It’s a quiet and chilly April morning in Aurora, Illinois. A lone goose, freshly returned from its winter pilgrimage south, spreads its wings and glides in for a landing on the gently flowing Fox River. Landing with the graceful splish of an Olympic diver, the goose pierces the calm with a loud, strained “Honnnnnk!” Anyone watching could be forgiven for wondering if it’s cursing out of shock, like a person might when gingerly stepping into freezing water.
The Fox River, which cuts through this city of two hundred thousand on its way to join the larger Illinois River, is cold but vital. The section between Aurora and Yorkville, thirteen miles south, is one of the best stretches of smallmouth bass fishing in the state. It’s a key recreational asset for this sleepy suburban region an hour west of Chicago. But it wasn’t always so. Just a few decades ago, the Fox River was a sewer—a literal dump for the region’s then-burgeoning manufacturing industry. With scant regulations preventing them from doing so, soap factories, aluminum foundries and steel mills pumped noxious gases into the air and effluent directly into the water. Dead fish bobbed in the river, swimming pools in the area were covered with soot and residents stayed indoors to hide from the pervasive stench. It was an ecological disaster in the making.
In 1969, Jim Phillips was a junior high school science teacher. Like many people in the area, he was fed up with the pollution and wished someone would do something about it. Fatefully, a friend relayed to him a story about a dispute between two local men over their home sewage situation. One of the men didn’t have a septic system and was instead running his waste through a pipe directly into the other man’s garden. The aggrieved man retaliated by stuffing a bag of oats into the pipe, causing the toilets in his thoughtless neighbor’s house to back up. A physical fight between the two men nearly ensued, but the offending party finally backed off and installed a proper drainage system.
Phillips thought a similar stratagem might work with Armour-Dial, the big soap company that owned a factory in Montgomery, just south of Aurora. The plant was one of many in the area that was brazenly spewing toxic sludge into the environment. So, one cold night in March, Phillips stole through a hole in the fence around the factory and found a pipe that was spewing sludge out into the river. Furtively, he filled it with bags of randomly strewn garbage and cement mix. Satisfied that the pipe was clogged, he penned a note to remind the company of its social responsibilities and left it nearby. He signed it “Fox,” with a cartoon animal face representing the O, a symbol he had thought up after coming across a fox in the woods a few days prior. Just as Bruce Wayne was inspired by a chance encounter with a bat while considering his crime-fighting persona, Phillips took his meeting as an omen. As he would later write in his pseudonymous memoir, “My message was in place and the Fox River had a spokesman.”1
The blockage worked temporarily, but Armour-Dial employees managed to clear it the next day. Phillips went back a few weeks later and re-plugged the pipe, leaving another note. Workers again cleared the obstruction.
Spring was arriving and new life was popping up. On one of his frequent walks along the river, Phillips noted a mother duck swimming in the river with her new brood of ducklings. Something in him snapped a few days later when he found them in a pool of soap bilge:
Floating upside down with their orange legs relaxed in death was the mallard hen and all of her baby ducks. The shock of seeing such carnage gave way to sorrow and then rage. Wading into the glop, I saw one tiny duckling’s foot feebly kick. Scooping it up and stripping soap waste off its partly fuzzy body, I tried to open its little beak and blow breath into its lungs. It was the only thing I could do, but it wasn’t enough. The little body went limp in my hand as the final spark of life flickered out. Everything got blurry as tears of sorrow and anger rolled down my cheek…. For the first time in my life, I was beginning to feel myself slipping away from the legions of law-abiding citizens into the realm of those who felt a gut-driven need to follow another set of laws. Maybe those of a higher set than statutory law…. I was feeling that I wasn’t part of the world that followed the rules and wondered whether the soap company felt the same way.2
Phillips had had it. He had monitored local efforts to force some sort of environmental action, but, frustrated with inaction from the authorities, he decided he would have to step up. Like the long string of American do-it-yourselfers before him, he felt he had no recourse but to enact his own brand of entrepreneurial law enforcement. The situation also echoed Batman’s fictional origin story, where a young Bruce Wayne is spurred into action by the senseless murder of his parents. The ducks certainly weren’t as personally connected to Phillips, but their deaths were no less enraging.
