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Superheroes: Has Anybody Tried It For Real?

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Phantom Cleaner Keeps Town Tidy

Oddly Enough - Reuters

Phantom Cleaner Keeps Town Tidy
Fri Jul 19,10:49 AM ET

LONDON (Reuters) - He masks his face with a scarf, wears a black raincoat, and only strikes at night.


But far from being a criminal, Kettering's "phantom street-cleaner" has become a celebrity in the central English town where every night he secretly sweeps up a dirty shopping precinct.

"No one knows who he is. It's a total mystery, even though he's been caught on camera once," Kettering council spokeswoman Sarah Smith-Petersen told Reuters Thursday.

For weeks now, shop owners at Kettering's Brambleside estate had been turning up in the morning to find their street mysteriously spotless even though the local landlord had ended regular cleaning arrangements.

Locals' suspicions of a mystery "Good Samaritan" were confirmed last weekend when a security camera caught a tall man wearing a wide-brimmed hat and scarf over his face while cleaning with a broom and black bags soon after midnight.

With a touch worthy of history's most famous criminals, the man left notes on each rubbish-bin saying "Keep Brambleside tidy -- best wishes, the Phantom." Taking care not to be identified, he also waved at the camera before making his getaway.

"I wanted to see who it was and when I saw the broom I was sure we would be able to identify him, but the scarf and hat made it impossible," said Pauline Tregidga, manager of the One Stop Shop, who sifted through hours of video to find the grainy black-and-white shots of the mystery cleaner.

"He's a good cleaner. It's a real pleasure to see the streets looking so good again. I think I might leave out a bag of soap and some water, so he can do my windows as well!"
 
that was

one of the nicest stories i've read this year, i saw it on the news the other day, I love the way he ives a little wave before vanishing.

Top man, an obviously a new variation on the phantom meat throwers.
 
I read about this in the local freebie rag "Northants on Sunday".

Apparently the phantom cleaner may now have gone into hiding due to the publicity.

The article also claims " In Northampton a similar good samaritan named Mr. Clean has been battling graffitti. "
 
Has anyone thought of leaving out pieces of leather and a last and little shiny nails..............?

I'll get me coat.
 
Has anybody ever donned a colorful costume and tried to stop crime by making a citzen's arrest?

The reason I ask is that here recently, a criminal was dropped off at a police station tied in duct tape with a note saying "This man is wanted on charges".

Now there was no claim there of anybody dressing up and fighting crime, but considering all the weirdness in the world, it seems like somebody would have tried being a superhero at one time or another.

I'm not looking for:
1) Racist idiots like the KKK
2) Someone who dresses in a superhero costume as a publicity stunt - we had a guy about 8 years back who, for publicity, climbed onto the state capital building dressed as the superhero from his self-made comic (he was arrested when they got him down, btw).
3) Plain out crazy people, like the guy who called himself "Captain Freedom" or something like that who started shooting people at some rich person's club or vacation resort because he thought the club members had undue influence on people.
4) Someone who just happens to be wearing a costume when they are put in the position to stop a crime, like the infamous John Ritter film "Some Kind of Hero" or in recent reports of a fellow who stopped lawbreakers while dressed as Batman going to a Halloween charitable event.

What I am looking for is:
1) Anybody who wears a costume to fight "crime", either by capturing criminals themselves or forcably taking them to police stations.

So, in the wide world of weird, has it ever happened?
 
Well, I'm sure there is a real Batman, but I think he has a paunch and when he hits people a little visual word appears that goes "pow" or "bam" as opposed to the avenging dark avenger of the night as per the Burton movies or Batman Animated Adventures....

:D
 
2) Someone who dresses in a superhero costume as a publicity stunt - we had a guy about 8 years back who, for publicity, climbed onto the state capital building dressed as the superhero from his self-made comic (he was arrested when they got him down, btw).

3) Plain out crazy people, like the guy who called himself "Captain Freedom" or something like that who started shooting people at some rich person's club or vacation resort because he thought the club members had undue influence on people.
Click to expand...

Darn!
I'm sure one of those conditions rules out Love 22 !
(or possibly the fact that he's not out fighting crime per se..)
 
The scary thing is which condition bars ol' Love 22 from this....:)

Amusing link, though.
 
Re: Superheros - has anybody ever tried it for real?

Mr. R.I.N.G. said:
...a fellow who stopped lawbreakers while dressed as Batman going to a Halloween charitable event.
Click to expand...
Are you referring to Delboy (and his faithful sidekick 'Plonker' Rodney)? :D
 
Well, it said in the Nottingham Evening Post today that there's a group of local residents patrolling the streets of Sherwood at the moment because the police are so useless and there's no CCTV (shop windows getting kicked in, armed raids etc) so maybe I could ask them to don their Lincoln Greens. I'll get back to you with photographic evidence if it works ;)

....excuse me sir, would you mind holding this lute whilst I take some pictures?...

THWAP! :p
 
By day I am a mild mannered Moderator, but by night I patrol Oberean as the Chair Leg Of Truth!

ZAP! :eek:
POW! :headbutt:
K'THUNK! :wince:
 
When starting this thread, I wasn't taking into account the long history in Mexico of masked wrestlers who use their notoriety to speak for the common citizens to town officials who won't really hear their voices.

While it's not really physically combating crime, I think they are pretty darn cool and can be safely said to be on the outer fringes of superherodom. I even saw a National Geographic documentary on them years ago.

But, has no one tried to actually, physically fight crime?
 
