It’s just after two in the morning on Saturday of Memorial Day weekend and the Xtreme Justice League, or XJL for short, is in action. The real-life superheroes are moving in patrol formation down Fourth Avenue in downtown San Diego. Nyght and Grim are in the lead; Mr. Xtreme is in the middle; Nyghtingale and Freedom Fighter are bringing up the rear.
Suddenly, Nyght spots an altercation up ahead by the Balboa Theatre. Two young men are bumping chests, yelling at each other and threatening to brawl. “Code Xtreme, everyone,” he says with urgency, “Code Xtreme!” The men are in their early twenties; one is wearing a yellow T-shirt and green cargo shorts, the other is in a grey shirt and blue jeans. Both have buzzcuts and reddened cheeks and are staggering from side to side, signaling the likelihood of inebriation. They’re also mad as hell.
“She died and you didn’t even call me, you motherfucker!” the yellow-shirted aggressor shouts, pushing the other provocatively. The man on the receiving end shoves back. “Fuck you, man, I’ll kill you!”
Nyght, a barrel-chested tank of a man in thick ballistic armor and a half-face mask, barks orders to his team. “Grim, you’re on de-escalation; Nyghtingale, stand by; Freedom Fighter, watch our backs!” Without missing a beat, Mr. Xtreme maneuvers between the two men. He puts his arms up and tries to create space between them. “It’s only words, man, it’s only words,” he says. Grim moves in and tries to strike up a conversation with the man in the grey shirt. “Hey dude, what’s going on?” he asks calmly. “Can you tell me about it?” Nyghtingale, looking on from the side, settles in for a show. “Grim is amazing at this, he’s really good at talking people down,” she tells me as we watch from the sidelines. “He once broke up a fight by getting a guy to talk about his shoes.”
Grim manages to maneuver the grey-shirted man, who looks startled by the sudden appearance of a stranger in a blue skull mask, away from the scene. Now isolated, Mr. Xtreme and Nyght convince the apparent instigator to explain why he’s angry. He’s emotional, it turns out, from the recent passing of his aunt. He feels like his friends haven’t been supportive and he has chosen this moment, when inhibitions have been lowered, to let them know. But he’s also puzzled by these interlopers, one of whom is wearing a purple cape and military helmet while the other looks a bit like Darth Vader.
“Why don’t you guys talk about this tomorrow,” Mr. Xtreme says, “when you’re sober.” The yellow-shirted man takes a step backward and lowers his fists a few inches. “It’s not worth it,” Mr. Xtreme says. “This’ll make more sense in the morning.” Grim, meanwhile, has walked the other man to the end of the block. We can’t hear what he’s saying from where we’re standing, but he later tells us he distracted the man with idle chitchat. Peace slowly returns as tempers ebb. Both parties go their separate ways; a crisis is averted.
The XJL members walk a few yards as a group to the entrance of the Balboa Theatre for a debriefing. Nyght asks the team members for their assessments. “We did an adequate job of de-escalating the situation,” Mr. Xtreme says. Grim, however, says Freedom Fighter was lax in his backup role. Tasked with crowd control, he was supposed to ensure that Mr. Xtreme’s back was covered. He instead focused on the conversations happening in front of him, which meant the team could have been attacked from behind had the situation gone awry.
Chastened, Freedom Fighter—who wears an American flag motif on his half-mask and chest—apologizes and says he’ll do better next time. Nyght wraps up the conversation with a round of kudos. “In any case, good job everyone,” he says.
Incidents like these—and far worse when they aren’t successfully defused—happen nightly in the Gaslamp Quarter, a powder keg of a district thanks to San Diego’s unique demographic mix and tightly concentrated nightlife. The city is home to seven Marine, Navy and Coast Guard bases and has one of the biggest military populations in the country.1 It is also a vacation hotspot, ranking as one of the most popular American tourist cities.2 Colleges and universities contribute more than a hundred thousand students to the mix.3 Petco Park stadium, at the southern tip of downtown, also adds thousands of baseball fans on game nights. Topping it off are the city’s estimated four thousand gang members.4 On weekends all of these disparate groups converge in the Gaslamp to form one big bomb that can go off at any time.
