of Nerd Nation bill of rights.

We nerds need to band together and demand better superhero movies (preferably when the jocks aren’t around).

I plan to reveal a few plot details from “Green Lantern” soon, so read no further if you haven’t seen the film.

Suspension of disbelief – Whatever strange and unlikely world these superheroes inhabit, the filmmakers have to be talented, imaginative and committed enough to make the world and the rules that govern it believable, if only for two hours. The climactic battle in “Green Lantern” involves two fighter planes made entirely of green energy and a giant humanoid fist made of the same substance. I found myself sitting there thinking, “Why not two VW buses and a giant bean bag chair? Why not two ice cream trucks and a giant Royal Wedding commemorative plate?”

If you get to the climax and can think of a dozen different things that could just as easily be happening at that moment, someone screwed up.

Characters and relationships you care about – Watching special effects is like eating cocktail peanuts. You can consume them all day and never feel full. What makes special effects seem truly special are good scripts and solid acting.

When Superman chases two divergent nuclear missiles in Richard Donner’s 1978 film and Batman races to rescue two people he cares about from separate imminent explosions in “The Dark Knight,” what thrills us is not just the flying sequences or Batman’s array of gadgetry. It’s that these characters have to make the same difficult choice, one that could potentially haunt them forever.

It’s the vulnerability, stupid – Forget what I said before about how we want to live vicariously through invincible characters. I might have been wrong about that. I think what really attracts us to superhero movies are the vulnerabilities they suffer despite being almost indestructible.

For Christopher Reeve’s Superman and Tobey Maguire’s Spider-Man, it’s love and the desire for a normal life. For Christian Bale’s Batman, it’s the realization that being really adept at punching and kicking people isn’t always enough. We love superheroes because they’re just like us, despite the fact that they occasionally bench-press continents.