Nerdy Real Life Superheroes to Keep City Safe from Bullies, Jocks
Originally posted: http://kotaku.com/5611331/nerdy-real-life-superheroes-to-keep-city-safe-from-bullies-jocks
They walk among us—average citizens who don capes and masks at night to battle evil-doers. They call themselves Real Life Superheroes, and they are, of course, deeply nerdy.
A visit to the World Superhero Registry – the apparent home of this movement on the web – reveals images of adult men and women in full-on superhero garb with invented monikers like “Death’s Head Moth”, “Master Legend” and “Dark Guardian”. Their mission? To rid the city of crime and help those in need. Honorable goals, but they seem to be most successful at taking themselves waayyy too seriously and confusing the hell out of the criminals they encounter.
Dark Guardian, for example – whose only superpower seems to be his heavy Staten Island accent – records an encounter where he attempts to chase a hulking drug dealer out of Washington Square Park. When it is revealed that Dark Guardian isn’t actually a cop nor does he possess any sort of legal authority to tell the guy to move, things get kinddaaaa awkward. It’s like he’s just come to the stunned realization that he can’t shoot laser beams out of his eyes, and the drug dealer, towering over Dark Guardian, feels too bad for him to even bother roughing him up.
Then there’s Shadow Hare, a 21-year-old whose intimidating Venom-style getup is belied by some B-roll footage of our hero flouncing down a fire escape. Such is the problem for real life superheroes: life is just a little too real sometimes to pull off wearing tights.
“Citizen Prime” spent $4,000 on his custom body armor suit – and spends most of the time wearing it doing common household chores like watering the lawn and vacuuming. He lives in a pretty quiet neighborhood, which reveals itself to be another obstacle for our real life superheroes.
But life isn’t always so cushy for our real life superheroes. “Master Legend” demonstrates his Iron Fist, for use when drastic measures need to be taken (against defenseless load-bearing walls):
Local news anchors, of course, love these sort of stories because they get to do the reports in that bemused, sing-songy tone that lets us know that this is a story about “colorful local oddballs” who shouldn’t be “taken too seriously”:
It’s sad and hilarious and kind of touching. I suppose they’re heroes, in a way. They’re not exactly rescuing people from burning buildings… but they are wearing capes. And that’s gotta count for something, right?
Superveri
Scanned copies by Entomo:
From Extra Magazine
By Claudia Ciammatteo
Bastano una tuta (o un paio di mutandoni), un mantello e una maschera per essere come Batman e l’Uomo Ragno o quasi.
Quelli “iscrittia all; Albo” sono circa 200. Difendono vecchiette, si battono peri lavoratori, fanno pronto soccorso e… spalano la neve.
La criminalita dilaga, la corruzione e alle stele, l’inquinamento cresce, lo spetro del terrorismo inernazionale aleggia in tutti gli aeroporti. Per salvarci ci vorrebbe Superman… E, infatti, c’e. Anzi, ce n’e piu di uno. Anche se puo sembrare incredibile, chi pens ache vegliare sul bene dell’umanita sia solo roba da bumetti sbaglia.
Al mondo esistono quasi 200 supereroi in carne e ossa, che inventandosi un nome altettanto suggestive di quello di batman o l’Uomo Ragno e indossando un costume all’altezza del compito, hammo deciso di combattere le ingiustizie o difendere I piu deboli. O almeno di provarci. Sono riuniti nel Real Life World Superhero Registry, ovvero, il primo Albo ufficiale dei supereroi della via reale, nato nel 2005.
Dai fumetti, al fatti. Il fenomeno ha almeno Quattro capostipiti. Tra questi, a Citta del Messico, Superbarrio Gomez e un’autentica celebrita: in aderente costume di lycra rosso, mutandoni e mantello Dorati sul fisico corpulento, il volto coperto da una maschera da wrestler “luchador”, si batte per I diritti dei lavoratori messicani ed e sempre in prima fila nei cortei di protesta. A New York, invece, e famosa gia da alcuni anni Terrifica, paladin della sicurezza femminile, che pattuglia locali e bar armata di spray irritante al peperoncino, cellular e macchina fotografica. Altrettanto célèbre, nonostante la sua identita sia segreta, Angle-Grinder Man (letteralmente: Uomo Smerigliatrice angolare), in tuta blu e stivali d’oro, che di note pattuglia le auto in divieto dis sosta dale ganasce messe dai vigili. Per non parlare di Captain Ozone, di Belfast, supereroe ecologista in cappuccino e lungo mantello blu, stemma nero e che dopo le ultime battalglie a difesa dei salmo ni e del riciclaggio delle tavolette del water, figura ufficialmnte tra gli organizzatori del Green Poer Rally, mega dimostazione pacifica in difesa delle energie rinnovabili che avverra simultaneamente in Canada e negli Stati Uniti il 31 luglio prossimo.
C’e chi aiuta la polizia con segnalazioni anonime.
Da Scorpione verde a Zetaman. Scorrendo l’elenco del registro dei supereroi, una cosa e evidente: lo sparuto gruppo originario e andato moltiplicandosi. Sui nomi d’arte e sul tip di missione degli eroi (poco “super” ma molto “utile”) la fantasia nono manca: in Canada opera Polar Man (Uomo Polare), pronto a splare la neve per evitare rovinsoe cadute agli anziani; dale parti di Cincinnati Shadow Hare (Lepre ombra), che con la maschere near sul volto protégé i senzatetto; nell’Oregon c’e Zetaman (l’uomo Zeta), campione di primo soccorso.
A vegliare sui cittadini assediati dai malintenzionati, tra gli altri, ci sono poi Fox Fire (Volpe di fuoco), paladina femminile travestita con un cappotto di pelle near e una maschera di volpe; Dark Guardian (Guardiano Scuro), che porta una maschera veneziana sul naso, e anche il misterioso The Eye (l’Occhino). Ma ci sono ache Green Scorpion (Scorpione verde), che opera in New Mexico; Death’s Head Moth (Falena testa di morto) in Virginia e Mr Silent (Silenzioso), l’angelo delle notti dell’Illinois.
Piu recente e la nascita di gruppi di supereroi, come la “Black Monday Society” (Societa del lunedi mero) nello Utah, la Great Lakes Heroes Guild (la Gilda degli eroi dei Grandi laghi) mello sato del Wisconsin e, a New York, l’Heroes Network (rete gegli Eroi) fondata dall’amomino Thothian, che come superavversario ha scelto addirittura Osama Bin Laden.
Ma chi si nasconde dietro tute, maschere e mantelli? La stragrande maggiroanza dei supereroi in carne e ossa prospera olteroceano. <<Quello dei supereroi della vita reale>> dicono gli esperti intervistati dai network americani come Cbe e Cnn, <<e un fenomeno socilogico che si e sviluppato principalmente negli Stati Uniti, come reazione allo choc dell’11 settembre>>. Ed e stato raffrorzato dalla politica di cittadinanza attivca lanciata dal presidente Barack Obama.
Niente armi e molta rete. Per vigilare contro la possibilita di infiltrazione di violenti, incoscienti, o gustizeri “fai da te” tra le loro fila, il regolamento ufficiale dell’Albo mondiale dei supereroi stabilisce criteri rigidi di ingress (vedi riquadro in queste pagine) e limitazioni, pena la radiazione; no all’uso di armi vere, innanzitutto. Si invece ad armi e coltelli di plastic, e a tecniche di autodifesa. Del resto, anche se non fermano aerie con la mano ne vanno piu veocia della luce, questi emuli di Superman qualche rischo lo corrono ugualmente. Per scambiarsi dritte e consigli, e dare appuntamento ai propri fan a caccia di aggiornamenti sulle imprese del giustiziere perferito, molti di loro utilizzano il social netork MySpace.
La crescent prpolarita di alcuni di loro, che privia di superpoteri hanno necessariamente ambizioni piu limitate di quelle dei supereroi dei fumetti, suscita pero qualche perplessita. <<Ma e un errore>> fa notare lo scrittore Giampelmo Schiaragola, autore di due scherzosi vademecum per aspirant supereroi, <<il primo compito di un eroe non e tanto quello di sconfiggere il male; quanto di dare il buon esempio, ovvero di creare altri eroi>>.
Mentre qualcuno songna perfino di sconfiggere Bin Laden
E a Napoli, Entomo combatte criminalita e inquinamento. Fra le sue mission: dare una mano nell’emergenza rifiuti
L’uomo-insetto partenopeo. E in Italia? L’uncio supereroe di casa nostra ammesso nell’anagrafe ufficiale, e Entomo: l’Uomo insetto che vegla sulla citta di Napoli. Il suo motto: “Ascolta il mio ronzio, temi il mio morso: inietto giustizia”. Ha 32 anni, e attivo dal 2007, e la sua identita e segreta. Ha un costume da insetto verde chiaro, con maniche scure, sul petto il simbolo stilizzato della lettera greca “sigma” e combatte criminalita e inquinamento grazie (a suo dire) alle sue tre armi: I sensi sviluppati come quelli degli insetti, le techiche di autodifesa e le segnalazioni anonime alla polizia.
<<Pattuglio le strade della citta, di giorno e di note, fermo I piccolo crimini come posso>> ha recentemete dichiarato in un’intervista al quotidano Il Reformista. Entomo sostiene che il suo costume giochi da diversivo, sorprendendo e distraendo I malintenzionati; usa una tecnica di autodifesa chiamata Krav Maga per disarmare I nemici, e li intimidisce senza ferifli. Tra li piu recent missioni, l’emergenza rifiuti a Napoli: <<Ho fermato alcuni tentative di teppismo ai Danni delle persone, delle strutture e dell’ambiente>>. Un modus operandi illegal, almeno I Italia, dove per legge (n.152 del 1975) e vitato comparire mascherati in luogo pubblico. <<Ma io non sono un esaltato, non mi oppongo o contrappongo alla polizia, ne mi sostitusisco a essa>> obiettta Entomo. <<Anzi, li auto a distanza con le mie segnalazioni anonime>>. E a chi aspira a emularne le imprese, consiglia: <<Trova il Supereroe nascoasto dentro di te. Quindi Materializzalo come una seconda pelle e sii quello che sei gia veramente. Fine della storia>>.
Boutique per Super
Eora che cosa mi metto?. Il dubbio puo venire anche ai supereroi. Per questo, a New York, e nata la prima boutique dedicate ai paladini dell’umanita, dove si possono acquistare costume personalizzati, maschere, quanti, armi e alteri accessori: si chimama Brooklyn Superhero Supply Co., e ha anche um goliardico catalogo online. Quache idea? Un mantello classic da supereroe, o da auito-supereroe, in seta a glitterato (cioe pieno di lustrini). Ha un prezzo oscillante tra 1 22 e 1 35 dollari. Mai pui senza. Ma si puo trovare anche la pistol a particelle ($25), il vaporizzatore sonico ($30), il campo di forza in mylar ($12), un’arma “a protoni” ($20), il dispositivo per leggere nel pensiero ($99.50) o una pinna meccanico ($39). I piu creative possono anche acquistare il fluido per la clonazione ($9) e il cuore cibernetico ($16.25).
Vuoi essere un supereroe? Ecco I criteri per l’ammissone.
Chi non ha mai fantasticato di combattere il crimine e debellare spaventosi nemici? Non e facile come sembra: per essere accettati nel Registro mondiale die supereroi (www.worldsuperheroregistry.com), e godere del privilegio di una scheda personale, con il proprio nome, area d’azione, abilita speciali, bisogna obbedire a tre regole indergabili.
I precetti degli eroi. Primo: non valgono ne autocandidature ne raccomandazioni. Per iscriversi bisogna essere contattati direttamente dal Registro mondiale, in seguito a una comprovata (attraverso ritagli di giornale o testimonianze dirette di rappresntanti legali) attivita di supereroe. Secondo: l’unica motivazione personale ammessa e la disinteressata vocazione al bene dell’umanita (quindi un candidate non pruo rievere incentive economici di alcun tipo, ne essere stipendiato per la sua attivita o rappresentare associazioni esterne, anche sense scopo di lucro). Terzo: il costume da supereroe non serve a proteggere solo l’anonimato ma e “simbolo indossabile” dei valori a difesa dell’umanita; sono dunque vietati I costume volgari e inappropriate.
Translation to English via Google
With just a suit (or a pair of knickers), a cape and a mask to be like Batman and Man Spider or so.
Those “all members; Roll” is about 200. Defend old women, are fighting dangerous workers, are first aid and … shovel snow.
Rampant crime, corruption and stele, pollution grows, get free of terrorism inernazionale hovering at all airports. It would take Superman to save us … And in fact there. Indeed, there are more than one. Although it may seem incredible ache watch over those who think mankind is just good stuff bumetti wrong.