The Gaslamp has served as San Diego’s entertainment-cum-red-light-district since the mid-nineteenth century, when it was established as New Town, a destination sought out by sailors for alcohol, drugs, massage parlors and prostitution. Redevelopment in recent years has driven much of the overt criminality under the surface, but the area remains ground zero for the city’s vices. With more than a hundred bars, restaurants and nightclubs packed into just sixteen blocks, alcohol and drug-fueled violence flares up frequently. The chances of witnessing a bar fight on any given night are estimated to be as high as 90 per cent.5 Fatalities, like the young man we learned about earlier who died in a punching game at Jolt’n Joe’s, are common. The police, meanwhile, are chronically understaffed—about 243 officers short as of 2018, the worst it’s ever been according to longtime members of the force.6 They’re overwhelmed by the sheer volume of people in the Gaslamp, which can heave with up to thirty thousand revelers on a busy night. As in the Wild West, conditions are ripe for entrepreneurial law enforcement.
The XJL is the self-appointed response, a triage unit of sorts. The team patrols the Gaslamp most weekends looking to defuse fights, prevent vandalism, administer first aid and, as we saw in the prologue, carry drunken tourists back to their hotels. “It’s a perfect… I almost want to say cesspool, although I don’t want to refer to my town as that,” says Nyghtingale. She estimates the XJL encounters five potential altercations per night, which usually involve between five and ten people each. Situations can easily escalate to twenty or thirty individuals. “The fights here tend to get very big. If one buddy is going to fight, they’re all going to fight. If a marine sees another guy who looks like a marine getting beat up, he’s going to join in even if he doesn’t know the guy,” she says. “It starts with two guys yelling at each other and next thing you know it’s an entire mob being pushed out into a busy street.”7
Nyghtingale believes the police can use the help with de-escalation and medical assistance or simply with warm bodies and eyeballs. XJL members wear body cameras to record “Code Xtreme” incidents, in case evidence is needed later. Grim turned his on the moment the team approached the brewing altercation by the Balboa Theatre. Nyght says he has turned over evidence to police in the form of video recorded on memory cards at least two dozen times. XJL members routinely appear in court—unmasked—to provide testimony and press charges.
Their efforts have won fans in the community. Will Sam, proprietor of the Doner Mediterranean Grill fast-food joint on Fifth Avenue, greets the team warmly when they patrol by his shop. Guy Harrington, manager of the parking lot at the corner of Sixth and Broadway, says street gangs used to use his space as a meeting point until the XJL helped chase them off. “They are the saviors of downtown!” he says. A homeless man thanks Nyghtingale for checking on him during the Memorial Day weekend patrol. “You guys are awesome, I really appreciate it,” he says. “You guys be safe, man!” An African-American couple stop the team and ask Grim to pose for photos. “This is better than Comic-Con,” the man says, “because Comic-Con don’t have black folks!” Even some rank-and-file police are appreciative. “We see these guys every weekend,” says patrolman Daryl Cox. “It’s fantastic.”8 His comments aren’t necessarily reflective of the entire local police department’s attitude, but the XJL has at least achieved a level of tacit tolerance by authorities, if their continuing, regular patrols are any indication.
The XJL purposely tries to differentiate itself from Phoenix Jones and the Rain City Superhero Movement, whose less than positive notoriety has spread across the country. The group has carefully cultivated its image with authorities and the public and distances itself from the early vigilante stylings of the real-life superhero phenomenon. The team more closely resembles the Guardian Angels, both in protocols and societal role. Like the Angels, the XJL has similarly insinuated itself as a community institution of sorts, tolerated at worst and cheered on at best. The parallels aren’t accidental.
The Xtreme Justice League has been a thing, more or less, since 2006, which is when founder Mr. Xtreme (Erick Wong) began his side career as a real-life superhero. The police would routinely pull Wong over in his early days, force him to unmask and produce identification. Each time, he would explain he was trying to help them by providing another watchful eye on the streets. Bemused, officers tolerated him, but mostly they tried to discourage him. They regularly told him to leave crime fighting to the professionals.