Under the mantle of the Fox, Phillips spent the next two years escalating his discrete acts of vigilante sabotage into an all-out eco-war that ranged from humorous mischief to outright—albeit good-intentioned—criminality. He hung banners in shopping malls that read, “Stop me before I kill more environment, signed: Armour-Dial” and “Armour-Dial murders our air and water for pure profit.” He smuggled a cap onto the local aluminum foundry’s chimney, filling the building with smoke. He tossed dead skunks onto the roof of a factory owner’s home. He dumped a bucket of sewage and roadkill onto the floor of steel producer American Reduction’s headquarters in Gary, Indiana; hung a protest poster on the Picasso sculpture in Chicago’s Daley Plaza; padlocked the doors to an asphalt factory; and held a mock funeral for the Fox River in reaction to a proposed dam project. All told, he hit twenty-six different corporations and businesses in fifteen cities across five states.3
Through it all, he maintained a code: property damage was acceptable, but not if it resulted in harm to people. Like Batman—post–Golden Age, anyway—the Fox opposed extreme justice: “If you have to kill or brutalize to make your point, then you and your point aren’t worth much,” he wrote.4
The media picked up on his activities, which garnered him allies. Mike Royko, a Pulitzer Prize–winning columnist at the Chicago Daily News, routinely wrote about the Fox’s exploits in a favorable light, which in turn prompted articles in Newsweek, Time and National Geographic. Life magazine ran a feature on the eco-vigilante after he dumped sewage on the floor of US Steel offices in Chicago. In all cases, his real identity was either unknown by reporters or withheld on purpose.
The Pine Hill Improvement Association also partnered with the Fox to distribute stickers to its friends across the country. Recipients of the stickers, which read, “Armour-Dial kills our water,” and “Armour-Dial kills our air,” clandestinely affixed them to soap products in stores. Children’s writer Clifford B. Hicks penned Alvin Fernald, Superweasel, a kids’ book based on exploits of the Fox. Phillips himself produced Tales of the Fox: Pollution Fighter, a thirty-page comic book depicting a cartoon version of his alter ego and his escapades. He distributed the comic—printed on recycled paper, of course—to local children in an effort to teach them about pollution.
Aurora’s police chief and the Cook County state’s attorney both wanted to arrest the mysterious figure who was inducing so many corporate headaches, but they couldn’t figure out who he was. Many residents of the area, including journalists and rank-and-file police, were indeed aware that Phillips was the man behind the persona, but they didn’t rat him out. Much like his Wild West forebears, the Fox had tacit support from the public for his war against wrongdoers. He even inspired a copycat—someone calling themselves the Beaver, who plugged up a sewage treatment plant near O’Hare airport in Chicago.
Phillips’s efforts proved highly effective in raising awareness of the region’s pollution problem and in turning public sentiment against the culprits. The soap sticker campaign led to a national boycott of Armour-Dial products and a strengthening of the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency. In 1975, the state sued the soap company for violating pollution standards at its Montgomery plant. And rather than looking for the copycat Beaver who had sabotaged the O’Hare plant, authorities instead fined the owner for polluting and turned him over to the EPA. Cleanup followed slowly but surely and by the late eighties the Fox River had mostly recovered from years of ecological abuse. Children could once again swim in its waters and ducklings no longer keeled over. Bald eagles even returned to discover a replenished feast of fish.
Phillips eventually took his fight to a higher level by joining the government as an inspector in charge of pollution investigations. He never publicly admitted to his alter ego, though friends and family finally copped to it after his death at the age of seventy from diabetes complications in 2001. Phillips never married and left no heirs, but conservationists honored his legacy by spreading his ashes along the river. In 2006, the Oswegoland Park District enshrined his contributions with a series of memorial plaques at Violet Patch Park, just south of Montgomery. His efforts unquestionably helped clean up the region. Now, the only threat geese face from the river is frozen tail feathers.
While he never wore a mask or costume—though he did sometimes disguise his voice when talking to reporters on the phone—Phillips can be considered the first known real-life American superhero, or at least a prototype of the concept. His persona and strategies served as a template for those who followed—the use of symbolism to attract attention to problems; the obviation of existing authorities to deal with issues in a vigilante fashion; the courting of the media to spread the message; the selflessness required to do it all; and the playfully self-aware sense of humor that kept regular people from fearing him.