Worldwide, there are nearly 200 heroes in the flesh, who invented a name altettanto suggestive of that of Batman and Spider or the man wearing a costume to the task, Hamm decided to fight injustice and defend the weak. Or at least try. Met in Real Life World Superhero Registry, ie, the first official list of superheroes by real, born in 2005.
From Comics to facts. The phenomenon has at least four founders. Among them, Mexico City, Superbarrio Gomez and genuine celebrity in tight red lycra dress, knickers and coat the Golden physical portly, his face covered by a mask wrestler “luchador”, fighting for workers’ rights Mexican and always at the forefront of protest marches. In New York, however, already famous and terrifying for some years, champion of women’s security, patrolling and local bar armed with irritating pepper spray, cell phone and camera.
Equally impressive, although his identity is secret, Angle-Grinder Man (literally: Angle Grinder Man), in blue overalls and boots with gold, notes that the patrol car in parking ban dis dale shoes made by the brigade. Not to mention Captain Ozone, Belfast, superhero ecologist in cappuccino and long blue coat, black coat and that after the last psalm ni battalglie in defense of the tablets and recycling of water, figure among the organizers of Green ufficialmnte Poer Rally Mega peaceful defense can show that renewable energy will take place simultaneously in Canada and the United States on July 31 next.
There are those who help the police with anonymous reporting.
From Scorpion green Zetaman. Go down to the register of superhero, one thing is clear: the tiny original group and went multiplying. Names of art and the tip of the heroes of mission (just “super” but very “useful”) lack the imagination ninth in Canada by Polar Man (Man Polar), ready to splare rovinsoe to avoid the snow falls for the elderly; Dale shares of Cincinnati Shadow Hare (Hare shadow), that with the masks on the face near the protégé homeless in Oregon there Zetaman (man Zeta), Standard First Aid.
To ensure the citizens besieged by the bad guys, among others, are then Fox Fire (Fire Fox), a champion female transvestite leather coat and a mask near fox Dark Guardian (Dark Guardian), who wears a Venetian mask nose, and even the mysterious The Eye (the Occhini). But there are ache Green Scorpion (Scorpio green), which operates in New Mexico, Death’s Head Moth (Moth skull) in Virginia, and Mr. Silent (Silent), the angel of nights Illinois.
More recently the emergence of groups of superheroes such as “Black Monday Society (Society of mere Monday) in Utah, the Great Lakes Heroes Guild (the guild of heroes of the Great Lakes) mello Sato of Wisconsin and in New York the Heroes Network (network GEGL Heroes) based dall’amomino Thothian, which chose as superavversario even Osama Bin Laden.
But who is behind suits, masks and capes? The vast maggiroanza superhero in the flesh olteroceano prosperous. << say experts interviewed by American networks like CNN and Cbe, >>. And it was the policy of citizenship raffrorzato attivca launched by President Barack Obama.
No weapons and plenty of networking. To guard against the possibility of infiltration of violent, reckless, or gustizeri DIY “among their ranks, the official rules of the Dawn World of superheroes down strict criteria for entry (see box on this page) and limits the penalty radiation, no use of real weapons, first. It instead weapons and plastic knives, and self-defense techniques. Moreover, even if they do not stop with the hand aerie veocia leave most of the light, these rivals Superman’s some risk it running anyway. To exchange tips and advice, and to meet their fans hunting for updates on the executioner peripherals companies, many of them use social netork MySpace.
The growing prpolarita some of them, without necessarily having superpowers ambitions more limited than those of superhero comics, but raises doubts. <<Giampelmo Schiaragola noted writer, author of two humorous handbook for aspiring superheroes, >>.
While some songna even to defeat bin Laden
And in Naples, Entomo fight crime and pollution. Among his mission: to help in emergency waste
The man-insect Naples. And in Italy? The uncia superhero home nell’anagrafe official admitted, and Entomo: Man insect that watches over the city of Naples. His motto: “Hear my buzz, my bite themes: inject justice.” He has 32 years, and active since 2007, and his identity and secret. It has a pale green insect costume, with dark sleeves, chest stylized symbol of the Greek letter “sigma” and fights crime and pollution through (he said) its three arms: The meaning developed as those of insects, of Techichi self-defense and anonymous reporting to the police.
<< recentemete he said in an interview with the newspaper The Reforma. Entomo argues that his custom games as a diversion, surprising and distracting the attackers, using a technique called Krav Maga self-defense to disarm enemies, and intimidate without ferifli. Among them the most recent mission, the garbage emergency in Naples: >>. A modus operandi illegal, at least Italy, where by law (n. 152 of 1975) and vines appear masked in public places. << obiettta Entomo. << And to those who aspire to emulate companies, advises: >>.
Super Boutique
Eora what I wear?. The question can also be superheroes. For this reason, New York, and founded the first boutique dedicated to the heroes of humanity, where you can buy custom costume, masks, those who alter weapons and accessories: you chimama Brooklyn Superhero Supply Co., and also um undergraduate catalog online . Quache idea? A classic superhero cape, superhero-or I help, Silk Glitter (ie full of glitter). Has a price ranging from $ 35 a 22:01. Never without pui. But you can also find the gun particles ($ 25), the vaporizer sonic ($ 30), the force field Mylar ($ 12), a weapon “proton” ($ 20), the device to read minds ($ 99.50) or a mechanical fin ($ 39). The more creative can also buy the fluid for cloning ($ 9) and heart cybernetic ($ 16.25).
Want to be a superhero? Here are the criteria for ammissone.
Who has not fantasized about fighting crime and eradicating frightening enemies? Not easy as it seems to be accepted in the superhero day Global Registry (www.worldsuperheroregistry.com), and enjoy the privilege of a personal card with your name, area of action, special skills, we must obey three rules indergabili.
The precepts of the heroes. First, they are not worth candidate, nor recommendations. To enroll you must be contacted directly from the Global Registry, following a proven (through newspaper clippings and eyewitness accounts of rappresntanti legal) activities of superhero. Secondly, the only permissible motivation and selfless vocation for the good of humanity (thus not a candidate pruo rievere economic incentives of any kind, be they salaried for his activities or associations representing the external sense even for profit). Thirdly, the superhero costume is not only to protect the anonymity but “symbol wearable values in defense of humanity, are therefore prohibited the suit vulgar and inappropriate.
The 12 Greatest Real-Life Superheroes of All Time
Originally Posted: http://www.ranker.com/list/the-12-greatest-real-life-superheroes-of-all-time/davehoward
By DaveHoward
The LAPD has performed a bltizkreig assault on Superheroeson Hollywood Blvd ( http://ow.ly/1Wsch ). True, just in front of the world famous Grauman’s Chinese Theater, dozens of Real-Life people who dress as superheroes on a daily basis were rounded up in a raid. In a sinister government plot not seen since “Heroes., Police jailed members of the” X-Men,” Batman, Edward Scissorhands, Bumblebee, Mr. Incredible and Catwoman. The Incredible Hulk and Superman were just two of the iconic loiterers who outsmarted the fuzz and returned to panhandle another day. Unlike these classic, renowned panhandlers, here are 12 people who really make a difference with their superhero costumes.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vz8r0qOm5OMNorse God Thor Stops A Home Invasion/Robbery
This annoying man in the video to your left lets us all know exactly what happened (for a written version of the story, click the link at the bottom of this item).
During a home invasion, a robber was stunned to find a man dressed as the Norse God Thor inside, defending the home. The intruder was chased off from the flat in Edinburgh and left his shoes, and a pitchfork behind. The man jumped out of a window, landing on a roof and was not heard from again after he escaped the Norse God’s wrath.
Local resident Torvald Alexander was dressed up as Thor for a New Year’s Eve Party. The man is 40 years old, and still completely and irrevocably awesome.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/scotland/edinburgh_and_east/7807920.stm
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mb_LghFFwkkSpider-Man Prevents Comic Book Robbery
In this absolutely heartwarming story, a local comic book store owner dressed as Spider-Man to commemorate International Free Comic Book Day. He stood around his store dressed as the masked hero all day, greeting customers and enjoying the day. That is, until a man tried to steal a comic book worth well over $100.
The owner, dressed as Spidey the whole time, noticed the shoplifter, took the book out of his bag and brought him to justice.
The best quote from the video is the shop-owner himself getting quite cheeky and letting people know about the crew who helped him out (a couple dressed as Jedi Knights and a man dressed as The Flash): “The Jedis watched the door, while The Flash kept things running…”. Well played, sir. Well played.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Da1ADqPplQ4Shadow Hare Actually Cleans Up Cincinnati Crime
As the movie/comic book “Kick-Ass” asked, “why does nobody actually dress up and try to be a superhero?”… this leader of an Avengers-style (kind of) crew in Cincinnati who calls himself “Shadow Hare” proves that question wrong.
He and his team of “heroes” patrol the streets of Cincinnati, OH, and solve crimes, help the homeless and walk around in broad daylight like it was Halloween at your local high school and nobody had enough money for a real costume.
It’s great to see people legitimately helping out the general public while asking for nothing in return; but it’s funnier to see them dressed up like comic book heroes and handing certified police men business cards in case they “ever need help”.
Their persistence, at least, is nothing to be laughed at — despite Shadow Hare himself talking like the narration in a badly written comic book.
Batman and Robin Catch Drug Suspect
Two police men dressed up as Batman and Robin captured a suspected drug offender in a weird sting operation. Once they approached the door, their intent (to confuse/disorient/distract the offenders) worked to their advantage, as the offenders would not answer the door for some crazy, costumed strangers knocking loudly on their door.
When one of the suspects decided to run out to the back of the house to try and escape, Batman and Robin were there waiting for him. Batman chased the man, hopped over a fence and arrested him. According to fellow officers, PC Eames said: “The bad thing about the operation is that we had to endure hours of terrible puns from PC Holman.”
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-415996/Police-dress-Batman-Robin-catch-drugs-suspect.html
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7pB2gLZtlYThe Holy Trinity: Dark Guardian, Life and Phantom Zero
DARK GUARDIAN is the leader of a Holy Trinity, followed by LIFE and PHANTOM ZERO. Trained in martial arts, DARK GUARDIAN prides himself on patrolling the inner cesspools of New York City. Knowing that safety comes first, he is one of the few superheroes that actually dons a bullet proof vest (he’s the red one in the video). While he hasn’t been shot, guns have been drawn on him… scary as he only arms himself with pepper spray. According to his MySpace (http://www.myspace.com/darkguardianhero) there is a meeting of the heroes this upcoming Sunday (6/8/2010). His powers include: – Bullet-proof vest – Human strength and (obviously) Persistence.
LIFE is one of the few Hassidic Jewish Superheros, and can be found in the video to your left. Born of meager means, he followed the tenants of his faith. This includes leaving the world in a better place than he found it. From http://www.reallifesuperheroes.com/2010/05/21/life/: “This moral code, underscored with a powerful sense of social justice, led him to his work with the homeless and disenfranchised that he found all around him, dispensing those seemingly small amenities that vitally fill in the gaps left by the NYC Department of Homeless Services.”
His powers include: – Giving toiletries to the homeless – Helping confused/needy homeless find shelter – Giving out food to the homeless. L’chaim! He can be found at http://www.myspace.com/theycalledhimlaz
PHANTOM ZERO is one of the first bridge and tunnel superheroes. Based in New Jersey, he’s often found on the streets of New York. While in most media appearances, he seems like an earnest enough bloke, do not cross him. In this video, he responds to detractors.
From his MySpace page: http://www.myspace.com/ph0hero “The most important aspect of being a Real Life Super Hero is as simple as this: You selflessly serve a pro social mission. It’s not about conquering groups of people to display your physical or martial prowess. It’s not about having scads of cutting edge technology at your disposal. It’s not about training one’s mind to the limits of human perfection so they can out think everyone and everything that comes their way.”
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ype4XKrNGXwRazorhawk
You’re nobody until Fox News mocks you as a misguided “do-gooder” (and then outs your secret identity).
Razorhawk, a former gas station employee, patrols the evil confines of Minneapolis. While crime is not the most important thing in the City of Lakes, he still helps out. He spends his time volunteering helping seniors and a very successful Toys For Tots program.
He doesn’t care for the term “Superhero” but prefers “the title Masked Adventurer as I do not have any special abilities or powers. I am just a guy who wears a uniform and promotes safety and crime awareness. I perform safety patrols in my town and in Minneapolis, as well as help out with many charities that help kids.”
He can be found at http://www.myspace.com/razorhawk_glhg
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YgAU_H8essYNyx
Previously known as Hellcat, Felinity, and Sphynx; NYX is an ever-evolving superhero. Also a bridge and tunneler, she is one of the few female superheroes, filling the boots of such retired greats as Terrifica (who patrolled NYC bars saving cosmo’d women from bad decisions).