Wong’s anti-crime activities actually go back further, to the late nineties, when he joined the San Diego chapter of the Guardian Angels at the age of twenty-two. His parents say that he was a happy child until his younger brother was born, which divided their attention.9 His demeanor further soured when, as a youth, he was jumped and beaten by gang members. It was a catalytic moment in which he developed an anti-victim mentality. He took up martial arts and has since earned a purple belt in jujitsu. He also found escape and inspiration in comic books. He fell in love with superheroes such as Captain America and Iron Man. He idolized Bruce Lee, the Power Rangers and professional wrestlers. “I wanted to go out there and do something positive and be part of something bigger,” he says. “Even when I was a kid, I wanted to be a Green Beret or some type of a hero.”10
When dwindling membership forced the San Diego Guardian Angels to shut down, Wong commuted to Los Angeles to patrol with the chapter there. On a visit to New York, he met with Curtis Sliwa and convinced the organization’s founder to let him reopen and lead a new division in San Diego. Wong’s stock within the Angels rose and he was soon made regional director for California, overseeing chapters up and down the state. He then helped the organization expand to South Africa and England, at first as an unpaid volunteer then later as the recipient of a stipend to help cover expenses on the road.
All of this activity was taking its toll. Guardian Angels members must follow strict rules and protocols; they have to be expert in local laws, train in self-defense and patrol frequently. Wong was burning out, tiring of the Angels’ demands and starting to wonder if there was another way he could fight crime independently. Fatefully, he came across the World Superhero Registry, the online forum that catalogued and connected real-life superheroes around the globe. He struck up conversations with Dark Guardian in New York and Mr. Silent in Indianapolis, both of whom encouraged him to create a costume and hit the streets solo. “I was wanting to try something different, something new where I could use the same reason why I joined the Guardian Angels, but maybe something a little more raw,” Wong says.
He decided to start his own team of real-life superheroes, the Xtreme Justice League—creating the name as a hybrid of DC’s Justice League of America and wrestling impresario Vince McMahon’s Xtreme Football League. The XJL would have the same goals as the Guardian Angels, but the team would be freer, more fluid and unshackled from the rules of a larger organization. Wong decided to call himself Mr. Xtreme, an homage to Marvel’s Fantastic Four and their leader, Mr. Fantastic.
His solo patrols drew local media attention, which in turn attracted like-minded individuals. Before long, the fledgling Xtreme Justice League had its first members: Urban Avenger and Vigilante Spider. Their patrols netted some results. In 2011, Wong and his partners passed out flyers as part of an awareness campaign in the manhunt for a local sexual predator, who the media had dubbed the Chula Vista Groper. Police caught the man, which earned Mr. Xtreme praise in some official circles. “It’s all stuff that contributes in a positive way,” San Diego deputy mayor Rudy Ramirez said at the time. “Public awareness is something he can be very valuable in.”11
Wong hadn’t told Sliwa and the Angels about his alter ego, but they figured it out, leading to a rift. Before long, the organization’s leaders stopped communicating. Wong feels the schism was influenced by the 2012 wrongful shooting of African-American teenager Trayvon Martin in a gated Florida community by neighborhood-watch coordinator George Zimmerman. “They were thinking that if people were discovering that a Guardian Angel leader was going around dressing up like a superhero, it might bring controversy because of what was going on with that situation. They’re a little political,” Wong says. “They just stopped responding to my emails and my calls so I just said, ‘Fuck it, I’ve already put in all this time, I already got this going so let me go ahead and just keep rolling.’”
Sliwa has a different take on the falling-out. He says Wong claimed he was patrolling as a Guardian Angel when he was actually on the streets as Mr. Xtreme. “He wasn’t being honest with us,” he says. “He was using the Guardian Angels as a cover. It really struck us the wrong way.”12
Wong registered the XJL as a charity in 2014, which made his identity public by virtue of his name being on the documentation. On the plus side, the status helped develop legitimacy with authorities and the public. Media coverage and membership grew.
