{"id":15488,"date":"2011-06-27T19:16:44","date_gmt":"2011-06-28T02:16:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.reallifesuperheroes.org\/?p=15488"},"modified":"2011-06-27T19:16:44","modified_gmt":"2011-06-28T02:16:44","slug":"meet-vancouvers-very-own-superhero","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rlsh.net\/archive\/2011\/06\/27\/meet-vancouvers-very-own-superhero\/","title":{"rendered":"Meet Vancouver's very own superhero"},"content":{"rendered":"

Has a challenge for the City of Vancouver<\/strong>
\nOriginally posted: http:\/\/www.news1130.com\/news\/local\/article\/246361–meet-vancouver-s-very-own-superhero<\/a>
\nBy News1130 Staff
\n\"thanatos\"<\/a>VANCOUVER (NEWS1130) – He takes care of those who live in the city’s dark places, defending and helping people on the mean streets of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside.\u00a0 News1130<\/a>‘s Mike Lloyd<\/a> is revealing the details of a clandestine meeting with the man who calls himself Thanatos, The Dark Avenger.
\n“I’m a real life superhero here in Vancouver.\u00a0 I take care of those who really need help the most.\u00a0 I take care of those in the street, I watch out for them, I defend them, and I help them out.\u00a0 I do monthly hand-outs of food, blankets and necessities.\u00a0 I patrol the [Downtown] Eastside and keep my eye on things.\u00a0 When I see things I report them to the police.”
\nOn a stormy afternoon, Thanatos strides between the gravestones of Mountain View Cemetery, cloaked in black with a wide-brimmed hat and masked behind a twisted, iridescent skull.
\nWhy the dramatic backdrop?\u00a0 “This is an appropriate place to meet Death.\u00a0 Where else would you meet him?\u00a0 At McDonalds?”
\nThanatos is the Greek God of Death, and the man behind the mask says he took on the persona after a conversation with a police officer.
\n“I was told people on the street had nothing better to look forward to than death.\u00a0 That really stung me.\u00a0 I thought if that’s the case, Death had better get out there and start taking care of these people.\u00a0 I originally came up with the idea of going out with the robe and scythe but I realized that would be impractical.”
\nInstead, he ended up in black overcoat and hat, body armour underneath, and masked behind a green skull-face.
\n“I started researching and found out other people were using the same idea to draw attention to what they were doing.\u00a0 So, being a comic book geek at heart, I fell back on that and redesigned the figure of death.\u00a0 I’m based on The Green Hornet, The Shadow, The Spirit, a bit of Doc Savage and a bit of Batman.\u00a0 The persona works.”
\nThanatos stresses he is not a vigilante. “Swinging in on a rope, beating up the drug dealer, leaving him tied up for police looks good in the movies, but this is the real world and you can’t do that.\u00a0 It doesn’t work.\u00a0 It’s a bigger problem than just trying to take criminals off the street one at a time.\u00a0 It’s a social issue and society has to change to stop people from landing on the street and getting swept up into the drugs and crime down there.”
\nThis is certainly no game for the costumed man as he asks to be tapped on his chest.
\n“Feel that?\u00a0 I wear a level 3A bullet proof vest.\u00a0 It is dangerous.\u00a0 Some of the people I encounter are coming down off methamphetamine or coming off other drugs.\u00a0 The drug dealers and gangs are also quite dangerous.\u00a0 I’ve had guns flashed at me.\u00a0 I’ve seen guns down there ranging from small handguns to AK-47s.\u00a0 I’ve had knives flashed at me.\u00a0 I had someone try to stick me with a [sharpened] bicycle spoke and when you stick that into someone it usually catches something vital.\u00a0 I’ve had someone throw a bullet at me from across the street.”
\nAs the wind whips and the clouds darken, Thanatos says he feels the need to continue his work.\u00a0 “I’ve helped out over the years as myself.\u00a0 No one remembers.\u00a0 No one cares.\u00a0 The idea of real life superheroes using costumes is to draw attention to what we’re doing.\u00a0 That draws attention to the problem.”
\nAnd there are others, many of them chronicled in the Real Life Superhero Project<\/a>.
\n“We are all over the world.\u00a0 Right now there are probably 300 of us who are active and out trying to actually help the world be a batter place.\u00a0 Most are in North America, but we have people in Asia, people in the Mid-East and we have quite a few in Europe and Great Britain.\u00a0 There are a few of us in Canada.”
\nAs the meeting draws to a close, Thanatos has one last thing to add, a challenge to the city.
\n“We have had terrible riots here in Vancouver.\u00a0 We had a great outpouring of emotion shown on the plywood, people saying ‘I love you,’ we need to do something, we need to better our city.\u00a0 So, I’m issuing a challenge to the city of Vancouver.\u00a0 Everyone go out and help 10 people before the end of July, anything they can do.\u00a0 If they can keep someone alive on the Downtown Eastside for a day, give them water, give them cereal bars, give them whatever.\u00a0 If all they can do is stop for five minutes and talk to these people and give them time, that’s fine, too.”
\nWith that, the meeting ends.\u00a0 Thanatos turns, disappearing deeper into Mountain View, preparing for another night of trying to help Vancouver’s vulnerable and, hopefully, inspiring others to do the same.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“I’m a real life superhero here in Vancouver. I take care of those who really need help the most. I take care of those in the street, I watch out for them, I defend them, and I help them out. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":15489,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[10],"tags":[688,754,769,1092,1632,1749,1751,2172,2555,2637,2835,2836],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rlsh.net\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15488"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rlsh.net\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rlsh.net\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rlsh.net\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rlsh.net\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15488"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rlsh.net\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15488\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rlsh.net\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15489"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rlsh.net\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15488"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rlsh.net\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15488"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rlsh.net\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15488"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}