“I’ve talked to a lot of people who are part of this real-life superhero thing who consider him to be one of their major influences,” says Nellie Bly Workman, a Milwaukee filmmaker working on a documentary about the Fox. Workman cites Michigan’s Citizen and Arkansas’s Wolf Paradox as a few examples. “Even though he didn’t use a costume or disguise, he did use a larger-than-life identity to draw attention to what he was doing. I see a direct connection between Jim and his Fox persona and what a lot of these heroes are doing.”5
Roger Matile, who considered the Fox a friend and reported on his activities as editor of the Oswego Ledger-Sentinel, thinks Phillips would be pleased to learn of his status among real-life superheroes. “If he thought he was inspiring people to do positive things, he’d really be proud of that. I think he’d be touched, really,” Matile says. “I think he would have been proud that his legacy is being carried on.”6
“I am America’s only practicing caped crusader,” Richard Pesta told the San Diego Evening Tribune in 1984. “That is the role I desire to maintain for the rest of my life.” Better known as Captain Sticky, Pesta picked up where the Fox had left off.
Born in Pittsburgh in 1946, Pesta made a fortune in the early seventies selling corrugated fiberglass, a key material used in buildings at the time. At the age of twenty-eight, he retired and settled in California to pursue his dream of being a full-time superhero. To that end, he bought and heavily modified a Lincoln Continental. The “Stickymobile” was painted gold and had plastic bubbles on its roof like the eyes of a bee, plus two guns hidden next to its front headlights. The guns didn’t fire bullets, but rather streams of peanut butter and jelly, at a range of about five feet. Dressed in a blue jumpsuit with a big S on the chest, along with gold boots and a cape, Pesta would drive up to teenagers who were stealing hubcaps from parked cars or spray-painting graffiti onto walls and shoot them with his concoction, hence the nom de guerre Captain Sticky. It helped that the 350-pound wannabe superhero was also fond of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.
Aside from patrolling the streets of San Diego looking for misbehaving teens, Captain Sticky was also a consumer advocate. He used his flamboyant persona to expose dishonest auto mechanics and car rental shops that were ripping off customers. In 1977, he was credited with spurring the launch of an investigation into substandard care at nursing homes, which resulted in stricter statewide regulations. “If I were to wear a pinstripe suit while trying to aid the oppressed, I would have no efficiency,” he told the New Musical Express in 1975. “When I stage a surprise raid in my costume, you can be sure I’m not ignored.”7
As with the Fox before him, Captain Sticky’s effectiveness was hard to dispute. “He got results largely by just showing up at the crime scene,” wrote comic book artist Mark Evanier on his blog. “He was one of those colorful characters that no reporter could resist. If he pulled up outside your business, so did the TV cameras. If you had a lick of sense, you’d just correct whatever he thought needed correction.”8
Pesta retired Captain Sticky in the early nineties to pursue other interests. He sold eco-friendly gardening products. He also indulged his seedier side: he invested in a chain of brothels in Nevada and was investigated by police for allowing one of his homes to be used in porn productions. He also promoted the “Real Man’s Midlife Crisis Tour of Thailand,” offering “drinking, debauchery and fun stuff,” an endeavor the Thai government promptly shut down.9 Pesta died in Thailand in 2003 of complications from emergency bypass surgery at the age of fifty-seven. “His dream was to alter the course of history,” his fiancée, Lynne Shiloh, told the press at the time. “He was a huge man with a huge heart filled with love for everyone.”10
Meanwhile in Birmingham, Alabama… Willie Perry was working as a manager at a furniture assembly shop. He was shocked to hear a news report one day about a group of men who had raped a woman whose car had broken down. As a husband and father, he was determined to prevent such crimes from happening and to prove that there were still good people who could be trusted. To that end, he bought and modified a 1971 Thunderbird, cramming it with every amenity he could think of—a record player, toaster oven, television, even an Atari game console. He painted the car, which he dubbed the “Rescue Ship,” with white-and-red racing stripes and affixed the message Will help anyone in distress to the front bumper and side doors. Perry himself donned a white-and-brown jumpsuit and a racing helmet emblazoned with a familiar bat logo. With his vehicle and uniform set, the Birmingham Batman was good to go—another entrepreneurial law enforcer and good Samaritan hitting the streets.
In addition to helping out motorists, Perry gave rides to individuals who’d had too much to drink, took elderly people to doctor appointments, drove kids to McDonald’s, assisted with guiding traffic around road hazards, taxied mothers carrying groceries and even paid for stranded travelers’ motel rooms. As a report on al.com put it, he “knew the birthdays of every kid in the neighborhood and would show up at their parties with bags of candy and cookies. If he drove past and saw kids jumping rope, he would stop and play music for them to jump to from the loudspeaker of his car.”11
Perry’s activities made him a local hero and celebrity. In 1982, Birmingham mayor Richard Arrington declared August 3 “Willie Perry Day.” An episode of the ABC TV show That’s Incredible the same year featured a segment on the Birmingham Batman. “There is no comic book about Willie Perry, but there should be,” said host Fran Tarkenton. “He’s the most incredible superhero of them all because he’s real.”
