Categories
Comics Oddities

Reals, take 2: Man dressed as the Joker shot dead by police

Now this is a macabre follow-up to my last post, about people dressing up as “real” superheroes:

A man dressed as Batman villain the Joker has been shot dead by police in America after pointing a loaded shotgun at them.

The dead man, who was said to be obsessed with the character, was wearing full costume and makeup when he was challenged by officers in a national park in Virginia, according to legal documents.

The FBI named him as army specialist Christopher Lanum, who was wanted as a suspect over the stabbing of a fellow soldier at Fort Eustis, a major army base in the state, several hours before. Lanum’s girlfriend, Patsy Ann Marie Montowski, who was with him when he was shot, told investigators that the soldier idolised the Joker…

[ via Warren Ellis]

Categories
Comics

“Reals”: Amateur crimefighters are surging in the US

There are, according to the recently launched World Superhero Registry, more than 200 men and a few women who are willing to dress up as comic book heroes and patrol the urban streets in search of, if not super-villains, then pickpockets and bullies.

They may look wacky, but the superhero community was born in the embers of the 9/11 terrorist attacks when ordinary people wanted to do something short of enlisting. They were boosted by a glut of Hollywood superhero movies.

In recent weeks, prompted by heady buzz words such as “active citizenry” during the Barack Obama campaign, the pace of enrolment has speeded up. Up to 20 new “Reals”, as they call themselves, have materialised in the past month.

Amateur crimefighters are surging in the US – Times Online [via LMG].

I’m pretty sure most of these people (one wants to call them characters) and their anecdotes have been featured in news stories I’ve seen before, but I like the article’s rethoric, describing this as an emerging sub-culture.

Here’s a video about a group of “supes” from Salt Lake City called The Black Monday Society. They look like LARPers:

Categories
Blather

Obama lifts ban on sperm cell research

Obama lifts ban on sperm cell research - Jerusalem Post headline

Despite the funny headline, the body of the news article actually uses the term embryonic stem cells (תאי גזע עובריים).

Categories
Comics

Hurm. Whores!

Want to add a rambling psychotic vigilante to your social network? Take your pick: rorschachsdiary at Livejournal or the Fake Frank Miller on twitter.

Categories
Comics

carpet bombing is from Krypton, god is in his beard

Wired has a feature on Zack Snyder’s making of the movie, as well as an interview with Watchmen co-creator, awesome artist Dave Gibbons. Their centerpiece is of course the contrarian interview with Alan Moore:

I wonder if the root of the emergence of the superhero in American culture might have something to do with a kind of an ingrained American reluctance to engage in confrontation without massive tactical superiority…
That, if it’s a military situation, then you’ve got carpet bombing from altitude, which is kind of the equivalent of having come from Krypton as a baby and to have gained unusual strength and the ability to fly because of Earth’s lesser gravity.

There’s also a profile of Moore at the Observer which mentions (twice) Moore living in a three-way relationship with his wife’s lesbian lover, which apparently features heavily in the uncyclopedia article:

Alan Moore (discovered November 18, 1953, somewhere in England by Fleetway Publishing) is one of the world’s top ranking 13th level wizards. He has also been known to write comics while recovering from stints of summoning vast rampaging hordes of absinthe-driven lesbians to do his bidding, and sometimes his laundry. It is rumoured that God lives inside Moore’s beard, where he whispers story ideas to the writer.

On a lighter note, Watchmen movie Easter Eggs, via the dod. And if you want the opinions of people I am fond of on the movie, both Bo and Ziv apparently loved it. Which is of course deeply tied in to why I like them.