Usually donned in lingerie, she stands for diversity.
From her MySpace (http://www.myspace.com/nyx22) “I respect all RLSHs (Real Life Superheroes) of every sort, it’s not an easy life we’ve chosen but we’ve chosen it nonetheless.”
Here she explains what the platform of the Real Life Superhero Project should be… just pretend it makes sense.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2wwQ_PRS748Citizen Prime – Utah Crime Fighter Extraordinaire
Citizen Prime hails from Utah and has recently announced his retirement. It’s too bad because his costume is great, even if it’s really really loud (after this fascinating video, see his interview at about 2:35).
This is, in part, due to his house being burgled and some key elements of his persona being taken from him.
Formerly calling Arizona his home, he has appeared at the Phoenix Comic-Con and tralled the mean streets of the Super Bowl parking lot.
Powers:
– His real passion is working with kids, helping them find the hero within. He appears in the video around the 2:30 mark. He works with kids in a program that is built for people to defend themselves, as well as discover their inner hero. A kind of a Tony Robbins for kids.
His MySpace page can be found at http://www.myspacae.com/paragonprime
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9srsaJW1bKMEnigma
Enigma, a pro-green superhero that hails from San Antonio, home of the Alamo.
His philosophy is simple: “Pride, Integrity and Honor.”
From his MySpace, ( http://www.myspace.com/enigmarlsh: ):
“I was put on this earth gifted from the lord, gifted to accomplish goals both mentally and physically challenging. I am here to help others and defend ones in need. I’m here to help clean up society and make the world feel and be a safe once again! I made the decision to dedicate my life to protect and help anyone in need, even if it means sacrificing my own to accomplish this goal.”
Enigma is more than a treehugger. According to his blog, he recently fought off two guys breaking into a car, using only an acid tinged tongue and a palm strike to the head. He then zip-tied them and used their phone to call 911.”
Bad. Freaking. Ass.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dpFer_LXE3cSqueegee Man, Captain Xavier Obvious
Squeegee Man and his partner, Captain Xavier Obvious, have embraced the West/Ward concept of Superherodom.
Often seen promoting social causes such as the AIDS Walk, they are currently living in a “secret” rooftop lair somewhere in New York.
From Squeegee Man’s My Space (http://www.myspace.com/squeegeerific ) announcement for his failed 2008 presidential campaign, where he had a platform that included “I promise to make America Squeegeetasting again!”
A bit of a rogue he is not currently a member of The Real Life Superhero Project. Here is a bit ABC did on them. http://abcnews.go.com/Video/playerIndex?id=3281359
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_I0sl2CArXYCrimson Fist
While he will not give out his secret identity, he also refuses to wear a mask.
Crimson Fist hails from Atlanta, GA and spends a few days a month working with folks who may need a granola bar and a bottle of water.
After a tumultuous trial of drugs and booze, he discovered his alter ego and hits the streets before he could hit the skids.
His MySpace http://www.myspace.com/heroatl claims that he is now undercover.
Just like everyone else who has still a MySpace page!
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yyheqc-6ZM012. Mr. Silent
Despite the misnomer of Mr. Silent, he took some time out to speak with Fox News.
He came across his alter-ego during a drunken moment of clarity, while watching Superheroes flix at a friend’s place. Steering away from the vigilante image of crime fighter, he recently helped the police locate the owner of a discarded purse.
In 2009 he went underground, but we know we will hear from his soon. Oh, wait…
13. Everyone Else
BONUS: If you are salivating for more, here is a clip from the not so secret society RealLifeSuperheroes.com . This is a broader overview of some of the previously mentioned heroes.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hohnzMe0cWw
Doktor DiscorD's Letter
In January of 2006, Doktor DiscorD took the liberty of announcing to the internet of the possibility of Real Life Superheroes. He wrote a letter to comic book writer, Warren Ellis, of he and Mr. Silent’s exploits and social network page.
Here is a copy of that letter-
Originally posted: http://www.warrenellis.com/?p=1712
The Live Superheroes Of Indianapolis
January 13th, 2006 | researchmaterial
Doktor DiscorD and Mr Silent are self-invented superheroes.
so tonight is the first night in a new era here in indianapolis. the dawn of the age of superheroes. after realizing the total lack of justice in the world, my friends and i have decided to become superheroes in order to balance this fracturing planet of ours. tonight, with my partner in crime fighting “Mr. Silent”, we went around the city helping people and stopping fights,drunk drivers,and a group of young dumb kids hitting an old woman’s car.
Here’s the note the good Doktor sent me the other day:
mr. ellis
hi,i’m a superhero…..seriously.
some friends and i have become tired of the muggers, rapists, and general riff raff causing problems in our city.
this is not a joke.
we’ve started a group called the Justice Society of Justice (offering twice the Justice as the leading competitors) and we go out and fight crime on a semi nightly basis.
we’ve only got about 8 hardcore members that go out with us right now,but we’re hoping to raise that number tenfold.
recently,some japanese street fashion kids have found our myspace pages and added us..so within 3 days we’ve had roughly 3-4 japanese weirdo kids adding us per hour…japan seems much more accepting of this concept than the states.
originally,we just thought it’d be funny to go out as superheroes and “fight crime” as a sort of street theater…but after the first hour and the sheer exhilaration of it all,we completely changed our mind. there are real problems,and no one wants to deal with them. some one has to do something.
many people have read about the adventures of your heroes, but soon (hopefully), they’ll be writing about their own adventures. i made a few blog entries about some of our patrols with pictures and stuff…so if you ever want to see how well superheroes work out in the regular world as opposed to paper one,check it out.
say a small prayer to jack kirby for us.
dokdiscord
Mr Silent @ MySpace | Doktor DiscorD @ MySpace
Was there life before 'Kick-Ass'?
Originally published: http://www.timeout.com/film/features/show-feature/9752/was-there-life-before-kick-ass.html
By Tom Huddleston
The USP of Matthew Vaughn’s ‘Kick-Ass’ is that it’s about real life superheroes. But what about Mystery Men?
For the next month or so, you won’t be able to leave the house without hearing the words ‘Kick-Ass’. Matthew Vaughn’s teen superhero epic is fast, funny and extremely violent, but it also seems to be labouring under a misapprehension: that the concept of normal, everyday superheroes is somehow original. The film even opens with our hero Dave Lizewski (Aaron Johnson) complaining that, in the real world, no one but the police dresses up and fights crime.
In fact, they do. A few years ago, a film played at the Sci-Fi-London Film Festival called ‘Your Friendly Neighbourhood Hero’. This wise and very amusing doc followed the exploits of four real-life costumed avengers – known only as Superhero, Master Legend, Mr Silent and Hardware – as they plied their trade on the suburban streets where they lived. Their exploits were relatively tame – none of them took down a major crime ring or foiled a villain in his underground lair – but, like Kick-Ass, they were dedicated ordinary Joes intent on remaking society in their own image.
Even in the realm of fiction the concept of normal folks with no special talents teaming up to fight forces of evil is nothing new. Alan Moore’s graphic novel ‘Watchmen’ was perhaps the first to imagine what would happen if society was suddenly overrun with masked heroes – his conclusion being that they’d become fascistic, sexually perverse social outcasts. Last year’s film version of Moore’s book turned the idea on its head by becoming exactly the kind of ultraviolent bonanza of special effects which Moore was satirising in the first place.
A decade ago, ‘Mystery Men‘ brought the very same concept which fuels ‘Kick-Ass’ – give or take a few vaguely supernatural elements – into cinemas, and was largely ignored by the ticket-buying public. It’s a shame, because Kinka Usher’s film was a smart, original and hilarious subversion of the superhero genre which deserves a second look.
Just check out the cast list for ‘Mystery Men‘: Ben Stiller plays Mr Furious, an ordinary guy convinced that his boundless inner rage makes him in some way special. Hank Azaria plays The Blue Raja, master of cutlery, while William H Macy brings his customary hapless warmth to the role of family man The Shoveller. There’s also room for Greg Kinnear as preening playboy Captain Amazing, Geoffrey Rush as master villain Casanova Frankenstein, Eddie Izzard as his sidekick Tony P, Janeane Garofalo as hipster hero The Bowler and the great Tom Waits as madcap inventor Doc Heller.
Sure, ‘Mystery Men’ plays things a lot broader and wackier than ‘Kick-Ass’. But it’s also sharper, more inventive and a lot funnier, taking the time to round out its lovingly drawn characters rather than just chucking them into another limb-slicing action sequence.
We’ve no doubt that ‘Kick-Ass’ is going to be a big box-office success. It’s got all the wisecracking, foul language and manic, intense violence that fanboys go nuts for. But once you’ve paid your money and got your kicks, give ‘Mystery Men’ a go: it would be a shame if this big-hearted, anarchic anti-blockbuster got lost in the shadow of its slicker but somehow less loveable offspring.
I Think I May Have Created a Monster
The Real Life Superhero story starts a few years ago..
There were a few people who dressed up as superheroes in order to promote public safety (Captain Jackson, Super Barrio, etc) Mr. Silent and I thought it was time someone dressed up like a superhero and actually FOUGHT CRIME. We started doing semi-nightly patrols in Indianapolis in full costume, helping break up fights, handing out food to the homeless, and doing generally all we could to help out those in need.
After a while, we decided to reveal what we were doing to the rest of the world.
I went to Warren Ellis hoping to give him a bit of a shock/laugh/whatever. (http://www.warrenellis.com/?p=1712)
I told him the story of how Mr. Silent and I were real life superheroes protecting the citizens of Indianapolis from crime. He posted our story on his site, and almost immediately, his story was reposted EVERYWHERE on the internet. We had become “viral”. (great)
All these years later, I wonder if we should have went public. The massive amount of press has been nice because it helped inspire others to make a stand against fear and HELP OUT THEIR OWN COMMUNITIES.
Alternately, the press is mostly laughing. Hardly anyone takes it seriously at all. While I understand this, I also think it may cause danger for other real life superheroes. How hard will it be to help others when you yourself are the center of attention and you’re being followed around by gawking onlookers? How do you stay in the shadows when all the lights are on you? It only ended up harming our patrols. Mr. Silent and I stopped doing interviews and started patroling the streets in plain clothes just so people wouldn’t notice us as “those guys from the internet”.
This is TROUBLE. Also, I have a big problem with the so called “real life superheroes” who have turned this into some bullshit “FIGHT CLUB” sort of mentality. We’re helping people who need it, NOT just walking around looking for fights. This has happened too much as of late, and it’s going to get someone seriously hurt.
Maybe it will take one of us being killed for the world to take notice that this shit is REAL and it’s NOT GOING AWAY.
Whatever your take on this, we need to be smart. We need to watch our backs, and we MOST DEFINITELY need to DO WHAT’S RIGHT TO HELP PROTECT OUR STREETS.
Stay brave, people. It’s OUR DUTY to HELP THOSE WHO NEED IT THE MOST!
Peace on the streets,
Dok Discord
Comments:
Dark Guardian
Long time no talk. Glad you and Mr S are still around. I like where you are coming from and have been right there with you all these years. We should talk sometime soon.
The Prowler
The Prowler Great to see you back. You were one of my biggest influences to protect and help people as a superhero, ever since I first read about yo and Mr. Silent, I think it was in INTake.
Daisy Hibbard
Daisy Hibbard I respect you guys so much! I think it’s brilliant what you do, but it must be hard trying to actually protect our city while people try and follow you around. I know if I ever saw you and Mr. Silent downtown I would probably stop walking and just think, “WOW. I just saw superheroes!” and I would be filled with some sort of Indy pride. 😀
Amazonia
Amazonia Thanks for those words. I had not gone public back when I started because I was afraid of what people would think of me. I had started back in May ’02 and I had no idea there were any others out there. Not until ’06 when I finally looked it up online. Your right, there has been a change in mentality from people doing this since I first started and came online. A lot of them just want to go around and bash heads in and fight crime period. There is more to this than that and I have been lucky enough to be exposed to most of the other things you can do to make a difference in the world. Mostly I do patrols and help people where ever I can. But I don’t go looking for a fight, but if one comes to me, I am ready for it.
Master Legend
Master Legend i been at this for like 25 years and was so happy to find out i wasn’t alone and i owe it all to you and MR Silent.thank you very much and so you know Team Justice has helped thousands and we aren’t stopping there.
Optimyst
Optimyst I agree with everything you said my good docktor. I am glad that you posted this. I really missed your blogs. O
The astounding adventures of the Wall Creeper, Colorado's own superhero
By Joel Warner
You don’t exist. You think nothing, you feel nothing, you are nothing. That’s the secret to becoming invisible, to becoming the Wall Creeper.
