I’m not a kid anymore, but somehow I think I’m still as excited about comic book mythology as ever. There’s something very primal about these characters that makes them so attractive, starting with their colourful appearance: Captain America’s red, white and blue costume and shield, Iron Man’s yellow and red armour, Hulk’s green skin, Thor’s red cape and silver hammer… Eye-popping stuff. It’s also interesting to note how each of these superheroes reflects a type of fantastic figure beloved by little boys (and fully grown geeks). There’s a soldier, a robot (sort of), a big monster, some kind of Viking warrior…

Going a bit deeper, one of the things Marvel Comics always got right is making their heroes relatable, however super they might be. So Steve Rogers, a.k.a. Captain America, is the weakling whose wishes to be strong are answered, as well as a straight-arrow, old-fashioned fellow who finds himself in a new world he’s not sure he fits in with. Tony Stark, a.k.a. Iron Man, is cocky egotism and megalomania personified, but with so much wit and charm on top that you can’t hold his flaws against him. The funny thing about the Hulk is that, when he’s not turning into a green ball of rage, he’s a really nice, easygoing science geek. As for Thor, he’s a bit more out there, Norse deity that he is, yet the issues he has to deal with, his troubled relationship with his brother Loki for instance, are relatively down to earth.

All of these things were well conveyed in the previous Marvel Studios movies – Iron Man 1 and 2, The Incredible Hulk, Thor and Captain America: The First Avenger – but never quite as effectively as they are in The Avengers, which is, simply put, the best goddamn superhero flick ever made. "What about The Dark Knight?" you might ask, as my friend and colleague Joseph Belanger did. Well, that may have been a better film-film, but Christopher Nolan’s Batman movies are not actually that comic book-y – they’re more like cop/gangster dramas that happen to feature dudes in costumes.

On the other hand, The Avengers is a tremendous, stupendous, unapologetic superhero extravaganza, quite literally a comic book translated to the screen, using all the most expensive state-of-the-art toys available to a Hollywood blockbuster filmmaker. Most importantly, the guy at the helm, writer-director Joss Whedon, is a smart, resourceful artist who’s genuinely enthusiastic about this stuff. Tellingly, in addition to being the creator of cult TV series such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Firefly, and the co-writer of films such as Toy Story and the recent The Cabin in the Woods, he has authored a bunch of comic books, including a run on Astonishing X-Men.

Coming from TV, Whedon also has a way with juggling multiple characters and directing an ensemble of actors, and one of the most enjoyable things about The Avengers is the dynamic between de facto leader Captain America (Chris Evans), wiseass genius billionaire Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.), fellow brilliant scientist Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo) and "the other guy" (Hulk), grandiloquent demigod Thor (Chris Hemsworth), plus badass S.H.I.E.L.D. agents Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson), Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner) and Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson).

If only for what might be the all-star cast of the year, the movie is a kick, and it’s worth noting that Whedon doesn’t just rush from one over-the-top set piece to the next – much of the first two acts is devoted to carefully putting all the pieces on the chessboard and developing the characters. But when you get to the film’s last stretch, starting with the awesome "suit up" montage, you’re in for an absolutely astonishing, brilliantly shot and cut, truly epic, special FX-heavy 3D action climax. As Loki (played with slimy arrogance by Tom Hiddleston, who makes a great villain) and his army of Chitauri aliens unleash unholy mayhem upon New York, Earth’s Mightiest Heroes finally stop fighting each other and figure out how to work as a team.

It may not look like it yet, what with the weather in Montreal these days, but the summer movie season has begun – with a Hulk smash!

Red-clad students board subway cars during the morning rush hour on the orange line of the metro. One per car, they stand silently looking straight ahead. When the car stops they get out, position themselves at equal intervals along the platform so that when the metro pulls out of the station passengers see a blur of red.

Red, the colour of radical movements, has been taken over by the students, who wear red knitted or crocheted squares, or squares of red felt, attached with a safety pin. Or just a plain old square of red duct tape.