Grim, who was working as a civilian security specialist after six years in the Navy, recalls hearing about Mr. Xtreme in 2011. He was joking with coworkers about how he might someday become a superhero, so one of them showed him a story in a local magazine. “I read the article and said, ‘This dude sounds legit!’” He found Mr. Xtreme’s email address, sent him a message and got a phone call shortly after. Wong asked about his work history, skills and background. It felt like a job interview. “I now understand it, but back then I thought it was weird as hell. I was like, ‘What kind of skills would I need to do this? I don’t even know what you guys do!’”13 He signed up and got to work on creating a costume. He dusted off an old Masters of the Universe Skeletor mask he had once worn to Comic-Con and painted it blue, then paired it with some motocross pads. The “Grim” persona came from a nickname he’d gained after an incident where his girlfriend’s angry ex-boyfriend slashed his car tires. Determined to retaliate, he found the ex’s house and began carving Grrrr… into the front door with a knife, only to have second thoughts. “I decided that was dumb, so I ended up scribbling, Grrrr-m. The ex ended up asking my girlfriend who ‘Grim’ was, so that stuck.”
Nyghtingale’s recruitment in 2014 also began randomly, when she ran into the XJL in the Gaslamp while part of a friend’s bachelorette party. She initially thought the costumed characters were cosplayers—an honest mistake given that Comic-Con’s presence is felt year-round in San Diego. The superheroes happily obliged when the drunken party of women asked to pose for photos. The next day, she couldn’t recognize any of the people in the photos as existing comic-book characters. Her son, however, correctly identified them as real-life superheroes. “It was like brakes squealing in my head,” she says. “I was like, ‘Hold on, San Diego has what?’ I was immediately down the rabbit hole.” She posted one of the photos online along with the message, “Sign me up!” Mr. Xtreme got in touch the next day. “He wanted to make sure I wasn’t one of those crazy people who wants to come out and beat up strangers.” She quickly put together a costume. “I pulled some stuff out of my closet and said, ‘Okay, this works.’” As a caregiver in real life, she chose her nom de guerre as an homage to Florence Nightingale, the founder of modern nursing.
Nyghtingale’s costume has since evolved to include a mesh surgical-style mask and a gold-and-green corset. Her oldest son, a graduate of the Naval Station Great Lakes Navy boot camp near Chicago, also sometimes patrols with the team as Yce (pronounced “Ice”). Her youngest son, Osprey, wears a costume while participating in XJL charity food drives and supply handouts. “He’s very self-aware for eleven years old,” she says. “He knows it’s way too late for him to patrol and he’s just not prepared yet. Eventually one day he will, but now he’s just not ready.” Like many XJL members, Nyghtingale has a military background. Prior to becoming a nurse, she spent ten years as an aircraft mechanic working for the Department of Defense. Her stepfather is also a Navy man. She’s in a relationship with Nyght, though they insist the similar spellings of their names is coincidental.
Nyght, for his part, is a former Marine and now a special education teacher in an elementary school. He says he did considerable research on the XJL before joining. He had been feeling despondent while on a year-long deployment in Afghanistan and was wondering if there was something positive he could do when his service time was up. When he returned home and learned of the XJL through the HBO Superheroes documentary, he decided to follow the self-styled superheroes covertly around the Gaslamp. “I’m not the type of person to jump right into something, I want to know what I’m getting into first,” he says. “I saw the genuine sincerity in everything they did and I saw it consistently.”14 He asked former Marine colleagues who had become police officers for their thoughts. “They said, ‘They’re not awesome, but they don’t hurt anything. They’re just citizens who are helping citizens.’”
Satisfied, he contacted Mr. Xtreme in 2014 and joined. He put together a black-and-silver costume with a reflective Superman symbol on the back and a conspicuous F*ck ISIS patch on the front. He also wears a modified half-mask paintball helmet that gives him a distinct resemblance to Batman’s nemesis, Bane, something Gaslamp revelers routinely point out.