And he is surely invisible tonight. No one notices as the lean nineteen-year-old makes his way across Civic Center Park and up the granite front steps of the State Capitol. He’s just another night prowler, bundled up against the cold in a black leather jacket.
Probably no one would pay attention even if he were wearing his full battle suit: The Kevlar composite vest, the blunt-trauma pads strapped to his martial arts-toned arms and legs, the custom-designed full-face covering purchased from Hero-Gear.net. Most people go through life in a stupor. It’s like what Master Legend — who’s been battling Florida evildoers for more than a quarter-century — says: “It’s not that a man becomes invisible; it’s just that a man becomes invisible to everybody else. If you are an outcast that nobody cares about, no one notices you.”
In other words, people don’t see what they don’t expect — and no one expects to see somebody like the Wall Creeper, a flesh-and-blood superhero.
Nevertheless, the Wall Creeper can’t risk wearing his battle suit. Not tonight, his first Denver patrol. He doesn’t yet know the city like he knows the Colorado mountain towns and rural communities he’s spent three years patrolling. Until he finds his footing here, there’s no need to attract attention. So all he carries, folded and tucked in his breast pocket, is the most important piece: the black mask he places over his mouth and nose like some terrible demon beak. It’s inscribed with an ornate “W” intertwined with a serpent-like “C” — the insignia of the Wall Creeper.
He paces at the foot of the Capitol building, waiting for his colleague Zen Blade to arrive. He’s edgy, too distracted by his nerves to scope out nearby walls and obstacles for footholds in case he needs to wall-creep to a good vantage point or escape route. He’s never met the Aurora crime fighter who wears a triple-crescent logo on his chest and knit cap, along with aviator-style goggles, but from what he’s learned of him online, the two have much in common. That’s why he contacted Zen Blade and suggested they meet up tonight, to join forces as they prowl the streets.
While the Wall Creeper waits, the city below him seethes. Somewhere nearby, a siren wails. In the shadows of Civic Center Park, a group of men holler and tussle. Maybe they’re playing around, maybe not. On the side of the Denver Newspaper Agency building, the block-long LCD news display scrolls through its never-ending inventory of despair. Drug dealers. Rapists. Pedophiles.
To the Wall Creeper, it seems that with each passing moment the world is getting worse, the shadows deepening, the hands ticking closer to midnight. That’s why he’s taking a stand, hopefully before it’s too late. He’ll stand guard, never resting, as it is written in Isaiah 62:6: “I have posted watchmen on your walls, O Jerusalem. They will never be silent day or night. Whoever calls on the Lord, do not give yourselves any rest, and do not give him any rest until he establishes Jerusalem and makes it an object of praise throughout the earth.”
A man in a black leather coat approaches. “Waiting for someone?” he asks.
“Zen Blade?” responds the Wall Creeper, extending a hand. Zen Blade, several years older and bulkier than Wall Creeper, left his suit at home, too, but is nonetheless ready to patrol. “Let’s go,” he says.
The night awaits.
Nobody knows my whole story,” the Wall Creeper says when he first consents to an interview. “Most nineteen-year-olds are just trying to get lucky and get drunk. I want to save the world. It’s taken over my life, and I’m happy with that.” But people need to know he’s not just some vigilante or costumed weirdo, he explains. (And, to be clear, he prefers to be called a crime fighter, not a defender, warrior or costumed activist. Worst of the bunch, he says, is probably “real-life superhero.” After all, no one would say “real-life police officer.”)
“My greatest desire is to aid the police in stopping crime in this great city,” he writes in an e-mail. “Every fiber of my being wants to patrol, to aid, to help the citizens of this city, and the real heroes, the police and firemen, in Denver.”
To explain why, he agrees to meet — under strict and secretive conditions. He’ll only show up at a public, neutral location — a quiet park in a metro-area suburb near where he’s been patrolling the past few months or, on cold days, in a nearby chain restaurant. He wears unremarkable civilian clothes over his lithe physique, and there’s none of the swagger or eagerness of other guys his age. Smiles, for example, are few and far between. He’s the type who blends into a crowd, the last one anyone would expect to be rounding up villains or crushing crime syndicates.
He refuses to disclose where he lives. Anyone who knows, he explains, would be in danger if a criminal tried to use him to get to the Wall Creeper. “It’s like the Batcave,” he says wryly, though he’s quick to point out that he’s never been a big fan of comic books. Getting him to reveal his real name is clearly not an option.
The tale he divulges over several weeks is impossible to verify. He won’t disclose the names of relevant locations, and he says the few people who are close to him, like his father, are reluctant to talk. But the veracity of the events he describes seems less important than the assurance with which he describes them. Each of his stories, each of his memories, is real enough for him to have created the Wall Creeper.
He ran and ran. The freshman boy who would become the Wall Creeper ran every afternoon through the hot, barren plains of South Texas. He ran alone, three to four miles at a stretch, until he could hit a 5:25 mile and had somehow willed away his asthma attacks. He ran even though he hated it, even though it left him ragged for the grueling tae kwon do classes he took later each afternoon. He ran to keep sane, to block out the physical and verbal abuse he suffered at school. He ran so he’d be able to fight back.
And he ran because something inside him told him he had to, that the agony he felt was leading up to something, that he was destined for something great.
It wasn’t always like this. When he was younger, growing up in suburban Oklahoma, there was nothing to run away from. Playing street hockey, learning Christian ideals of right and wrong from his strict but loving parents, watching Batman (the ones with Michael Keaton, whom he considers the only real Batman) — it all seemed right. He especially loved the peach tree in his yard, the one that grew fruit so fat and juicy it would split from within. He’d climb up the tree’s trunk and nap within its thick branches, just as he’d shimmy up light poles and scale chain-link fences. He climbed because it was exhilarating and was something no one else could do, and because at the top he got to live, just for a moment, in his own special world.
He can’t remember exactly when things changed. For reasons he can’t explain, his recollections are fractured and disjointed, his memory cut short by parts he seems to have blocked out. One of the turning points, however, came on a night when he was eleven or twelve. Walking home from a street hockey game, he saw a teenager leading away a young girl he knew, saying to her, “I’m going to take you home, and we’ll see what’s under your skirt.” Hearing that, something snapped. He attacked the teenager, he says, fighting until the older boy ran away. After that, things get fuzzy.
He says he took the girl to her empty house and, to watch over her once she was inside, quietly scaled the one-story residence and waited on the roof until her parents returned. That was his first “wall creep,” he says now, a technique that would later become his signature move. For a while, though, the whole episode seemed so incredible, he wasn’t sure it had actually happened; as he wrote about the wall-creeping part of the night in his journal last year, “Someone inside me (probably a lie) tells me this.”
Whatever happened, the episode changed him.
“That night, I realized the dark underside of the world,” he wrote. “People as a whole squirm and are crippled by their lies, false beliefs…expectations and society. This perversion could not be ignored by me…I decided to be something inhuman to exonerate myself from human weakness, at least in part.”
The human weakness he witnessed around him only worsened when, not long after this incident, he and his family moved to Texas. His memories of middle school there are bleak. A gray prison of a school building, with no heat or windows to let in the sun. First-period physical education classes spent running the school grounds in ragged gym clothes, the early morning haze illuminated by the piles of burning trash school workers would ignite. Bullies everywhere, attacking the new kid and scrawling curse words all over his clothes.
High school was no better. It was a sprawling warehouse-like place packed with 7,000 students. Someone like him got lost in the flood.
While he was locked away in these dismal fortresses, something new and fierce was growing inside him, struggling to get out. “In the turmoil of this dangerously weak emotional state was born a new face,” he says now. “While most kids my age succumbed to apathy, not really caring about others or what was morally right, I became filled with empathy, to the point where I knew I would sacrifice myself for another.”
He needed a body to match his taut new mental state, so he took up tae kwon do and a rigorous running regimen, even though he hated it. He had no choice, he told himself; he was destined for something great.
Pray for me.”
That’s what he said right before his first crime-fighting patrol. He was talking to a classmate at whose house he was spending the night. The classmate, a friend from his junior class, had agreed to help out with his crazy scheme. While the kid wasn’t coming along for the outing, he had offered his parents’ home as a base of operations, since it was located near the center of the Colorado mountain town where the would-be crime fighter and his family had moved from Texas the year before.
The Wall Creeper still shivers nervously thinking about that evening: how the two boys spent the hours leading up to the patrol, almost too anxious to talk. How glancing at the duffel bag of equipment he’d spent weeks preparing made him feel like he was about to get on a roller-coaster ride, one without a visible end. What would happen if he got caught? Would he be arrested? Would the embarrassment ruin his family? By 10 p.m., he’d done enough wondering. It was time to go.
He’d hatched the plan two months earlier, the day he claims he got a call from a police detective who was looking for a guy he knew, a friend of a friend who’d recently skipped town. The detective said the guy had been abusing a little girl. Afterward, he sat in his bedroom feeling trapped, all the old anger flooding back.
After moving to Colorado, things had briefly gotten better for the boy. His new school was small, intimate, populated with teachers and students who seemed to care. But then he started hearing about drugs at parties, stuff like heroin and ecstasy. Classmates he thought were respectable turned out to be dealers. And with each passing week, the local crime blotter filled with ever more reports of robberies, assaults and worse.
The detective’s call was the final straw. It seemed to him the town was falling apart, with the police too understaffed to do anything about it. The ones who’d suffer the consequences were the children — kids like his own little sister.
“I realized I was all alone against what was happening,” he says. “It was an innocent town, a loving town that turned to drugs. And my little sister was going to have to grow up in that, and I wouldn’t allow that.”
That night, surrounded by papier-mâché masks and fantasy posters he’d hung on his bedroom walls, he realized something incredible: Maybe he could make a difference. “I have been training. I can do something. It’s not like I am just some common guy,” he thought. “I’ve been training for this all my life and didn’t realize it.”
The creature struggling inside him was about to be let out. As an unassuming high school student, he had the perfect cover to learn about the drugs and dealers. He could handle himself in a fight, having continued his obsessive physical training. All he needed was a way to protect his identity in this insular mountain town.
In other words, he needed a battle suit. The outfit he built over the next two months was a mixture of practicality and drama, something he hoped would protect him but also strike fear into the hearts of evildoers. He bought a full-face balaclava from a ski shop, obtained a paintball ballistics vest from a military surplus store and salvaged the arm and leg pads he’d used in his street hockey days. Everything was black, to blend in with the night. He armed himself with swords, two short blades he named Twitch and Wind. And while the grappling hook he tried never worked, he was pleased with the black cape he’d designed with sewn-in umbrella ribs that he could raise like demon wings.
But he still needed a name, something terrifying. Since the Wall Creeper persona had yet to come to him, he instead thought back to the time as a toddler when he’d wandered into his family’s backyard playhouse and found its walls writhing with the pulsing wings of hundreds of moths. The door had slammed behind him and the creatures had taken flight, pouring over his tiny body, consuming him. He couldn’t remember what happened next — the memory breaks off — but the revulsion he still felt about it was enough to inspire the perfect name: the Mothman.
And now, as he stepped quietly out of his classmate’s house, the Mothman was ready to take flight.
The masked young man had no particular destination in mind as he walked down the quiet street that warm summer night. He was essentially taking his suit for a test drive, to see what might happen. He didn’t have to wait long to find out.
Just a few doors down, the Mothman froze as a motion-sensitive garage-door light flicked on, illuminating a deer on an evening stroll. He considered it for a moment, until he realized he wasn’t the only one watching. A couple was observing the deer from their nearby porch — and then turned and looked right at him.
He did the only thing he could think of. He raised his horrible black wings like some fiendish beast rearing out of the darkness. If this was to be the Mothman’s coming-out party, he’d be damned if he didn’t leave an impression.
That’s when the cop car rolled down the street.
He couldn’t believe it. What were the odds that one of the town’s meager police force would show up right here, right now? Instinctively, he dropped to the ground and covered himself with his cape, hoping, pleading, to blend into the foliage. The squad car cruised by without stopping. He sprinted back to his friend’s house, not bothering to look back. He’d only been gone twenty minutes and had nearly been caught. Still, he was exhilarated that he’d actually patrolled — and made it back in one piece.
And look on the bright side, he told himself. Things could only get better from here.
He soon discovered he wasn’t the only crime fighter, unbelievable as that seemed. The tip-off was Mr. Silent.
Several months after his first patrol, with several additional excursions under his belt, he came across a MySpace page for a man who patrolled Indianapolis armed with a cane, a gentleman’s suit and a silver mask. He excitedly sent Mr. Silent a message, letting him know that he, too, was a crime fighter. He received a response from a different superhero, a New York City-area avenger named Tothian. There are lots of us, Tothian explained, and encouraged him to join their ranks in the Heroes Network — a sort of United Nations for superheroes.
