While The Avengers movie continues to succeed at the box office, the campaign to honor the characters' creators with donations to the Hero Initiative hasn't fared as well. According to the organization's Jim McLauchlin, donations have essentially stopped coming in after five weeks.Over at The Comics Reporter, Tom Spurgeon writes after checking in with McLaughin that "donations that organization has received related to the Avengers movie have trickled down to non-existence," with a rough estimate of the money raised by the campaign totaling somewhere in the region of $4,000- $5,000. That figure may not be nothing, but it pales in comparison to the movie's $576,583,182 domestic box office gross to date.

As Comics Alliance reported last month, cartoonist Jon Morris was the one to come up with the idea of donating the price of a movie ticket to the Hero Initiative in order to offset the ethical dilemma some fans may feel paying money to see The Avengers, considering that the creators (or the estates thereof, in the cases of those who have passed like Jack Kirby and Don Heck) of the characters featured in the movie saw no financial benefit from the movie's record breaking success. "You're probably going to go see The Avengers and, judging by the early reviews, you'll probably enjoy it," Morris wrote when proposing the idea. "If every concerned comic fan -- every superhero aficionado who learned to live by the lessons of altruism and sacrifice taught by these comics -- donated the price of their ticket, well, it may not hit a billion dollars but it'll bring in a lot of money for a good and relevant cause."

For those who may not have donated yet, but find themselves considering doing so now, it's very easy to donate to the Hero Initiative whether by check, money order, Network for Good online payment or PayPal. As the organization is a federally-registered not-for-profit, donations are tax-deductible and, of course, donating is a generally good thing to do even if a reaction to The Avengers isn't your motivation.

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