Perry died in the winter of 1985 at the age of forty-five from carbon monoxide poisoning. He was working on the Rescue Ship and either closed his garage door to keep out the cold, or didn’t notice when it accidentally shut. Either way, the car in which he did so much good ended up killing him. The Birmingham Batman’s legacy lives on through the Willie J. Perry Foundation, steered by his daughter Marquetta Hill-King. The organization holds community education and anti-bullying events and donates restored cars to single parents. “He just gave so much of himself,” Hill-King told Alabama Newscenter in 2016. “Everything he’d make he would basically give it away in helping somebody else.”12 Sheila Tyson, a Birmingham city councilor, remembers Perry helping her mother home with groceries. “We thought he was actually Batman,” she told a reporter. “He was an inspiration to me. It made me feel humble doing volunteer work. He inspired me and made me feel like it was alright to volunteer without being paid.”13
Meanwhile in St. Petersburg, Florida… a darker hero was prowling the streets and back alleys looking for criminals to thwart and homeless people to help. Knight-Hood claims he began his activities in 1989 after his wife of twelve years died and, two weeks later, his house burned down. Living in a van with nothing left to lose, he says he decided to throw himself into helping others. The blockbuster Batman also happened to be raking it in at the box office. “I saw it twelve times that year,” he told author Tea Krulos in Krulos’s book Heroes in the Night.14 Wearing a black face mask with a knight chess piece symbol on it, Knight-Hood called in crimes to police, kept watch over the city’s homeless and counseled prostitutes and drug dealers in an effort to help them reform. Or so he said. Unlike Captain Sticky and the Birmingham Batman, Knight-Hood shied away from the media and never revealed his identity. As such, there is scant evidence of his activities. He did respond to one email message I sent and revealed that he’s now retired, in his sixties, living in Louisville, Kentucky. “I still feed the homeless here of course whenever I come across them,” he wrote. “Old habits are hard to break and I still report crime when I see it.”
Knight-Hood’s place in the history of real-life superheroes is important, however, specifically for his reference to the 1989 Batman movie as a source of inspiration. The superhero comic-book boom that followed, coupled with the earlier media sensations generated by the Fox, Captain Sticky and Birmingham Batman, meant that the real-life superhero phenomenon was starting to stir. Inspired by the fame and impact of the early do-gooders and emboldened by the growing nerd culture, a few costumed individuals—such as Master Legend in Orlando, Florida, and Captain Jackson in Jackson, Michigan—were popping up around the country. They were soon joined by Dark Guardian and Terrifica in New York City; Superhero in Clearwater, Florida; Civitron in Salem, Massachusetts; Shadow Hare in Cincinnati and others. For the most part, these individuals were isolated and unaware of each other. The internet changed all that.
It all started with an innocuous post in 2004 by computer programmer Mark Schmidt on his personal blog, titled “Calling All Superheroes.” Acting on the same curiosity that spawned this book, Schmidt idly posed the question: why weren’t there more people trying to be real-life Batmen and Batwomen? The query brought some of those isolated individuals, who perhaps hadn’t received the same media attention as their forebears, out of the woodwork. Schmidt’s post garnered hundreds of comments, many from actual real-life superheroes and those considering taking up the mask. For some, it was their first realization they weren’t alone. “That blog was the start of it,” says Dark Guardian. “It helps when you realize you’re not the only one.”15
In response, Kevlex, a real-life superhero in Phoenix, launched the online World Superhero Registry in 2005, a site where costumed individuals could enroll themselves and make their presence known to the world. “There was almost nobody out there doing this,” Kevlex said on a podcast in 2009. “There were people there saying, ‘I’m taking this seriously and I’m going to go out and do this, it’s a good idea.’ Since there seemed to be a little spark there… I decided to fan the spark until something happened, and indeed it did.”16 Myspace, which helped kick off the concept of social networking the same year, also enabled individuals to create their own pages, complete with profiles and photos. The Heroes Network, also started in 2005 by New Jersey real-life superhero Tothian, created a proper forum for interested individuals to connect and converse. All of the online activity created a snowball effect, connecting existing real-life superheroes and spurring new ones into being. “It was this whole world I had discovered,” says San Diego’s Urban Avenger. “It was almost like watching Star Wars for the first time.”17