Fallen Boy is unique in that, as of this writing, he’s still on active duty with the Navy. An injury in Iraq forced him into a desk job, which in turn led to restlessness. He checked out his local neighborhood watch, but they weren’t active enough for his liking. He discovered Mr. Xtreme through the media and, like most of his teammates, got recruited after reaching out. He joined in 2014 and chose his persona as a sort of redemption effort. “My [military] call sign used to be ‘Golden Boy’ because I did everything by the book, but in Iraq I kind of fell off the rocker, so people called me Fallen Boy. We did some things I wasn’t proud of,” he says. “It’s a terrible name that’s shadowed with darkness and bad stuff. But what happens if I bring it back and instead of thinking of all the stuff I did, I think of all the stuff I’m doing now in the community? Now when I hear it and think about it I don’t associate it with what I did in Iraq. I associate it with what I’m doing now.”15 His superiors in the Navy are aware of his nocturnal activities and are supportive as long as he stays within the Uniform Code of Military Justice. That means leaving the Navy out of anything he might be doing.
All told, XJL membership has fluctuated between a dozen and twenty people in recent years—large, by real-life superhero standards. If New York City is the center of the fictional superhero universe, San Diego holds that distinction in the real world largely because of the XJL’s public profile, active recruitment efforts and courting of media coverage—all tactics Wong learned as a Guardian Angels leader. The result is that more real-life superheroes call San Diego home than any other city in the world.
XJL patrols generally consist of four to eight members, each of whom has a specific role. The leader determines the route and gives orders while the medic attends to injuries or health issues that may arise with teammates or civilians. Another team member handles communications, calling police and emergency services if needed, while at least one other performs crowd control. The team works out together several times a week and each member is encouraged to take advantage of free self-defense lessons offered by the San Diego Krav Maga Academy. Grim’s father, a reserve deputy sheriff, periodically hosts training sessions on how to de-escalate situations. He is generally supportive of his son’s activities. “I wouldn’t say he was skeptical, he was more practical,” Grim says of his father. “He asked, ‘Do you have a bulletproof vest? Do you need some training?’”
Several members, including Grim, do indeed wear body armor. Nyght, who is almost as wide as he is tall, wears a level-four ballistic vest—capable of stopping armor-piercing rounds—on top of a level-three vest, totaling more than a hundred pounds of protection. When patrolling, the team stops at intersections and waits for a fresh green light before crossing the street. “I’ve got ballistic armor on,” Nyght explains. “That’s legal in California, but if I’m caught doing anything illegal—even jaywalking—it becomes a felony because of that.” When the team stops, members form into a circle to protect each other’s backs. The patrol leader uses hand signs to order stops and single-file formation when moving through crowds.16
The protocols are drawn from the members’ respective backgrounds. Some derive from Guardian Angels procedures while others originate with the Army and Marines. “You get this amazing amalgam of street-level law enforcement from the Guardian Angels and the militaristic structure and organization,” Nyght says. “It becomes this amazing beast.”
Mr. Xtreme has difficulty quantifying the number of incidents the XJL has been involved in over the years. The team has broken up too many fights to count, he says. He does recall several difficult situations, such as a particularly tense patrol with Grim on the beach in the summer of 2014. The duo was investigating a commotion in a nearby parking lot where three men were threatening another on a bicycle. The real-life superheroes chased the antagonists off, only to have them return with backup. “The next thing you know, they’ve surrounded us,” Mr. Xtreme says. “One guy tried to hit Grim with a chain and I just started pepper-spraying my way out of the situation. I told Grim, ‘Let’s go!’ It was pretty tense.”
He also recalls breaking up a fight between two large men in the Gaslamp, but not before one of them punched him in the side of the head. Spartan prevented the attack from escalating further by pepper-spraying the assailants, but Wong felt the blow clear through his helmet. “I had a headache for maybe two or three days,” he says. “In this business, it’s like feast or famine, right? Sometimes you’ll have a slow night and then a lot of times we’ll get a lot of small little situations, verbal de-escalation, a little punch-up and then full-on street brawls. Big situations seem to happen at least every few weeks.”