Don't know of any specific instances, but ... On another newsboard a few months ago, a poster asked a similar question, together with a "if not, why not?". At around the same time, there was another message thread, which I believe was from the same poster, saying that they were writing something and the character had to realistically learn all the skills they needed to combat crime within a year and how would they go about it. Messages followed from myself and others about this being an unrealistic time line and that, as this was a fictional character, it should be easy to make the timeline more reasonable - say ten years or so. Of course, they say it was for a fictional character, but I can't help putting those two threads together and wondering if this was some teen looking to battle crime ...
 
Re: Look, Out In The Slums... It's Super Barrio!

AndroMan said:
Only one I can think of is the Mexican masked avenger,

Super Barrio
Click to expand...

El Chupacabras Crusader, who defends and avenges debt-wracked members of Mexico’s middle class (wears a fanged mask and business suit).
Click to expand...
:eek!!!!: :eek!!!!:
 
I have a Bart Simpson mug with "Avenger of evil" on it. My friend said it suited me. I was never sure what she meant by that... :sceptic:
 
I suppose you all know about the very rare phenomena of superhero sightings. One in LA about three years ago, I believe, reported in the letters page of FT.

They are only really superheroes by appearance though. I think most of the reports I've heard (pitifully few) are of flying men in tight costumes and masks/helmets.

This has always disturbed me as the stories are horribly similar to Grant Morrison's superlative Flex Mentallo-Man of Muscle Mystery. If you've read it, you'll understand why this is troubling.
 
Now, now MrHyde. It's not nice to Drop vague hints and then leave like that.
Could you please provide a brief sysnopsis of your " Flex Mentallo-Man of Muscle Mystery" connection?

------------------------------------------------------------

As a token, I will provide another local looney[*] - King Love, unfortunately, deceased now. He's no superhero, though. Heck, he can't hold a candle to our beloved Emperor Joshua Norton I, Emperor of the United States and protector of Mexico!

(Veering back on topic, one episode of the Emperor Norton legend has him single handedly stopping a lynch mob headed for chinatown one night. And he did dress up in a uniform. Didn't go out looking to foil criminals, though).

--------------------
[*] actually, that seems like a good topic for a thread...
 
Erm...not easily. It's one of the most obscurely plotted comic books in history, concerning a dying musician who always wanted to be a comic book artist. He reminisces about his favourite superhero, Flex Mentallo and we see an ongoing Flex story but the boundaries between the two narratives are unclear.

Madmen on street corners scream that they've seen supermen above the clouds. An ex-astronaut reveals that his alchoholism is a result of seeing caped figures in space.

It's a damn good read, but a lawsuit has resulted in it being almost unobtainable.
 
Flex Mentallo is one of the greatest comics ever.

I could see the connection of seeing real superheroes being scary because one of the many premises of the book is that superheros from another dimension are trying to break out from their imaginary world into our world of the real.

The lawsuit? Flex derived his power from a Charles Atlas type comic ad, so that he can enact various phenomenon when he flexes his pecs. Also, the baner "Hero of the Beach" floats over his head when he is using his super flex powers (just like in the ad). Charles Atlas sued DC Comics, and the settlement ended with DC agreeing to never reprint Flex Mentallo or any comic he appeared in (so there will probably never be trade paperbacks of the Grant Morrison era Doom Patrol).

------------------------------

So, what's the deal with seeing supheroes for real, which is a phenomenon I've never heard of. Any details about it?

This thread is great, BTW. I hadn't heard that Emperor Norton stopped a mob in his uniform - obviously he was the pregenator of the Wold Newton line!:D
 
Something like William Gibson's "The Gernsback Continuum", where for whatever reason, the line between reality and the common culture / sub-conscious / whatever becomes blurred? In Robert Heinlen's "Number of the Beast", all imagined or fictional scenarios are a reality if you can just find the correct parallel universe where they exist. I try not to hold that model in my head while reading H.P. Lovecraft. Obviously.

These superhero reports are new to me. I really hadn't stumbled across that. Although I can't say I'm surprised. I'm more surprised that they aren't more common.

Do these seem to be reports of what is actually there, or more a case of indistinct stimuli leading to interpertation by the witnesses?
 
Now, if only we could invent a superhero named "Hemenvenger " we might be able to merge two threads and engineer some nifty synchronicity...
 
I think that in real life, an aspiring superhero would probably model himself on a gun nut like The Punisher rather than Superman.

There must be some vigilantes out there?
 
Orbyn:
Now, if only we could invent a superhero named "Hemenvenger " we might be able to merge two threads and engineer some nifty synchronicity...
Click to expand...

On http://www.everything2.com, there is a node (thread) called "the node that is linked to all others". Apparently, at one time in the site's history, the denizens were trying to crosslink everything.

We could very well end up with something similar here, since the mods do on occassion merge related threads. Anyhow, you painted a vision of the cross-linking between threads around here balling itself up into the granddaddy of all rat kings [*][2] and swallowing itself like oroborus[*].

[*]look, two more crosslinks!
[2] Somewhere I have a picture of an actual "squirrel king" from the local paper several years ago. I keep meaning to find it and get my clipping cite in FT.
 
Orbyn said:
Now, if only we could invent a superhero named "Hemenvenger " we might be able to merge two threads and engineer some nifty synchronicity...
Click to expand...
What about, The Hymen Avenger?

Boggle on that one for a while! :spinning
 
Re: Look, Out In The Slums... It's Super Barrio!

AndroMan said:
Only one I can think of is the Mexican masked avenger,

Super Barrio
Click to expand...

Well, okay, Superbarrio is no superhero, just a social activist (or social activists, depending on who do yo believe). He doesn't figth crime per se. He is just a fat guy with a mask.
 
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