The fledging movement got some inadvertent help from Stan Lee the following year in the form of Who Wants to Be a Superhero?, a reality show on the Sci Fi Channel hosted by the Marvel Comics legend. Contestants dressed up as superhero characters of their own devising to compete in comic book–inspired challenges, such as quickly changing in and out of costumes, shutting off water valves and solving thefts. The show ran for just two seasons, but it spawned some unintended spinoffs. Several individuals who had unsuccessfully auditioned stayed in touch and formed the SkiffyTown League of Heroes, a group that creates superhero characters for the purpose of encouraging good ethics and morals in children. Some, including Citizen Prime in Salt Lake City, Utah, and Geist in Rochester, Minnesota, took it a step further by patrolling the streets of their respective cities, looking for crime and people in need, as real-life superheroes. “When you ask the question, ‘Who wants to be a superhero?’ Well, who doesn’t?” says the cowboy-themed Geist. “When I didn’t get cast, I had this suit and I thought, ‘What am I going to do?’ I ended up going over to the other side of the line and got real with it.”18
In 2007, Chaim Lazaros and Ben Goldman were students at Columbia University in New York. Like Schmidt the blogger, they wondered why superheroes weren’t real, only to be surprised when they learned the opposite. “We found these people on Myspace and were blown away,” Lazaros says.19 The duo wanted to film a documentary project on the emerging subculture, but as students they couldn’t afford to travel around the country to meet these disparate people. Their solution was to have the characters come to them instead, to Superheroes Anonymous, likely the first convention of its kind—a meeting of the minds for do-gooder types where participants could network, partake in workshops devoted to costume design and self-defense techniques, and patrol together. Thirteen superheroes attended, and, when the planned host dropped out at the last minute, Lazaros decided to fill in himself. He cobbled together a costume and dubbed himself Life, the translation of his Hebrew first name, Chaim. “I woke up the next morning after not having slept for months and I was a real-life superhero,” he says. “I’d done it, I’d dived in, I was wet.” Superheroes Anonymous has since turned into a periodic event, with gatherings also held in Massachusetts and Louisiana.
Kick-Ass, a comic book by writer Mark Millar and artist John Romita Jr. first published in 2008, brought the real-life superhero concept full circle—back to fiction. Starring an ordinary teenager named Dave Lizewski, the first issue starts with the protagonist asking some by-now familiar questions:
I always wondered why nobody did it before me. I mean, all those comic book movies and television shows, you’d think at least one eccentric loner would have stitched himself a costume. Is everyday life really so exciting? Are schools and offices really so thrilling that I’m the only one who ever fantasized about this? C’mon. Be honest with yourself. We all planned to be a superhero at some point in our lives.
In the comic’s early pages, Lizewksi spends his evenings thinking up superhero names before finally settling on “Kick-Ass.” He assembles a costume centered on a wetsuit he orders on eBay, then gets thrills from secretly wearing it under his clothes at school. Eventually, he admits that “like a murderer, simply fantasizing would only cut it for so long. After a while, I had to engage.” In his first encounter, Lizewski tries to stop a trio of teens from spray-painting graffiti on an alleyway wall, but instead ends up in the hospital after the hoodlums pummel and stab him. He recovers and later intervenes in a street fight, only to be beaten once again. This time, the skirmish ends up on the internet after an onlooker records it on his cellphone. The incident goes viral, turning Kick-Ass into an internet sensation and something of a local celebrity. From there, he hooks up with other like-minded costumed heroes and manages to actually foil some crimes.