Nyght, Grim and Mr. Xtreme have each appeared in court to provide evidence and testify against individuals involved in bigger situations. “We like to come across as professional so we wear our suit and tie,” Nyght says. “I’ve never showed up to court wearing my uniform or anything like that.” In one case, Nyght appeared to press charges against a man who had instigated a large fight in the Gaslamp, which resulted in injuries to several individuals. He supplied the court with video of the incident and a written summary. “They asked me more about my military service and credentials,” he says. “They didn’t ask too much about the superhero angle.” In another case, he testified by phone against a homeless man who had pulled a gun on him. The man was sentenced to several months in jail and then remanded to a drug and alcohol treatment center.
The court appearances bring up a wrinkle in the secret-identity logic that many real-life superheroes, including most members of the XJL, subscribe to. Just as Peter Parker doesn’t reveal that he’s Spider-Man for fear that Doctor Octopus will take reprisals against his Aunt May, so too do many real-life superheroes hide their identities from the media in an effort to prevent repercussions; many say they don’t want blowback in their civilian identities because of something they did while in costume. Real-life superheroes are thus faced with a choice: they can either choose to maintain their secret identities and not press charges after intervening in incidents, in which case the involved miscreants may escape punishment, or they follow through and expose themselves to those they accuse. Nyght, for one, doesn’t seem worried by the latter, even though he insists on anonymity in the media. “In those instances, [defendants] have a lot bigger things to worry about than some dude dressed like Darth Vader,” he says. “He might remember my name, but whatever.”
In either case, the XJL has pulled off an impressive feat. By co-operating with police and the courts and practicing internal discipline rooted in the military and quasi-militant Guardian Angels, the group has gained a measure of institutional acceptance not previously seen among real-life superheroes. They have won admiration from their colleagues elsewhere as a result, a major accomplishment given how fractious and prone to infighting their kind is. “When the Xtreme Justice League started, they were the joke of the RLSH community,” says Rock N Roll, leader of San Francisco’s California Initiative. “To their credit, they’ve pulled it up.”17
By distancing and differentiating themselves from the Phoenix Jones example, the XJL has also pulled the real-life superhero community’s evolution into mirroring its fictional counterparts. Batman, after all, started out as a loose-cannon vigilante who often enacted his own sentences on criminals, so to speak, before ultimately settling in as a friend and trusted ally of Police Commissioner Gordon. Once again, life has imitated art.
Are the XJL vigilantes? They insist they aren’t—“I consider myself to be a protector,” Mr. Xtreme says. “I don’t act as judge, jury and executioner”—because they cooperate with official enforcement authorities and make a concerted effort to avoid breaking the law. The group has good reason to avoid the term and its baggage. While vigilantes were generally admired in the Wild West frontier era, the Ku Klux Klan applied an irrevocable stain of racism to the concept. Periodic racially charged incidents in more recent years, such as the Trayvon Martin shooting, have only added to the public’s soured perceptions about vigilantism. Outside of racism and within the specific context of real-life superheroes, Phoenix Jones and his polarizing methods also tarnished the brand.
But not being a vigilante isn’t as simple as not considering oneself to be one, given that the definition changes as policing evolves. Criminology experts mirror Sliwa’s comments in Chapter 3 when they point out that word doesn’t mean what most people think it does today. In his book Vigilant Citizens, Ray Abrahams notes that the judge, jury and executioner aspect of classic vigilantism has changed to match modern times. Today’s vigilantism, he writes, is more about self-reliance and unofficially enforcing the law than it is about punishment or taking revenge. Gavin Weston, an anthropology professor at Goldsmiths, University of London, who studies vigilantism, agrees with that assessment. “Expectations of policing today are higher, generally speaking, so the fantasy of the Wild West vigilante is perhaps anachronistic,” he says. In the specific context of real-life superheroes,
there’s a really narrow gap in the law where it’s not vigilantism if you don’t want to call it vigilantism, but it certainly is taking justice into their own hands. There’s also the threat of violence in what they do. It’s implicit rather than explicit. What you’re doing actually falls within the law that covers everyone. You’re acting in a way that is appropriate when other people are using force or violence or antagonistic behavior toward you. That’s why they’re not vigilantes if they don’t want to be thought of as vigilantes.18
The nature of vigilantism is evolving, but its underlying causes aren’t. It is still a reaction to the wilderness phenomenon, existing where the law doesn’t—it’s just that the frontier itself is different now. Rather than the definable geographical location it was in the Wild West, the frontier is now a more amorphous concept found within cities that is being exacerbated by rising inequality, poverty, racial discord and declining faith in institutions, including law enforcement. Many American cities now have clear divides within them—no-go zones for certain groups of people. “It fits with a very particular way in which the policing of violence is done in the United States that perhaps doesn’t extend elsewhere,” Weston says. “Frontiers aren’t just in the heart of the country anymore, they’re just as likely to pop up in a city where the police don’t really want to go on a Saturday night. Vigilantism emerges in these frontier spaces—and that’s quite American.”