Music students perform a professional calibre Sacre du printemps by Igor Stravinsky to cheer the protesters, a piece that sent the Paris establishment into paroxysms of rage when it was first played in the spring of 1913.

Students build red cubes, using them as part of a piece of street theatre at the Earth Day demonstration, the biggest demonstration in the history of Canada and Quebec.

Videos, installation art, signs brandished by philosophy students in Latin and Greek. Fine arts students make picket signs with wonderfully detailed portraits of Quebec politicians.

Poems, songs, videos and music clips. If the purpose of an education is to learn how to think creatively, then the education system is working.

For 40 years, older people have lamented self-absorbed, apolitical youth. Now that so many have taken their ideas to the streets, many of those same observers are outraged, calling them spoiled, pointing to their iPads and Starbucks coffees as evidence. The unemployment rate for young people is at 14 percent and most of them end up burdened with huge debt when they graduate. Many students work while studying – 20 or more hours per week. They may have a Starbucks coffee from time to time. So what?

Supporters of the Occupy movement in New York speak admiringly of the Quebec student mobilization.

The Occupied Wall Street Journal, the newspaper of the movement, writes: "A deep democratic movement, something most of us have never seen and scarcely imagined, turned a small park near Wall Street into the centre of a global storm. Everybody knows the deck is stacked. But it turns out not everyone is willing to put up with it."

Beautifully written, and who would have thought that the Quebec branch of this worldwide mobilization, with 300,000 people in the streets, would have become the most stupendous of all? Quebecers in the streets are united, with the world marching. Everyone knows something is profoundly wrong – with the economy, with the environment, with the political system, corrupted with cash.

André Pratte, chief editorialist of La Presse, who is in favour of the tuition fee increase, compares the upheaval to May 1968. Students around the world protested against the war in Vietnam and demanded a voice in their education. In 1970, four students were shot down and killed at Kent State University in Ohio. You have probably heard the song by Canadian Neil Young that starts with the line, "Tin soldiers and Nixon’s coming…"

When it was all over, students had a say in the running of educational institutions.

Quebec’s student strike perplexes, annoys, thrills. Montreal writer Elise Moser says she supports it for three reasons:

a) The more accessible education is, the fairer, more stable and richer a society is, because we can develop the resources of all our people, not just the thin layer of entitled wealthy who can pay for education. That seems obvious, doesn’t it?

b) The strike is not just against a tuition hike, it’s for a much broader vision of an equitable society.

c) The investment in an undergrad degree produces much higher economic returns to the state than an equal amount in subsidies to industry.

On March 22 at least 100,000 people protested peacefully in the streets of Montreal against the tuition fee hike. That was the first sign that something really big was underway. In another song of the 60s, Bob Dylan sang, "Something is happening here, and you don’t know what it is, do you, Mister Jones?"

The tuition fee hike amounts to a 75 percent increase over five years – $325 per year for five years. About $325-million in all. The cost of the fiasco of a new building constructed by the Université du Québec à Montréal called L’Îlot Voyageur: $500-million. So why the insistence on the fee hike?

Ideology. An election promise. The need to be seen to be fiscally responsible.

After the World Trade Center attacks, social activism declined. The gap between the 1 percent and the 99 percent grew. Now over ten years later a new generation of activists is looking around and saying, "Wait a minute, this system is not so great. The neo-liberal model led to a worldwide financial crisis that brought the world economy almost to its knees. Just what is so great about the status quo?"

It has always been easier to stand back, cross your arms and do nothing. To go along with things as they are. But the reason we have public education, votes for women, public healthcare, libraries and paved roads is because people who didn’t just go along with the status quo built systems that defended the interests of the people.

They were called names too – "communists," "anarchists," "agitators."

I was struck by an interview I saw with a government minister who said she doesn’t like demonstrations. No one likes demonstrations, Minister. It’s just that sometimes demonstrations are the only tool people have to make themselves heard.