The comic book and the movie that followed in 2010 at first offered a simple answer to the question of why there weren’t more real-life Batmen—that it would be dangerous and potentially fatal for anyone foolish enough to try it—before ultimately glorifying the idea. If Kick-Ass didn’t inspire real people to go after hardened criminals and gangsters, it at least tempted some to think it could be possible, and suggested how it might be done. “It did have a very interesting message buried beneath it, which is: What’s actually stopping people from dressing up in costumes and doing their best to better society?” says Nameless Crusader, a real-life superhero based in Oshawa, Canada. “It doesn’t have to be literally going out and fighting crime. It could be something as simple as what me and the Justice Crew of Oshawa did on occasion, which is go out and do night patrols on a weekly basis.”20
By 2011, the growing real-life superhero movement had attracted the attention of filmmaker Michael Barnett. Barnett’s simply titled documentary Superheroes, which aired on HBO, cast a sympathetic eye on the phenomenon and followed the exploits of a variety of characters, from Mr. Xtreme’s mission to apprehend a sex offender in San Diego and the Black Monday Society’s street patrols in Salt Lake City to the New York Initiative’s training sessions and Master Legend’s work with the homeless in Orlando. Barnett was struck by the costumed characters’ entrepreneurialism. “Help just wasn’t coming,” he says. “This movement was born out of that, not waiting around for bureaucracy.”21 His film further galvanized momentum, with numerous real-life superheroes citing it as inspiration for their decision to join the movement. Canadian Justice, in Windsor, Ontario, for example, says he was particularly amused by Mr. Xtreme, who comes across as haplessly earnest despite repeated setbacks, like being forced to live in his van. But on repeated viewings, “it stopped being funny and started being inspirational,” he says.22 Crimson Canuck, also in Windsor, was prompted to action by the one-two punch of Kick-Ass and Superheroes, which he says he watched “five million times.” “It really resonated,” he says of the Kick-Ass movie. “What if everyone just adopted that ethos?”
On October 13, 2011, a Seattle judge ordered twenty-three-year-old Benjamin Fodor to remove his mask to address assault charges stemming from an incident in which he had allegedly pepper-sprayed people fighting outside a nightclub. Fodor complied and took off his black-and-yellow molded-rubber cowl, revealing in public for the first time the identity of the famous Phoenix Jones.
Fodor had decided to become a real-life superhero a year earlier, after discovering that his car had been broken into. His young son had cut himself on the broken glass and required stitches. Fodor was later told that several people had witnessed the break-in, but had done nothing about it. Then one of his friends was assaulted at a bar and was left with permanent facial damage. Again, no one intervened.
Fed up with bystander apathy, Fodor started breaking up fights at bars. As an amateur mixed martial artist, he was effective, which drew attention. He realized he was becoming known as “the guy who stops fights” and that he was putting himself in danger because of it. “They’d recognize me and pick me out. I couldn’t do regular, everyday things anymore,” he told Seattle’s KOMO News. “So I started wearing the mask.”23 Fodor was thus “reborn” as Phoenix Jones, a butt-kicking street fighter in customized, black-and-yellow bulletproof Dragon Skin armor—the brand favored by the CIA and the US military—and matching rubber cowl. On his belt: a stun baton, pepper spray, tear gas, handcuffs and a first-aid kit. By look, equipment and capability—physical, at least—he was the closest thing yet to a real-life Batman.
Jones joined forces with a group of like-minded individuals including Buster Doe, Thorn, Green Reaper, Gemini, No Name, Catastrophe and Thunder 88 to patrol the streets of Seattle as the Rain City Superhero Movement. Like a gang of costumed Guardian Angels, the team broke up fights outside bars, chased down thieves and petty criminals, and performed everyday good deeds like helping ordinary citizens to get taxis or to cross the street. As with the Fox, Captain Sticky and the Birmingham Batman before them, they became fast celebrities, locally and globally. “Vigilante justice has come to Seattle, and the caped crusaders drive a Kia,” proclaimed the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.24 “The case mirrors that of Kick-Ass, last year’s Hollywood film directed by Matthew Vaughn, in which an ordinary teenager tries to become a real-life superhero,” reported the Telegraph in the UK.25 The team even earned a mention, albeit a mocking one, on Saturday Night Live after a fight gone wrong in early 2011. “A man in Seattle who calls himself Phoenix Jones and dresses up in a homemade superhero costume while fighting crime had his nose broken in a fight,” said Seth Meyers in the “Weekend Update” sketch. “So it seems evil has found Phoenix Jones’s only weakness: weakness.”