Regardless of whether real-life superheroes consider themselves to be vigilantes or not, it may not even be something they really need to be ashamed of. After all, despite the racial baggage, Americans have historically sympathized with vigilantes. Bernhard Goetz, the man who shot and wounded four youths who he claimed were trying to rob him on a New York subway in 1984, and Ellie Nesler, the California woman who in 1993 murdered a man accused of molesting her young son, both enjoyed widespread public support, as just two examples. As one study on the public acceptance of vigilantes notes, the police hotline in the Goetz case was “swamped with supporters rather than callers looking to provide information that could help in his arrest. Furthermore, out of the eighteen charges, the jury only found him guilty of illegal gun possession, despite his confession to the shooting.”19 Meanwhile, 60 per cent of respondents to a 1985 study on the effectiveness of the Guardian Angels—a group that is as debatably vigilante or not as the XJL—said they felt safer knowing they were in their community.
Basketball great Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, of all people, points at the recent superhero movie craze and other pop culture TV hits—such as Dexter, about a serial killer who only murders bad guys, or the BBC’s modern Sherlock, which reimagines the detective as a trigger-happy executioner—as proof that Americans’ love of vigilantism is only deepening. Abdul-Jabbar, a comic book fan who penned a page of the Marvel Comics #1000 anniversary issue in 2019, believes the phenomenon has been developing since the seventies, in lockstep with declining trust in public institutions. “How did America go from admiring lovable police detective Columbo to admiring lovable serial killer Dexter?” he wrote in Time magazine. “To ignore the seismic shift in who we’re elevating as heroes is like ignoring the backpack of meth you found in your teen’s closet.”20
This fevered obsession with pop-culture vigilantes indeed looks to be a reflection of what’s happening in the real world. According to Gallup’s 2017 Law and Order Index, which measures how safe citizens of 142 countries feel, Americans have good reason to be looking for law enforcement in whatever form it may take, however they can get it. “In most economically developed countries with strong rule of law, high majorities of residents say they feel safe walking alone in their areas at night,” the report says. “This response is nearly universal in Singapore at 94% and tops eighty percent in many Western European countries. The U.S. is considerably farther down the list, at 72%.”21
America’s steady slide to the political right may very well be the cause of all these interrelated phenomena, or perhaps it’s a reflection of them. As lawyers James Daily and Ryan Davidson point out in their book The Law of Superheroes, fictional heroes in comic books have been acting as government agents since their inception, whether their writers have been cognizant of it or not. The argument is also applicable to their real-life counterparts:
Policing and investigation are traditional governmental functions, so by engaging in the same kind of work that the [Gotham City Police Department] does with their co-operation and approval, Batman may be fairly described as a state actor. Overall, the more closely Batman and other superheroes work with the police, the more likely they are to be described as state actors, which makes a certain amount of intuitive sense. There wouldn’t be much value to the Constitution if the government could do an end run around it by having private parties break the law on its behalf.22
Others suggest that real-world vigilantes, wherever they are on the spectrum of the term, are effectively state actors who contribute more to the proper enforcement and preservation of the status quo than they do to changing or abolishing it. As Abrahams writes in Vigilant Citizens, “rather than reject the state, vigilantism commonly thrives on the idea that the state’s legitimacy at any point in time depends on its ability to provide citizens with the levels of law and order they demand.”23
Some pundits have gone so far as to suggest that Batman, Superman and other fictional superheroes have, for most of their history, been symbols of fascism. Writing for NPR, pop culture commentator Glen Weldon says that, “although conceived in a progressive spirit, the superhero genre’s central narrative has always been one of defending the status quo through overpowering might.”24 Damien Walter, writing for the Guardian, suggests the same of Frank Miller’s 1986 landmark The Dark Knight Returns comic-book series: “Everyone in the city is guilty, and Bruce Wayne is the only man worthy to sit in judgment over them, dishing out violent retribution as he sees fit.”25 Plenty of critics have suggested fascist themes in Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight Trilogy. “Bane’s henchmen literally attack Wall Street, savagely beat the rich and promise the good people of Gotham that ‘tomorrow, you claim what is rightfully yours,’” writes Mark Fisher, also for the Guardian.26 That is, until Batman restores the status quo by beating everyone involved within an inch of their lives.