But first he’d need a new name. “Mothman” had lost its mystique when he’d realized it was similar to the name of a 2002 thriller starring Richard Gere. So he thought back to his alter ego’s origins, the night he silently scaled the wall of that little girl’s house. The answer was obvious: He was the Wall Creeper.
The Heroes Network embraced the Wall Creeper with open arms. Founded by Tothian in early 2007, the membership-only online forum covered everything from battle tactics to investigation tips, and boasted dozens of members from all over the country and beyond — people like Slapjack in Maine, Nostrum in New Orleans, Lionheart in England and the not-so-subtly named Superhero in Florida. From the Wall Creeper’s perspective, a few were clearly dressing in tights for attention or to live out some fantasy.
But many were like himself, people sick of the world’s depravity and apathy who’d decided to take matters into their own hands. Their outfits symbolized a pledge to justice. “Some would say the costumes are to inspire people to do good, to show people that there are people like us out there,” says the Wall Creeper. “This line of work isn’t just a job or career; it’s a piece of your life. It defines you, and it comes out in the pride you take in your costume.” Most of these costumed avengers know they have no real powers other than those provided by their training or equipment (though a few believe they have metaphysical abilities, including Master Legend, who says he can flip over a car and run at supersonic speeds without losing his breath). But that hasn’t stopped them from facing down evil on their own. They have no interest in joining structured operations like police forces or even the Guardian Angels. They live by their own rules.
“Justice is not the law,” Master Legend says, his declarative sentences seeming to come out in word bubbles. “Laws are written by men. Justice is written into our souls, our spirit, from the day we are born.”
No one knows for sure who was the first to heed this call for justice and strap on a mask. Some heroes have been around since the 1990s — folks like Mr. Silent, as well as Terrifica, a woman who dons a Valkyrie bra and defends ladies in New York City, and Superbarrio Gómez, a Mexico City resident who campaigns against corruption wearing a red and yellow wrestler’s mask. Then there’s Master Legend, who claims to have been taking down criminals with his “No Mercy Punch” since 1983. But even before him, there was the Human Fly, a costumed Canadian who in the 1970s rode on top of a DC-8 airliner and used a rocket-powered motorcycle to jump 27 buses at a Gloria Gaynor concert. He had a Marvel comic book named after him.
Lately, though, conversions to the superhero cause have reached a fever pitch, with the Heroes Network swelling to more than 300 members. So far, the Colorado contingent remains relatively small. There’s Tigris, who crusaded for animal justice for a while in Colorado Springs; Ten, who sports a blood-red mask and a mean pair of nunchucks; and a shadowy figure who answers to the name Nightwatch. None of them could be reached for this story. But Colorado’s superhero population may grow, especially with new crime-fighting associations such as the Signal Light Foundation and Superheroes Anonymous taking hold.
The recent upswing could be a response to real-world perils that seem straight out of a mega-villain’s plan for world domination, things like the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the bird flu and the USA PATRIOT Act. Or maybe it’s thanks to the Internet, with websites like the Heroes Network inspiring costumed crime fighters the world over to come out of the closet. Or maybe, as the Wall Creeper believes, it’s because few people look up to the military or elected officials or the police anymore. The only heroes left, it seems, are the mythical ones whose visages soar across movie screens and whose four-color exploits still embellish endless childhoods.
“The only role models we have left are either dead or gone or never existed,” he says. “It’s sad we have to take up that mantle waving a superhero flag.”
In the Heroes Network, the Wall Creeper finally felt part of something important.
“It was like coming home for the first time,” he says. “Just imagine having a friend in every state that knows what you do and how you are and everything.” With his online colleagues, he endlessly compared and fine-tuned his battle suit and tinkered with his MySpace page. He eventually sank more than $1,000 into his alter ego, explaining to his parents that it was going toward a paintball hobby. Along the way, he gathered trade secrets such as how capes, while dramatic, don’t work well in actual crime fighting. He discovered that the best place to buy handmade Spandex battle suits was www.Hero-Gear.net — “We’ve got what it takes to be a HERO!” — and ordered a custom-designed mask from the site for special occasions. And from Entomo the Insect Man, a Naples, Italy-based superhero, he learned he needed an insignia that would set him apart from your everyday all-black ninja. “You are the only Wall Creeper,” Entomo told him. “There is no one else like you.” So the Wall Creeper painted an ornate “W-C” motif on his mask.
And now the man behind that mask felt like he was becoming a force to be reckoned with. He had to keep his secret from his parents — it was too dangerous and unconventional for them to know about — so a few times a week, he’d wait in his room until the house was silent before sneaking out. Then he’d navigate the moonlit three-mile walk to town before stealthily roaming the streets for hours looking for trouble.
He gave up his swords, preferring to rely on his detective skills and the three or four martial arts styles in which he’d taken lessons (though to keep the upper hand, he won’t say how, exactly, he’d handle himself in a fight). Some nights he’d “wall-creep” up buildings, climbing up fire escapes and vaulting over walls so he could run surveillance from roofs. He discovered he could become invisible just by thinking and feeling nothing — acting as though he didn’t exist. The tactic seemed to work, since he remembers only a handful of people ever noticing him. The few who did sometimes gasped or screamed, while others waved and wished him a good night.
One time, he says, he tracked a local drug dealer to his house and knocked on his window. When the thug got over the sight of a masked man peeking through his curtains, he allowed the Wall Creeper inside to talk. That night, the crime fighter learned about the OxyContin, heroin, cocaine, meth and ecstasy flowing freely under the direction of a local narcotics ring. He took it all down in his journal and warned the dealer that if he didn’t clean up his act, he’d be back.
Other than that, the Wall Creeper didn’t experience much in the way of dramatic confrontations. No matter: His main weapon wasn’t his fists, but the legend that he believed was growing. Sure enough, he sensed that rumors were spreading around school of a masked vigilante, and to him it seemed that the once-rampant drug trade petered off.
With his home-turf mission apparently accomplished, the Wall Creeper entered college last year in another small Colorado community and stepped up his patrols. He began training two recruits, one of whom supposedly now patrols in the Greeley area under the name Dragomir. Together at college, the three scoped out underage parties for potential date-rapists and would-be drunk drivers. One time they discovered what they thought was an OxyContin pill at a popular college nightclub, so they left the evidence on a vacant squad car, noting where they’d found it. According to the Wall Creeper, the nightclub was shut down within a week.
Another time, the Wall Creeper was biking across campus with his mask off when he spotted what looked like a sleazeball about to take advantage of his drunken companion. He’ll never forget how that dude turned tail when the Wall Creeper bore down on him like a bike messenger from hell, ripping open his coat to reveal his fearsome battle armor. Too bad the girl he saved was too sloshed to notice.
This was the Wall Creeper at his finest, the creature inside of him on full display. As he noted in his journal, he’d reached a new level: “When I am out there, alone with a seemingly new body and a different track of thought, I become the Wall Creeper. That part of me barely speaks. He takes his work seriously, and doesn’t half-ass it like the others. I feel raw power and animal-like, seeking justice.”
The resulting hero was becoming well regarded on the Heroes Network. “He sticks to his mission and doesn’t change his ideals for anybody,” says Tothian about the Wall Creeper. “For someone his age, he is wise beyond his years.”
“For a guy who’s not bulletproof and doesn’t have any superpowers, his heart is totally in what he does. He’s a 110-percent type of person,” adds Ecliptico, a Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, masked man with whom the Wall Creeper has spent hours on the phone brainstorming about helmet designs and crime patterns.
But becoming the Wall Creeper, patrolling in full battle armor several times a week, was taking a toll. Thanks to his long nights, he was struggling to stay awake in class. He began having panic attacks, feeling like something revolting was crawling over his skin. He became obsessed with crime blotters, poring over the injustices he’d failed to stop. “Not doing my job well enough,” he wrote in his journal. “Never enough.”
It was as if he was turning into Rorschach, his favorite character in Watchmen, the 1980s graphic novel idolized by many Heroes Network members for its cast of complex, real-life superheroes. The Wall Creeper had always shared a kinship with the story’s loner detective Rorschach, since both wore their ornate insignias on their masks. But lately there was another, more disturbing similarity between the two. Rorschach was so disgusted and victimized by the world he pledged to protect that he’d become numb to reality, going so far as to consider his ghastly mask his true visage. And now the Wall Creeper started feeling that way, too — as if the creature dressed in the all-black battle suit was his real, dominant personality and the young man in civilian clothes just the alter ego.
As he wrote in his journal one day, “The mask truly is like my face.”
The explosion rips through downtown Denver. Deep within a secret, subterranean lab beneath the State Capitol, something has gone terribly wrong. Down there, far from the population’s prying eyes, a diabolical corporation has developed a horrible new nerve gas — a gas that, thanks to a freak detonation, has now been released. The thick, noxious fumes spread through the sewers and up into the streets, lacing the city with its nefarious tentacles. Many die immediately, littering sidewalks with a gruesome tableau. The rest suffer a worse fate: Devolving into zombie-like maniacs, they roam the streets thirsty for blood and destruction.
There’s only one hope: the Knightmen. Ensconced in a downtown safe house, this vigilant league of crime fighters leaps into action. To end the chaos, they must avoid the zombie hordes, infiltrate the underground lab, find an antidote and inoculate the surviving, half-mad population. Along the way, they might as well take out the mind-controlled lizard men guarding the laboratory.
So goes the fictional training exercise the Wall Creeper recently devised for the Knightmen, a renegade new super-secret offshoot of the Heroes Network. The word-based scenario plays out online, with members messaging back and forth over strategies and plans. The narrative is admittedly over the top, but the Wall Creeper, who transferred to a metro-area college this past fall, designed it to hone his colleagues’ battle tactics in case they ever face a large-scale crisis. Of course, the Knightmen believe they already have one crisis on their hands — one involving the Heroes Network.
The troubles started this past December, when Tothian, satisfied with what he’d accomplished in the Heroes Network, stepped down as president and members voted to replace him with Zimmer, an Austin-based superhero with binary-code 1s and 0s emblazoned on his chest. Taking a page from Barack Obama’s playbook, Zimmer posted a dramatic video acceptance speech on his MySpace page promising a new superhero era. “By the power of truth, I, while living, have conquered the universe,” he proclaimed. “We are here because the world is in bad shape. We have a lot to do and not a lot of time to do it in. But who the hell do you think we are? We are the goddamn Heroes Network, and I am honored to be your president.”
But these lofty claims soon led to online bickering and accusations, with universal truth and justice taking a back seat to petty recriminations and political infighting. Some were upset over a surge of new recruits admitted in under Zimmer’s watch, heroes with dubious missions like the Michigan-based Blue Lightning, who crusades against secondhand smoke. Others were up in arms about the new president’s plan to send out press packets to media outlets all over the country. It didn’t make sense, they argued, for folks with secret identities and unsanctioned weaponry like homemade pepper-spray bazookas and Taser gauntlets to be parading all over the nightly news.
The central argument was over what superheroes are supposed to do with themselves. Zimmer and his colleagues held that social activism should play a key role in the Heroes Network, with costumed superheroes volunteering at local charities and the organization taking steps to become an official nonprofit. That didn’t sit well with those who’d rather be cleaning the streets of scum than running toy drives. “You think you’re a superhero because you show up at a charity once or twice? That’s a smack in the face to people who do it every day,” fumes Ecliptico now. “If you are not risking your life, you are not doing anything heroic. Who is out saving the girl from being brutalized while you’re handing out Barbie Dolls?”
Because of the tumult, the Wall Creeper and several of his colleagues decided to form the Knightmen. “We’re the honest crime fighters,” says the Wall Creeper. “We were sick of all the online minutiae between crime fighters and superheroes.”
Maybe they’ll even end up working hand in hand with local cops — though so far, the Denver police haven’t heard of folks like the Wall Creeper. “I’ve asked around with some of the officers on the street, and they haven’t seen them,” says police spokeswoman Detective Sharon Avendaño. “And it’s not going to be listed on any reports that, ‘Hey, we saw the Batman.'” The department doesn’t necessarily have a problem with people like this, she adds, as long as they don’t take the law into their own hands: “We can’t stop them from dressing like that or walking the streets. But if they do something that crosses the line or is a crime, then it becomes a concern for us.”
While most of the Knightmen’s roster wishes to remain anonymous, one notable Heroes Network ex-pat is the legendary Master Legend, recently profiled in Rolling Stone. “The Heroes Network got a little too soft,” he says. “All that tough-guy stuff, that’s what we are. We’re not here to play around.”
The Wall Creeper still maintains contact with the Heroes Network, and Zimmer promises there’s room for everyone — charitable superheroes and tough-guy crime fighters alike — under his administration. But for that to happen, there’s the matter of cooling down a few superhero-sized tempers. As Knightmen member Ecliptico says about Heroes Network newcomer Blue Lightning, “I’m a smoker. You take my cigarette away, and we’re gonna have problems.”