The incident that landed Fodor in court happened on the night of October 9, 2011. As per his account, two groups of club-goers were brawling outside the venue, which necessitated his involvement and the discharging of pepper spray. The official police report stated that no fight had in fact happened and that the partiers were simply dancing and walking to their respective cars. Fodor was charged with four counts of assault and released on bail of $3,800 after spending the night in jail. In court a few days later, the prosecutor declined to press charges after video footage showed Fodor was in the right. Wasting no time, Fodor donned his cowl and ripped off his dress shirt, Superman-style, to reveal his black-and-gold armor underneath. “I will continue to patrol with my team, probably tonight,” Fodor told reporters waiting outside the courthouse. “In addition to being Phoenix Jones, I am also Ben Fodor, father and brother. I am just like everybody else. The only difference is that I try to stop crime in my neighborhood and everywhere else.”26
The court appearance fueled Jones’s fame. The case drew worldwide media attention, making him a sought-after interviewee. “Being a superhero is the best way I can serve my community,” he said on Fox News. “It’s time for people to stand up and defend themselves and what they believe in,” an unmasked Fodor, with his real-life superhero wife, Purple Reign, by his side, told BBC’s Newsnight while visiting the UK. Television network AMC came calling and filmed a Phoenix Jones pilot, though it never aired.27
The notoriety reached a fever pitch in 2012 when a video of Jones in a street fight went viral. Police looked on as the costumed fighter beat on an unidentified man who had challenged him. Authorities allowed the bout to happen without intervening on account of Washington state’s mutual combat law, which permits fights between consenting individuals. Mirroring Kick-Ass, except with the superhero as the victor, various versions of the video quickly amassed more than fourteen million views on YouTube.
Public opinion of Jones’s activities was generally supportive, but authorities felt differently. Seattle police maintained they didn’t want anyone besides sworn officers putting themselves in danger. In at least one case, members of the Rain City Superhero Movement broke up a fight, but refused to press charges, not wanting to reveal their identities by appearing as witnesses in court. “There’s nothing wrong with citizens getting involved with the criminal justice process as long as they follow it all the way through,” a police spokesperson said.28 Seattle prosecutor Pete Holmes was less charitable to Jones. “Mr. Fodor is no hero, just a deeply misguided individual,” he said in a press release following the court appearance. “He has been warned that his actions put himself in danger and this latest episode demonstrates that innocent bystanders can also be harmed.”29
Phoenix Jones isn’t the only self-styled do-gooder to run afoul of the law. In 2005, a few years before Fodor’s run-in, factory worker Thomas Frankini—better known as the purple-cape-wearing Captain Jackson—was arrested for drunk driving in Jackson, Michigan. The Captain was forced to hang up his tights after the local newspaper published his identity. Also in Michigan, the Petoskey Batman was busted just a few months before Fodor after police found him hanging off the wall of a building. Petoskey Batman (Mark Wayne Williams), was arrested for trespassing and possession of dangerous weapons, which included a baton, a can of pepper spray and a pair of lead-lined gloves. He was sentenced to six months’ probation, during which he was forbidden from wearing his Batman costume. Williams was arrested again the following year after he was found nosing around an area that police had cordoned off after a car crash. “He wouldn’t clear the scene and we had a canine out there and he kept screwing up the scent,” a police sergeant told the Petoskey News-Review. Williams ultimately sold his Batman suit for $152 to help cover his legal fees.
Williams’s Michigan Protectors teammate Bee Sting (Adam Besso) also managed to get himself into trouble. Bee Sting was in a trailer park in Burton, Michigan, and found himself annoyed by a man loudly revving his motorcycle. He asked the man to cut it out and, when he didn’t, a struggle ensued. Bee Sting’s shotgun went off—no one was hurt, but it was enough to earn him 102 days in jail and two years of probation, not to mention universal enmity among the media and his peers. What exactly was a self-styled real-life superhero doing with a shotgun anyway?
Then there was Matthew Argintar, a twenty-three-year-old man who got himself arrested outside a Home Depot in Mansfield Township, Ohio, in 2012. Argintar, a former military policeman, was offering shoppers a helping hand in his Beast guise, wearing a Batman-like mask, armor and cape. The problem was, he was doing this less than two weeks after a masked gunman had killed twelve people and wounded fifty-eight others during a midnight screening of The Dark Knight Rises in a Colorado movie theater. It’s worth noting that Argintar cited Phoenix Jones as his inspiration.30
If real-life superheroes are some form of entrepreneurial response to perceived societal needs, then real-life super villains are, similarly, a reaction to market demand. They aren’t homicidal world-conquering comic-book madmen like Lex Luthor or Doctor Doom, nor are they actual bad guys like real-world dictators, drug lords and greedy corporatists. A real-life super villain is instead just an internet troll with a gimmick. Their raison d’être isn’t to perform acts of evil, but to act as foils to real-life superheroes—to criticize and expose their failings and hypocrisies.
