Well, everyone needs a hobby, I suppose.
There apparently exists a sub-culture of people who dress up in hand-crafted costumes and pretend for long evenings and nights to be superheroes, patrolling the streets of the city they live in or near. It seems a mostly harmless fancy, as described by the Willamette Week, Portland’s Zetaman acts as well as various charity organizations do — walk around the city and hand out blankets and food to the city’s homeless. Of course, the members of the charity organizations don’t have that need to emblazen their chest with a giant “Z”. As for fighting crime, when Zetaman observes an act of violent from one of the city’s evil-doers he springs into action by… dialing up the Portland Police Department on his cell phone. Some Superhero.
Apparently other superheroes are more pro-active in the crime-fighting arena. The Willamette Week update — at the end of that page –mentions his uneventful team-up with a guy who dresses up as a ninja in Anaheim, “Ragensi” described as having a more “hard core image”. I assume that means he takes the fight to the criminals? What else could it mean? Just that he dresses up as a ninja while others are content to stick a giant letter on their chest and wear a cape?
There are two troubles with this cadre of vigilante superheroes. One is the bright shining light of media attention which will expose the flaws — it’s a problem familar to anyone who’s read Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s Watchmen. The media create a back-lash in investigating these costumed avengers. Rolling Stone has apparently blown the lid off of a man who patrols the streets in Florida. Apparently he’s a poor slob living in a shack and dons the costume to escape his existence. But that strikes me as rather nit-picky: if I assume he’s acting like “Zetaman” that means he’s a dirt poor man running around helping dust-poor people. A knock, how? Also, has it occured to Rolling Stone that his alter-ego is actually the disguise, a ruse of assuming statue to…
But the real problem comes with the omega to this alpha, the yang to this yin. Nature abhors a vacuum. If there are people playing out their fantasies of donning capes and assuming identities as superheroes, it follows that there would also have to be people wishing to play out their fantasies and act as Super-villians. The ninja figure in Anaheim (and really, if you see a man in a tough stance in a ninja outfit, would you assume he’s on the side of good?) apparently has attracted a costumed nemesis — one of the reasons for his “hard boiled” reputation, I assume. The question is — do we really want to live in cities where superhero versus supervillian grudge matches exist? Well, it’d be entertainment on the Max, I suppose. Either that or it’d just resemble the lamest geeky comic book convention sparring ever. But really, if these guys insist on running around in costumes under assumed “super” identities, they all each and every one probably deserve an arch super-villian nemesis. So I beg of somebody, anybody… please… Zetaman needs an enemy. If you want a back-story for motivation — I don’t know — apparently he’s starting to police and guard who gets to be superheroes? It leads to something like this.  Proportinate with the situation, I don’t know what these guys deserve — rotten eggs thrown at them every so often? They need adventure, folks!
Actually what we need is the Bizarro-version to appear. That’s what is needed.