Striding up Colfax Avenue on their joint Denver patrol, it doesn’t take long for the Wall Creeper and Zen Blade to run smack into an evildoer.
Just a few blocks east of the Capitol building, a shady-looking figure steps out of a darkened alley and approaches the unmasked, plainclothes crime fighters. “You guys looking to buy?” he asks under his breath. The encounter is so unbelievable to the Wall Creeper that he can’t help but keep walking, clearing half a block before his mind fully comprehends what just happened. He spent the past three years looking for drug dealers — and one just came right up to him. “What did that guy say?” he asks. “Normally I would call the police on that guy!”
“Eh,” says Zen Blade with a shrug as they keep walking. The two get along — they chuckle knowingly at a store-window movie poster advertising Watchmen and joke that if Tothian were here, he’d try to hitch a ride on a wailing fire truck speeding by — but it’s clear that Wall Creeper’s companion is a different breed of crime fighter. While Zen Blade has patrolled the mean streets of Aurora, this Heroes Network loyalist also volunteers in his civilian clothes at the Dumb Friends League. And his demeanor is markedly different from his colleague’s: By putting on a costume and assuming a new name, he says, he found inner peace. “Now that kid with all the rage is gone,” he says with a tranquil smile.
A few minutes later, Zen Blade suggests they turn around. He doesn’t want to worry his wife and kid. Back at the Capitol, Zen Blade takes in the view from the top of the steps. “This is too big a city,” he says, shaking his head. “Too big for me.” This was his first time patrolling in a while; because of the cold, he’d called it quits in December. Maybe he’ll pick it back up in the spring. He’ll have to wait and see.
“I learned a lot about the city tonight,” says the Wall Creeper once the two part ways. “I am going to need more training before I take it on.” Aside from his work with the Knightmen, however, lately this crime fighter, too, has been lying low. Last summer he told his mother about his nocturnal activities, and, to put it mildly, she wasn’t pleased. The experience shattered something inside him. Recently he’s been giving the incessant patrolling a rest, and when he does make the rounds in his metro-area neighborhood, aside from the mask in his pocket, the battle suit stays at home.
Maybe that’s why he sleeps better now and the panic attacks have died off. He now knows it wasn’t very healthy always seeing the world in terms of a super-sized clash of good and evil, with bad guys around every corner and masked men the only hope. It’s best to leave that dystopian stuff to Watchmen‘s Rorschach, he explains, having realized that “he saw society in such grim terms that he became something grimmer to cope with it — and that’s what I did, too.”
He’s not about to give up fighting for the downtrodden and afflicted, though — far from it. He’s majoring in criminal justice in hopes of one day becoming a private investigator (police work being too constraining for a lone wolf like him). “If I took as much pride and effort [that I put into the Wall Creeper] and put it into becoming a detective, I would be helping a lot more,” he writes in his journal. “I will still be a watchman, a crime fighter. Why not be legal?”
Nor does he plan to mothball his battle suit, since he’ll need it when he visits Ecliptico in Pennsylvania later this year. He’ll get to meet Mrs. Ecliptico — that’s her official superhero name — and maybe go for a spin in their homemade, three-wheeled Ecliptico Car. Plus, he and Ecliptico have big plans to discuss: They’re hoping to one day start a security company. It could be a crime-fighting consortium like the Black Monday Society in Salt Lake City or the Justice Society of Justice in Indianapolis. Or maybe it will be the old-fashioned suit-and-tie sort; they haven’t decided yet.
Whatever the operation looks like, it’s going to make a difference — the Wall Creeper’s sure of it. “I’m meant to do something,” he insists.
He’s destined for something great.
See photos of crime fighters around the world at westword.com/slideshow. Also, on the Latest Word blog, find a super discussion of Watchmen and a Q&A with a local supervillain.
You don’t exist. You think nothing, you feel nothing, you are nothing. That’s the secret to becoming invisible, to becoming the Wall Creeper.
And he is surely invisible tonight. No one notices as the lean nineteen-year-old makes his way across Civic Center Park and up the granite front steps of the State Capitol. He’s just another night prowler, bundled up against the cold in a black leather jacket.
Probably no one would pay attention even if he were wearing his full battle suit: The Kevlar composite vest, the blunt-trauma pads strapped to his martial arts-toned arms and legs, the custom-designed full-face covering purchased from Hero-Gear.net. Most people go through life in a stupor. It’s like what Master Legend — who’s been battling Florida evildoers for more than a quarter-century — says: “It’s not that a man becomes invisible; it’s just that a man becomes invisible to everybody else. If you are an outcast that nobody cares about, no one notices you.”
In other words, people don’t see what they don’t expect — and no one expects to see somebody like the Wall Creeper, a flesh-and-blood superhero.
Nevertheless, the Wall Creeper can’t risk wearing his battle suit. Not tonight, his first Denver patrol. He doesn’t yet know the city like he knows the Colorado mountain towns and rural communities he’s spent three years patrolling. Until he finds his footing here, there’s no need to attract attention. So all he carries, folded and tucked in his breast pocket, is the most important piece: the black mask he places over his mouth and nose like some terrible demon beak. It’s inscribed with an ornate “W” intertwined with a serpent-like “C” — the insignia of the Wall Creeper.
He paces at the foot of the Capitol building, waiting for his colleague Zen Blade to arrive. He’s edgy, too distracted by his nerves to scope out nearby walls and obstacles for footholds in case he needs to wall-creep to a good vantage point or escape route. He’s never met the Aurora crime fighter who wears a triple-crescent logo on his chest and knit cap, along with aviator-style goggles, but from what he’s learned of him online, the two have much in common. That’s why he contacted Zen Blade and suggested they meet up tonight, to join forces as they prowl the streets.
While the Wall Creeper waits, the city below him seethes. Somewhere nearby, a siren wails. In the shadows of Civic Center Park, a group of men holler and tussle. Maybe they’re playing around, maybe not. On the side of the Denver Newspaper Agency building, the block-long LCD news display scrolls through its never-ending inventory of despair. Drug dealers. Rapists. Pedophiles.
To the Wall Creeper, it seems that with each passing moment the world is getting worse, the shadows deepening, the hands ticking closer to midnight. That’s why he’s taking a stand, hopefully before it’s too late. He’ll stand guard, never resting, as it is written in Isaiah 62:6: “I have posted watchmen on your walls, O Jerusalem. They will never be silent day or night. Whoever calls on the Lord, do not give yourselves any rest, and do not give him any rest until he establishes Jerusalem and makes it an object of praise throughout the earth.”
A man in a black leather coat approaches. “Waiting for someone?” he asks.
“Zen Blade?” responds the Wall Creeper, extending a hand. Zen Blade, several years older and bulkier than Wall Creeper, left his suit at home, too, but is nonetheless ready to patrol. “Let’s go,” he says.
The night awaits.
Nobody knows my whole story,” the Wall Creeper says when he first consents to an interview. “Most nineteen-year-olds are just trying to get lucky and get drunk. I want to save the world. It’s taken over my life, and I’m happy with that.” But people need to know he’s not just some vigilante or costumed weirdo, he explains. (And, to be clear, he prefers to be called a crime fighter, not a defender, warrior or costumed activist. Worst of the bunch, he says, is probably “real-life superhero.” After all, no one would say “real-life police officer.”)
“My greatest desire is to aid the police in stopping crime in this great city,” he writes in an e-mail. “Every fiber of my being wants to patrol, to aid, to help the citizens of this city, and the real heroes, the police and firemen, in Denver.”
To explain why, he agrees to meet — under strict and secretive conditions. He’ll only show up at a public, neutral location — a quiet park in a metro-area suburb near where he’s been patrolling the past few months or, on cold days, in a nearby chain restaurant. He wears unremarkable civilian clothes over his lithe physique, and there’s none of the swagger or eagerness of other guys his age. Smiles, for example, are few and far between. He’s the type who blends into a crowd, the last one anyone would expect to be rounding up villains or crushing crime syndicates.
He refuses to disclose where he lives. Anyone who knows, he explains, would be in danger if a criminal tried to use him to get to the Wall Creeper. “It’s like the Batcave,” he says wryly, though he’s quick to point out that he’s never been a big fan of comic books. Getting him to reveal his real name is clearly not an option.
The tale he divulges over several weeks is impossible to verify. He won’t disclose the names of relevant locations, and he says the few people who are close to him, like his father, are reluctant to talk. But the veracity of the events he describes seems less important than the assurance with which he describes them. Each of his stories, each of his memories, is real enough for him to have created the Wall Creeper.
He ran and ran. The freshman boy who would become the Wall Creeper ran every afternoon through the hot, barren plains of South Texas. He ran alone, three to four miles at a stretch, until he could hit a 5:25 mile and had somehow willed away his asthma attacks. He ran even though he hated it, even though it left him ragged for the grueling tae kwon do classes he took later each afternoon. He ran to keep sane, to block out the physical and verbal abuse he suffered at school. He ran so he’d be able to fight back.
And he ran because something inside him told him he had to, that the agony he felt was leading up to something, that he was destined for something great.
It wasn’t always like this. When he was younger, growing up in suburban Oklahoma, there was nothing to run away from. Playing street hockey, learning Christian ideals of right and wrong from his strict but loving parents, watching Batman (the ones with Michael Keaton, whom he considers the only real Batman) — it all seemed right. He especially loved the peach tree in his yard, the one that grew fruit so fat and juicy it would split from within. He’d climb up the tree’s trunk and nap within its thick branches, just as he’d shimmy up light poles and scale chain-link fences. He climbed because it was exhilarating and was something no one else could do, and because at the top he got to live, just for a moment, in his own special world.
He can’t remember exactly when things changed. For reasons he can’t explain, his recollections are fractured and disjointed, his memory cut short by parts he seems to have blocked out. One of the turning points, however, came on a night when he was eleven or twelve. Walking home from a street hockey game, he saw a teenager leading away a young girl he knew, saying to her, “I’m going to take you home, and we’ll see what’s under your skirt.” Hearing that, something snapped. He attacked the teenager, he says, fighting until the older boy ran away. After that, things get fuzzy.
He says he took the girl to her empty house and, to watch over her once she was inside, quietly scaled the one-story residence and waited on the roof until her parents returned. That was his first “wall creep,” he says now, a technique that would later become his signature move. For a while, though, the whole episode seemed so incredible, he wasn’t sure it had actually happened; as he wrote about the wall-creeping part of the night in his journal last year, “Someone inside me (probably a lie) tells me this.”
Whatever happened, the episode changed him.
“That night, I realized the dark underside of the world,” he wrote. “People as a whole squirm and are crippled by their lies, false beliefs…expectations and society. This perversion could not be ignored by me…I decided to be something inhuman to exonerate myself from human weakness, at least in part.”
The human weakness he witnessed around him only worsened when, not long after this incident, he and his family moved to Texas. His memories of middle school there are bleak. A gray prison of a school building, with no heat or windows to let in the sun. First-period physical education classes spent running the school grounds in ragged gym clothes, the early morning haze illuminated by the piles of burning trash school workers would ignite. Bullies everywhere, attacking the new kid and scrawling curse words all over his clothes.
High school was no better. It was a sprawling warehouse-like place packed with 7,000 students. Someone like him got lost in the flood.
While he was locked away in these dismal fortresses, something new and fierce was growing inside him, struggling to get out. “In the turmoil of this dangerously weak emotional state was born a new face,” he says now. “While most kids my age succumbed to apathy, not really caring about others or what was morally right, I became filled with empathy, to the point where I knew I would sacrifice myself for another.”
He needed a body to match his taut new mental state, so he took up tae kwon do and a rigorous running regimen, even though he hated it. He had no choice, he told himself; he was destined for something great.
Pray for me.”
That’s what he said right before his first crime-fighting patrol. He was talking to a classmate at whose house he was spending the night. The classmate, a friend from his junior class, had agreed to help out with his crazy scheme. While the kid wasn’t coming along for the outing, he had offered his parents’ home as a base of operations, since it was located near the center of the Colorado mountain town where the would-be crime fighter and his family had moved from Texas the year before.
The Wall Creeper still shivers nervously thinking about that evening: how the two boys spent the hours leading up to the patrol, almost too anxious to talk. How glancing at the duffel bag of equipment he’d spent weeks preparing made him feel like he was about to get on a roller-coaster ride, one without a visible end. What would happen if he got caught? Would he be arrested? Would the embarrassment ruin his family? By 10 p.m., he’d done enough wondering. It was time to go.
He’d hatched the plan two months earlier, the day he claims he got a call from a police detective who was looking for a guy he knew, a friend of a friend who’d recently skipped town. The detective said the guy had been abusing a little girl. Afterward, he sat in his bedroom feeling trapped, all the old anger flooding back.