Let the last word go to filmmaker Hugo Latulippe, excerpted from the poem he wrote called Nous sommes des millions published in Voir:

"Puis, raillé nos enfants insurgés.
Minimisé l’envergure du geste, la largeur des idées.
Minimisé les milliers d’entre eux dans la rue.
Grave erreur."
[...]
"Nous sommes arrivés à ce qui commence.
Le feu a pris pour de bon.
Nous sommes des millions."

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"NATO, NORAD, ICC, end Canada’s complicity!" shout some of the grown-ups. "What is NATONORADICC?" I ask.

The horses move in on the crowd. We leave. "Jesus Christ," my dad says, "that should not be happening. Those police officers have no business going after the demonstration." "Non," says my mum. "Il vaut mieux s’en aller."

Demonstrating for peace is an old tradition. Of necessity it often involves children.

Children were everywhere on Sunday, April 22, 2012. Children, parents, fresh-faced young and old people. A respectful, good humoured, wildly varied crowd that politely stopped at the traffic lights. The same kind of crowd that carefully avoided trampling the tulip beds in Dominion Square a month earlier, when over 100,000 students marched through downtown protesting tuition fee increases.

On Sunday, marchers were organized to form a huge human tree, or hand, spread across the street and the park next to Mount Royal. It ended with a concert by some of Quebec’s most celebrated performers, including Pierre Lapointe, Ariane Moffatt, Gilles Vigneault and Diane Dufresne, who closed by singing Ne tuons pas la beauté du monde. The concert was a smoothly produced showcase organized by one of our most talented directors, Dominic Champagne.

The biggest demonstrations I have ever been in have been in the last month here in Montreal. One was for more accessible education a month ago on March 22. And one was for Earth Day, on April 22, a call on the Quebec and Canadian governments to respect the Kyoto protocol, to slow development in the north, to freeze shale gas development until more is known about the possible ill effects.

There were 48 Innu women who walked 1,000 kilometres from Maliotenam to protest against the proposed plan to open up Quebec’s north.

The coverage in the print media of the demonstration on Sunday is telling. Le Devoir ran an artistic panoramic photo by Jacques Nadeau of the crowd in the shape of a tree with a huge headline and subhead that read, "Un grand cri du peuple – une manifestation d’une ampleur sans prédédent pour la Journée de la Terre," quoting organizers putting the numbers at 250,000 to 300,000 people. La Presse ran a similar photo with the headline "Une forêt humaine – marche historique pour le Jour de la Terre, environs 125,000 personnes (300,000 selon les organisateurs de l’évènement) ont convergé hier vers Montréal pour former un arbre géant." The Gazette ran a big street-level photo of the crowd, captioned "Marching for Mother Earth, huge crowd rallies peacefully for environmental issues," and said there was an estimated 250,000 people, ten times what organizers expected.

The newspaper of record in English Canada made no mention of the demonstration in the print edition of the paper I received at my doorstep the next day. Instead The Globe and Mail talked about hockey, and cuts to Statistics Canada. Le Journal de Montréal ran the story of the demo inside on pages 2 and 3, headlining it, "Une manif calme… enfin."

The Globe and the Journal seem to have completely missed the story. There is something going on. One can only imagine how many people would have gone to the Earth Day demonstration if the weather hadn’t been so raw and cold. There is a deep feeling that something isn’t right. That the political class is not listening to the concerns of a big segment of the population.

A huge peaceful demonstration is a major achievement. One that caught the Charest Liberals completely by surprise, I am sure. There hasn’t been anything like this in 40 years. Maybe that explains Charest’s tone-deaf joking about sending students to work, way up in the north, while a handful of angry students fought with police outside the Palais des Congrès last Friday.

No one really anticipated the size of these two huge demonstrations, including the people who organized them. There have been many smaller demonstrations over the past few weeks, and hundreds of people have been arrested. Violent exchanges between police and a handful of masked protesters have nothing to do with these huge peaceful demonstrations.

Groundswells of protest arise at key periods of disaffection and frustration with the status quo. Ignoring them is a very short-sighted political strategy. The civil society is a formidable force. Most of the time the civil society is a sleeping giant. That giant is showing serious signs of awakening.