Real-life superheroes don’t possess that overpowering might in the sense of superpowers, nor do they necessarily dish out violent retribution, but the XJL—with its armored, trained and pepper spray–toting members—are certainly more mighty than the average Gaslamp drunkard, and they don’t shy away from taking such offenders down when they deem it necessary.
Vigilantism, entrepreneurial law enforcement or whatever we want to call it, is a conservative impulse—an acceptance of control and a desire for its proper application, rather than a rejection of it. As historian and American violence scholar Richard Maxwell Brown sees it, vigilantism is driven by a desire to restore order and stability: “The sources of instability vary throughout history—crime, demographic shifts, government corruption—but the impulse remains the same: to restore stability to a world turned upside down, and reinforce those values at risk in a rapidly changing world.”27
Abdul-Jabbar, who in 2012 was chosen by then–secretary of state Hillary Clinton to be a US global cultural ambassador, writes that the popular obsession with vigilantism and entrepreneurial law enforcement is indeed pulling the United States in a worrisome direction—toward the fascism that some fear is represented by superheroes. Not only does the fantasy perpetuate the belief that it’s okay to skirt the law to fight corruption—fighting fire with fire, as it were—it also stunts reasoned debate and encourages violence. Most worryingly, Abdul-Jabbar writes in his Time piece, it chips away at the fundamental base of democracy:
Many fictional vigilante heroes rationalize their actions because the villains “got out on a technicality” or “beat it through a legal loophole.” Nothing infuriates us more and we angrily blame our judicial system for these “technicalities” and “loopholes.” And yet, often the technicality or loophole that we so hate is actually something important, like searching without a warrant, racially profiling, or not reading Miranda rights. These aren’t minor “technicalities,” they are the foundation of the American ideal of protecting our people against the abuses of power. They are defending our Constitution as legitimately as soldiers on a front line. Yes, there will be miscarriages of justice because of these technicalities, but that doesn’t mean we dismantle the judicial system any more than abandoning soldiers in a just cause just because we lose some to the miscarriage of friendly fire.
A possible descent into fascism is the furthest thing from the minds of the Xtreme Justice League members. They are likely to take offense at such a suggestion; their supporters would view it as a great disservice to their efforts. It’s a conversation that might seem prudent in the detached realms of the media and academia, but on the streets—where help is needed—it makes no sense at all.
Political discussions and debates on XJL patrols are indeed discouraged. With a diverse membership coming from different races, creeds and religions, views differ dramatically. The mission is all that matters. “You look at the bigger picture, what are you here for, what binds you together?” Fallen Boy says. “When you really focus on that, it overshadows everything else. Don’t get me wrong, sometimes certain things will pop up, but the senior guys or the people with the bigger image smash it. They’ll say, ‘Hey we’re not going to go down that road.’”
Nyghtingale disputes the notion that real-life superheroes are agents of the status quo—they are, in fact, the exact opposite. The biggest reason for why they wear costumes is to draw attention to their actions and how they fly in the face of widespread social apathy. If anything, being a real-life superhero is about motivating change, rather than promoting the continuation of the norm. “I want to be the change that the world needs,” she says. “The world needs more kindness, it needs more people to stand up and say, ‘This is wrong!’ This is how we need to be, this is how the world heals.”