After moving to Colorado, things had briefly gotten better for the boy. His new school was small, intimate, populated with teachers and students who seemed to care. But then he started hearing about drugs at parties, stuff like heroin and ecstasy. Classmates he thought were respectable turned out to be dealers. And with each passing week, the local crime blotter filled with ever more reports of robberies, assaults and worse.
The detective’s call was the final straw. It seemed to him the town was falling apart, with the police too understaffed to do anything about it. The ones who’d suffer the consequences were the children — kids like his own little sister.
“I realized I was all alone against what was happening,” he says. “It was an innocent town, a loving town that turned to drugs. And my little sister was going to have to grow up in that, and I wouldn’t allow that.”
That night, surrounded by papier-mâché masks and fantasy posters he’d hung on his bedroom walls, he realized something incredible: Maybe he could make a difference. “I have been training. I can do something. It’s not like I am just some common guy,” he thought. “I’ve been training for this all my life and didn’t realize it.”
The creature struggling inside him was about to be let out. As an unassuming high school student, he had the perfect cover to learn about the drugs and dealers. He could handle himself in a fight, having continued his obsessive physical training. All he needed was a way to protect his identity in this insular mountain town.
In other words, he needed a battle suit. The outfit he built over the next two months was a mixture of practicality and drama, something he hoped would protect him but also strike fear into the hearts of evildoers. He bought a full-face balaclava from a ski shop, obtained a paintball ballistics vest from a military surplus store and salvaged the arm and leg pads he’d used in his street hockey days. Everything was black, to blend in with the night. He armed himself with swords, two short blades he named Twitch and Wind. And while the grappling hook he tried never worked, he was pleased with the black cape he’d designed with sewn-in umbrella ribs that he could raise like demon wings.
But he still needed a name, something terrifying. Since the Wall Creeper persona had yet to come to him, he instead thought back to the time as a toddler when he’d wandered into his family’s backyard playhouse and found its walls writhing with the pulsing wings of hundreds of moths. The door had slammed behind him and the creatures had taken flight, pouring over his tiny body, consuming him. He couldn’t remember what happened next — the memory breaks off — but the revulsion he still felt about it was enough to inspire the perfect name: the Mothman.
And now, as he stepped quietly out of his classmate’s house, the Mothman was ready to take flight.
The masked young man had no particular destination in mind as he walked down the quiet street that warm summer night. He was essentially taking his suit for a test drive, to see what might happen. He didn’t have to wait long to find out.
Just a few doors down, the Mothman froze as a motion-sensitive garage-door light flicked on, illuminating a deer on an evening stroll. He considered it for a moment, until he realized he wasn’t the only one watching. A couple was observing the deer from their nearby porch — and then turned and looked right at him.
He did the only thing he could think of. He raised his horrible black wings like some fiendish beast rearing out of the darkness. If this was to be the Mothman’s coming-out party, he’d be damned if he didn’t leave an impression.
That’s when the cop car rolled down the street.
He couldn’t believe it. What were the odds that one of the town’s meager police force would show up right here, right now? Instinctively, he dropped to the ground and covered himself with his cape, hoping, pleading, to blend into the foliage. The squad car cruised by without stopping. He sprinted back to his friend’s house, not bothering to look back. He’d only been gone twenty minutes and had nearly been caught. Still, he was exhilarated that he’d actually patrolled — and made it back in one piece.
And look on the bright side, he told himself. Things could only get better from here.
He soon discovered he wasn’t the only crime fighter, unbelievable as that seemed. The tip-off was Mr. Silent.
Several months after his first patrol, with several additional excursions under his belt, he came across a MySpace page for a man who patrolled Indianapolis armed with a cane, a gentleman’s suit and a silver mask. He excitedly sent Mr. Silent a message, letting him know that he, too, was a crime fighter. He received a response from a different superhero, a New York City-area avenger named Tothian. There are lots of us, Tothian explained, and encouraged him to join their ranks in the Heroes Network — a sort of United Nations for superheroes.
But first he’d need a new name. “Mothman” had lost its mystique when he’d realized it was similar to the name of a 2002 thriller starring Richard Gere. So he thought back to his alter ego’s origins, the night he silently scaled the wall of that little girl’s house. The answer was obvious: He was the Wall Creeper.
The Heroes Network embraced the Wall Creeper with open arms. Founded by Tothian in early 2007, the membership-only online forum covered everything from battle tactics to investigation tips, and boasted dozens of members from all over the country and beyond — people like Slapjack in Maine, Nostrum in New Orleans, Lionheart in England and the not-so-subtly named Superhero in Florida. From the Wall Creeper’s perspective, a few were clearly dressing in tights for attention or to live out some fantasy.
But many were like himself, people sick of the world’s depravity and apathy who’d decided to take matters into their own hands. Their outfits symbolized a pledge to justice. “Some would say the costumes are to inspire people to do good, to show people that there are people like us out there,” says the Wall Creeper. “This line of work isn’t just a job or career; it’s a piece of your life. It defines you, and it comes out in the pride you take in your costume.” Most of these costumed avengers know they have no real powers other than those provided by their training or equipment (though a few believe they have metaphysical abilities, including Master Legend, who says he can flip over a car and run at supersonic speeds without losing his breath). But that hasn’t stopped them from facing down evil on their own. They have no interest in joining structured operations like police forces or even the Guardian Angels. They live by their own rules.
“Justice is not the law,” Master Legend says, his declarative sentences seeming to come out in word bubbles. “Laws are written by men. Justice is written into our souls, our spirit, from the day we are born.”
No one knows for sure who was the first to heed this call for justice and strap on a mask. Some heroes have been around since the 1990s — folks like Mr. Silent, as well as Terrifica, a woman who dons a Valkyrie bra and defends ladies in New York City, and Superbarrio Gómez, a Mexico City resident who campaigns against corruption wearing a red and yellow wrestler’s mask. Then there’s Master Legend, who claims to have been taking down criminals with his “No Mercy Punch” since 1983. But even before him, there was the Human Fly, a costumed Canadian who in the 1970s rode on top of a DC-8 airliner and used a rocket-powered motorcycle to jump 27 buses at a Gloria Gaynor concert. He had a Marvel comic book named after him.
Lately, though, conversions to the superhero cause have reached a fever pitch, with the Heroes Network swelling to more than 300 members. So far, the Colorado contingent remains relatively small. There’s Tigris, who crusaded for animal justice for a while in Colorado Springs; Ten, who sports a blood-red mask and a mean pair of nunchucks; and a shadowy figure who answers to the name Nightwatch. None of them could be reached for this story. But Colorado’s superhero population may grow, especially with new crime-fighting associations such as the Signal Light Foundation and Superheroes Anonymous taking hold.
The recent upswing could be a response to real-world perils that seem straight out of a mega-villain’s plan for world domination, things like the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the bird flu and the USA PATRIOT Act. Or maybe it’s thanks to the Internet, with websites like the Heroes Network inspiring costumed crime fighters the world over to come out of the closet. Or maybe, as the Wall Creeper believes, it’s because few people look up to the military or elected officials or the police anymore. The only heroes left, it seems, are the mythical ones whose visages soar across movie screens and whose four-color exploits still embellish endless childhoods.
“The only role models we have left are either dead or gone or never existed,” he says. “It’s sad we have to take up that mantle waving a superhero flag.”
In the Heroes Network, the Wall Creeper finally felt part of something important.
“It was like coming home for the first time,” he says. “Just imagine having a friend in every state that knows what you do and how you are and everything.” With his online colleagues, he endlessly compared and fine-tuned his battle suit and tinkered with his MySpace page. He eventually sank more than $1,000 into his alter ego, explaining to his parents that it was going toward a paintball hobby. Along the way, he gathered trade secrets such as how capes, while dramatic, don’t work well in actual crime fighting. He discovered that the best place to buy handmade Spandex battle suits was www.Hero-Gear.net — “We’ve got what it takes to be a HERO!” — and ordered a custom-designed mask from the site for special occasions. And from Entomo the Insect Man, a Naples, Italy-based superhero, he learned he needed an insignia that would set him apart from your everyday all-black ninja. “You are the only Wall Creeper,” Entomo told him. “There is no one else like you.” So the Wall Creeper painted an ornate “W-C” motif on his mask.
And now the man behind that mask felt like he was becoming a force to be reckoned with. He had to keep his secret from his parents — it was too dangerous and unconventional for them to know about — so a few times a week, he’d wait in his room until the house was silent before sneaking out. Then he’d navigate the moonlit three-mile walk to town before stealthily roaming the streets for hours looking for trouble.
He gave up his swords, preferring to rely on his detective skills and the three or four martial arts styles in which he’d taken lessons (though to keep the upper hand, he won’t say how, exactly, he’d handle himself in a fight). Some nights he’d “wall-creep” up buildings, climbing up fire escapes and vaulting over walls so he could run surveillance from roofs. He discovered he could become invisible just by thinking and feeling nothing — acting as though he didn’t exist. The tactic seemed to work, since he remembers only a handful of people ever noticing him. The few who did sometimes gasped or screamed, while others waved and wished him a good night.
One time, he says, he tracked a local drug dealer to his house and knocked on his window. When the thug got over the sight of a masked man peeking through his curtains, he allowed the Wall Creeper inside to talk. That night, the crime fighter learned about the OxyContin, heroin, cocaine, meth and ecstasy flowing freely under the direction of a local narcotics ring. He took it all down in his journal and warned the dealer that if he didn’t clean up his act, he’d be back.
Other than that, the Wall Creeper didn’t experience much in the way of dramatic confrontations. No matter: His main weapon wasn’t his fists, but the legend that he believed was growing. Sure enough, he sensed that rumors were spreading around school of a masked vigilante, and to him it seemed that the once-rampant drug trade petered off.
With his home-turf mission apparently accomplished, the Wall Creeper entered college last year in another small Colorado community and stepped up his patrols. He began training two recruits, one of whom supposedly now patrols in the Greeley area under the name Dragomir. Together at college, the three scoped out underage parties for potential date-rapists and would-be drunk drivers. One time they discovered what they thought was an OxyContin pill at a popular college nightclub, so they left the evidence on a vacant squad car, noting where they’d found it. According to the Wall Creeper, the nightclub was shut down within a week.
Another time, the Wall Creeper was biking across campus with his mask off when he spotted what looked like a sleazeball about to take advantage of his drunken companion. He’ll never forget how that dude turned tail when the Wall Creeper bore down on him like a bike messenger from hell, ripping open his coat to reveal his fearsome battle armor. Too bad the girl he saved was too sloshed to notice.
This was the Wall Creeper at his finest, the creature inside of him on full display. As he noted in his journal, he’d reached a new level: “When I am out there, alone with a seemingly new body and a different track of thought, I become the Wall Creeper. That part of me barely speaks. He takes his work seriously, and doesn’t half-ass it like the others. I feel raw power and animal-like, seeking justice.”
The resulting hero was becoming well regarded on the Heroes Network. “He sticks to his mission and doesn’t change his ideals for anybody,” says Tothian about the Wall Creeper. “For someone his age, he is wise beyond his years.”
“For a guy who’s not bulletproof and doesn’t have any superpowers, his heart is totally in what he does. He’s a 110-percent type of person,” adds Ecliptico, a Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, masked man with whom the Wall Creeper has spent hours on the phone brainstorming about helmet designs and crime patterns.
But becoming the Wall Creeper, patrolling in full battle armor several times a week, was taking a toll. Thanks to his long nights, he was struggling to stay awake in class. He began having panic attacks, feeling like something revolting was crawling over his skin. He became obsessed with crime blotters, poring over the injustices he’d failed to stop. “Not doing my job well enough,” he wrote in his journal. “Never enough.”
It was as if he was turning into Rorschach, his favorite character in Watchmen, the 1980s graphic novel idolized by many Heroes Network members for its cast of complex, real-life superheroes. The Wall Creeper had always shared a kinship with the story’s loner detective Rorschach, since both wore their ornate insignias on their masks. But lately there was another, more disturbing similarity between the two. Rorschach was so disgusted and victimized by the world he pledged to protect that he’d become numb to reality, going so far as to consider his ghastly mask his true visage. And now the Wall Creeper started feeling that way, too — as if the creature dressed in the all-black battle suit was his real, dominant personality and the young man in civilian clothes just the alter ego.
As he wrote in his journal one day, “The mask truly is like my face.”
The explosion rips through downtown Denver. Deep within a secret, subterranean lab beneath the State Capitol, something has gone terribly wrong. Down there, far from the population’s prying eyes, a diabolical corporation has developed a horrible new nerve gas — a gas that, thanks to a freak detonation, has now been released. The thick, noxious fumes spread through the sewers and up into the streets, lacing the city with its nefarious tentacles. Many die immediately, littering sidewalks with a gruesome tableau. The rest suffer a worse fate: Devolving into zombie-like maniacs, they roam the streets thirsty for blood and destruction.
