Marvel must be feeling flush, especially after the box office performance of recent movies starring Spider Man, the X-Men and the Fantastic Four. Now, The Motley Fool reports that Microsoft and Marvel have joined forces to put Marvel characters into massively multiplayer online games developed for Microsoft's Xbox 360 console. The deal was announced at, of all places, a comic book convention.

The Motley Fool puts the deal into context:

"One of the soundest investment arguments backing Motley Fool Stock Advisor pick Marvel is its ability to make its intellectual property work in so many channels. Licensing its characters for videogames is no new thing, [but] this is Marvel's first foray into massively multiplayer online games, which is a particularly promising segment of the videogame industry. As far as Microsoft is concerned, gaining a cache of well-known characters is a logical step as it competes with Sony's PlayStation and Nintendo's Gamecube, not to mention the massively multiplayer online games that are available for the ubiquitous home computer without requiring a console."