There’s only one hope: the Knightmen. Ensconced in a downtown safe house, this vigilant league of crime fighters leaps into action. To end the chaos, they must avoid the zombie hordes, infiltrate the underground lab, find an antidote and inoculate the surviving, half-mad population. Along the way, they might as well take out the mind-controlled lizard men guarding the laboratory.
So goes the fictional training exercise the Wall Creeper recently devised for the Knightmen, a renegade new super-secret offshoot of the Heroes Network. The word-based scenario plays out online, with members messaging back and forth over strategies and plans. The narrative is admittedly over the top, but the Wall Creeper, who transferred to a metro-area college this past fall, designed it to hone his colleagues’ battle tactics in case they ever face a large-scale crisis. Of course, the Knightmen believe they already have one crisis on their hands — one involving the Heroes Network.
The troubles started this past December, when Tothian, satisfied with what he’d accomplished in the Heroes Network, stepped down as president and members voted to replace him with Zimmer, an Austin-based superhero with binary-code 1s and 0s emblazoned on his chest. Taking a page from Barack Obama’s playbook, Zimmer posted a dramatic video acceptance speech on his MySpace page promising a new superhero era. “By the power of truth, I, while living, have conquered the universe,” he proclaimed. “We are here because the world is in bad shape. We have a lot to do and not a lot of time to do it in. But who the hell do you think we are? We are the goddamn Heroes Network, and I am honored to be your president.”
But these lofty claims soon led to online bickering and accusations, with universal truth and justice taking a back seat to petty recriminations and political infighting. Some were upset over a surge of new recruits admitted in under Zimmer’s watch, heroes with dubious missions like the Michigan-based Blue Lightning, who crusades against secondhand smoke. Others were up in arms about the new president’s plan to send out press packets to media outlets all over the country. It didn’t make sense, they argued, for folks with secret identities and unsanctioned weaponry like homemade pepper-spray bazookas and Taser gauntlets to be parading all over the nightly news.
The central argument was over what superheroes are supposed to do with themselves. Zimmer and his colleagues held that social activism should play a key role in the Heroes Network, with costumed superheroes volunteering at local charities and the organization taking steps to become an official nonprofit. That didn’t sit well with those who’d rather be cleaning the streets of scum than running toy drives. “You think you’re a superhero because you show up at a charity once or twice? That’s a smack in the face to people who do it every day,” fumes Ecliptico now. “If you are not risking your life, you are not doing anything heroic. Who is out saving the girl from being brutalized while you’re handing out Barbie Dolls?”
Because of the tumult, the Wall Creeper and several of his colleagues decided to form the Knightmen. “We’re the honest crime fighters,” says the Wall Creeper. “We were sick of all the online minutiae between crime fighters and superheroes.”
Maybe they’ll even end up working hand in hand with local cops — though so far, the Denver police haven’t heard of folks like the Wall Creeper. “I’ve asked around with some of the officers on the street, and they haven’t seen them,” says police spokeswoman Detective Sharon Avendaño. “And it’s not going to be listed on any reports that, ‘Hey, we saw the Batman.'” The department doesn’t necessarily have a problem with people like this, she adds, as long as they don’t take the law into their own hands: “We can’t stop them from dressing like that or walking the streets. But if they do something that crosses the line or is a crime, then it becomes a concern for us.”
While most of the Knightmen’s roster wishes to remain anonymous, one notable Heroes Network ex-pat is the legendary Master Legend, recently profiled in Rolling Stone. “The Heroes Network got a little too soft,” he says. “All that tough-guy stuff, that’s what we are. We’re not here to play around.”
The Wall Creeper still maintains contact with the Heroes Network, and Zimmer promises there’s room for everyone — charitable superheroes and tough-guy crime fighters alike — under his administration. But for that to happen, there’s the matter of cooling down a few superhero-sized tempers. As Knightmen member Ecliptico says about Heroes Network newcomer Blue Lightning, “I’m a smoker. You take my cigarette away, and we’re gonna have problems.”
Striding up Colfax Avenue on their joint Denver patrol, it doesn’t take long for the Wall Creeper and Zen Blade to run smack into an evildoer.
Just a few blocks east of the Capitol building, a shady-looking figure steps out of a darkened alley and approaches the unmasked, plainclothes crime fighters. “You guys looking to buy?” he asks under his breath. The encounter is so unbelievable to the Wall Creeper that he can’t help but keep walking, clearing half a block before his mind fully comprehends what just happened. He spent the past three years looking for drug dealers — and one just came right up to him. “What did that guy say?” he asks. “Normally I would call the police on that guy!”
“Eh,” says Zen Blade with a shrug as they keep walking. The two get along — they chuckle knowingly at a store-window movie poster advertising Watchmen and joke that if Tothian were here, he’d try to hitch a ride on a wailing fire truck speeding by — but it’s clear that Wall Creeper’s companion is a different breed of crime fighter. While Zen Blade has patrolled the mean streets of Aurora, this Heroes Network loyalist also volunteers in his civilian clothes at the Dumb Friends League. And his demeanor is markedly different from his colleague’s: By putting on a costume and assuming a new name, he says, he found inner peace. “Now that kid with all the rage is gone,” he says with a tranquil smile.
A few minutes later, Zen Blade suggests they turn around. He doesn’t want to worry his wife and kid. Back at the Capitol, Zen Blade takes in the view from the top of the steps. “This is too big a city,” he says, shaking his head. “Too big for me.” This was his first time patrolling in a while; because of the cold, he’d called it quits in December. Maybe he’ll pick it back up in the spring. He’ll have to wait and see.
“I learned a lot about the city tonight,” says the Wall Creeper once the two part ways. “I am going to need more training before I take it on.” Aside from his work with the Knightmen, however, lately this crime fighter, too, has been lying low. Last summer he told his mother about his nocturnal activities, and, to put it mildly, she wasn’t pleased. The experience shattered something inside him. Recently he’s been giving the incessant patrolling a rest, and when he does make the rounds in his metro-area neighborhood, aside from the mask in his pocket, the battle suit stays at home.
Maybe that’s why he sleeps better now and the panic attacks have died off. He now knows it wasn’t very healthy always seeing the world in terms of a super-sized clash of good and evil, with bad guys around every corner and masked men the only hope. It’s best to leave that dystopian stuff to Watchmen‘s Rorschach, he explains, having realized that “he saw society in such grim terms that he became something grimmer to cope with it — and that’s what I did, too.”
He’s not about to give up fighting for the downtrodden and afflicted, though — far from it. He’s majoring in criminal justice in hopes of one day becoming a private investigator (police work being too constraining for a lone wolf like him). “If I took as much pride and effort [that I put into the Wall Creeper] and put it into becoming a detective, I would be helping a lot more,” he writes in his journal. “I will still be a watchman, a crime fighter. Why not be legal?”
Nor does he plan to mothball his battle suit, since he’ll need it when he visits Ecliptico in Pennsylvania later this year. He’ll get to meet Mrs. Ecliptico — that’s her official superhero name — and maybe go for a spin in their homemade, three-wheeled Ecliptico Car. Plus, he and Ecliptico have big plans to discuss: They’re hoping to one day start a security company. It could be a crime-fighting consortium like the Black Monday Society in Salt Lake City or the Justice Society of Justice in Indianapolis. Or maybe it will be the old-fashioned suit-and-tie sort; they haven’t decided yet.
Whatever the operation looks like, it’s going to make a difference — the Wall Creeper’s sure of it. “I’m meant to do something,” he insists.
He’s destined for something great.
http://www.westword.com/2009-03-12/news/the-astounding-adventures-of-the-wall-creeper-colorado-s-own-superhero/1
Sul web, in lotta contro il crimine
di BENEDETTA PERILLI
FOX Fire indossa una maschera da volpe, un lungo cappotto di pelle nera e insieme ai Nameless Few protegge dalla violenza le strade del Michigan. Ha 26 anni, è una donna, e di notte diventa una supereroina. Come Wonder Woman. Senza superpoteri, però. La sua forza sta in alcune nozioni di magia e in un buon allenamento fisico. Come lei, in giro per il mondo, centinai di altri supereroi della vita reale, che si dividono tra professioni normali e lotta al crimine.
Quella dei supereroi della vita reale è un’esperienza nata dopo l’11 settembre e rafforzata dalla recente politica dell’active citizenship promossa da Barack Obama. Negli anni recenti la loro comunità è cresciuta intorno al sito World Superhero Registry, l’anagrafe dei “difensori dell’umanità” che a oggi registra trenta iscritti e due aspiranti. Ognuno con un nome, uno stile, un “costume” e un’area d’azione. Il resto è nelle mani della loro fantasia. A eccezione di tre regole, alle quali ogni supereroe, che ambisca a entrare nel registro mondiale, deve sottostare.
La prima riguarda il costume. Non un semplice travestimento per tutelarsi da eventuali ritorsioni, ma un segno di rispetto nei confronti dell’umanità. L’abito è il biglietto da visita con cui presentarsi al mondo, e dal quale dipende la propria credibilità. La seconda regola definisce l’attività del supereroe, che deve agire per il bene dell’umanità, mantenendo però un livello d’azione più attivo e partecipativo del semplice comportamento quotidiano. In caso di inattività o di inadempienza, il registro segnala nella scheda l’eventuale ritiro dall’anagrafe mondiale.
Infine, l’ultima regola, quella che riguarda la motivazione personale e definisce i doveri del paladino. Essere supereroi non ha niente a che fare con campagne di promozione personale o trovate pubblicitarie. La vocazione deve venire dal singolo individuo, che non può ricevere denaro per la sua attività né lavorare come rappresentante, stipendiato o volontario che sia, di un’organizzazione.
Detto questo, non resta che scorrere il registro per scoprire travestimenti e crociate di questi paladini che molto devono al mondo dei fumetti ma dal quale non possono prendere neanche un nome, pena l’infrazione del copyright. E allora l’ispirazione arriva dalla fantasia. A New York lavora Terrifica, in Inghilterra c’è Black Arrow, in Florida opera Amazonia mentre la Regina di Cuori è del Michigan. Ultima limitazione all’operato di questi eroi incompresi – che in questi giorni grazie ad alcuni articoli su The Sunday Times e Rolling Stones vivono momenti di gloria – è l’utilizzo di pistole e coltelli. Ben vengano quelli in plastica, che fanno da complemento all’abito. La loro vera arma non è metallica, ma virtuale.
Dalle pagine dei loro siti, i supereroi lanciano le loro minacce al mondo del crimine. Ed è sempre online, con l’iscrizione al registro ufficiale, che l’attività trova definitiva consacrazione. Inutile fare pressioni per entrare nel registro: la nomina deve essere promossa da parte del registro stesso in seguito a una comprovata carriera da supereroe.
I capostipiti sono i quattro più celebri iscritti che a oggi, tuttavia, risultano in pensione. C’è Terrifica, paladina della sicurezza femminile che per anni ha tutelato le donne newyorkesi da uomini violenti e pericolosi. C’è Angle-Grinder Man, il vigilante inglese degli automobilisti che, operando tra Londra e il Kent, ha liberato centinaia di automobili dalle ganasce applicate dalla polizia municipale. Ci sono anche Mr. Silent, angelo delle notti dell’Illinois, e Crime Fighter Girl, ragazzina in maschera gialla impegnata in attività di volontariato e assistenza sociale nella contea di Jackson.
A loro si ispirano gli attuali supereroi, tra i quali spiccano per notorietà, con tanto di interviste a Cnn o Fox, SuperBarrio e Shadow Hare. Il primo, costume in lycra rosso, mutandoni e mantello dorati, difende i diritti dei lavoratori e dei poveri messicani. Il secondo, maschera nera, aiuta i senzatetto di Cincinnati. C’è anche chi difende il mondo dall’inquinamento, come Black Harrow – cappuccio nero, capelli rossi e amore per gli animali – o Entomo: quest’ultimo è l’unico supereroe italiano ammesso nel registro. Il fiorentino Superataf è in attesa che la sua candidatura venga valutata.
Entomo è un uomo insetto che opera a Napoli per promuovere una più ampia coscienza ambientalista. E dalla sua pagina MySpace lancia una testimonianza: “Essere un supereroe è il gesto più importante che si possa realizzare in un mondo arretrato come il nostro. Utilizzo le mie capacità salvando quel che resta da salvare e distruggendo quel che non rientra nel grande schema dell’equilibrio”.
http://www.repubblica.it/2008/12/sezioni/esteri/supereroi-vita-reale/supereroi-vita-reale/supereroi-vita-reale.html?ref=hpspr1