According to Tea Krulos, they started appearing around the end of the aughts. A man calling himself Dark Horizon, dressed in a trench coat and fedora with pantyhose stretched across his face, posted a YouTube video in 2008 in which he taunted several heroes. He referred to Florida’s Amazonia as “a beast of a woman” and threatened to crush Minnesota’s Geist “like an insect.”31 Meanwhile the debut of hero Shadow Hare in Cincinnati in 2009, which garnered local TV news coverage, kicked off a wave of criticism on Myspace and YouTube by self-styled villains calling themselves Dr. Sadistique, Sword Kane, Executrix, Tiny Terror, Street Shock and Gravestar. Much of the commentary took the form of poorly filmed rants in low-rent disguises. The criticisms, however, were sharp. “These people claim to be heroes, but honestly they do very little that is heroic,” Gravestar said on an internet radio show produced by Portland, Oregon’s hero/villain Apocalypse Meow.
Real-life super villains ultimately gave voice to the questions and concerns that ordinary people tend to have when it comes to real-life superheroes. “Everyday citizens go about their lives and help people,” Lord Malignance told Krulos. “To say that one must put on a costume to inspire others is to seek to elevate themselves at the expense of ordinary people. If one wanted to fight crime, become police. If one wants to help the hungry, work in a soup kitchen. The reason they are superheroes is ego, and ego alone.”32 Purple Lotus, a Florida villain who started as a real-life superhero before switching sides, is less charitable. “The superhero community is full of self-righteous schizophrenics,” he says. “Come on, look at you: you look like a multi-colored ninja.”33
If the villains found Shadow Hare and his ilk irksome, they really hated Phoenix Jones. Rex Velvet, in actuality Seattle filmmaker Ryan Cory, took Fodor to task in a series of videos he posted on the internet. Unlike most villain missives, Cory’s videos had professional-quality production, makeup and costuming. “Now, our city is not protected by our once-respected police force, but by a tormented, delusional freak in a mask. How did this happen?” the mustachioed and eyepatch-wearing Velvet asked in one slickly produced short. “When I see that our boys in blue are being replaced by a hobo snitch in a mask gallivanting around with a slew of nerds in tights, I have to wonder: What direction is our fair city heading in? For far too long we’ve watched as our nation buys in to its childish charade and it has run its course.”
Lord Mole, a villain based in the United Kingdom, was especially angered by Fodor’s attempt in 2012 to crowdfund ten thousand dollars for a new, high-tech suit of armor. He pointed out the irony in a sarcastic response video: “All you have to do is get out there and spray some people in the face! If you don’t spray them in the face, tase them! Kick them in the nuts! And then you will be worthy of a super suit too,” he said. “Come on American superheroes, get your act together! Be a Phoenix Jones role model, break some children’s fingers today!” Mole is more soft-spoken in person these days, but no less critical. He points to the viral video of Jones in mutual combat as everything that was wrong with what he and others like him were doing. “There’s nothing superheroic about it,” he says. “There’s nothing about it that looks like a superhero making things better. It just looks like a guy who’s really good at fighting beating up someone else who’s drunk.”34
The villains were ultimately effective in that they sparked internal dialogue within the real-life superhero community. They may in fact have been too effective, with the heroes themselves becoming their own harshest critics, thus putting the villains out of their jobs. Phoenix Jones in particular has become a lightning rod for criticism from fellow heroes. “The kid was an affront to whatever I stand for—being yourself and not lying to the world,” says Zero, cofounder of the New York Initiative.35 Even his own teammates turned on him. “He would try to instigate the situation instead of defusing whatever we came upon,” says Skyman. “He was born aggressive, already looking for the next fight.”36 “I don’t trust the guy anymore, I’m very skeptical of his intentions,” says El Caballero. “He’d roll into a place and all of a sudden there’d be some sort of craziness. It was almost as if his energy was bringing that in a way.”37
The feelings were mutual. Jones seemed to delight in denigrating his more charitable-minded compatriots. “When you wake up one day and decide to put on spandex and give out sandwiches, something’s a little off,” he told writer Jon Ronson. “I call them real-life sandwich handlers.”38 Jones disbanded the Rain City Superhero Movement over social media in 2014, saying that some members were disloyal and/or were carrying illegal weaponry, but then quickly reformed the group with new qualifying criteria. Members would have to be able to perform five pull-ups and twenty-five sit-ups in a two-minute stretch, he said.
His purged teammates tell a different story. The actual dissolution of the Rain City Superhero Movement occurred after May Day, an annual protest event for worker and immigrant rights, in Seattle in 2014. According to Evocatus (James Marx), the team had scouted downtown locations ahead of time and had planned to use a hotel room as their base of operations. Their plan was to watch the proceedings on television and spring into action at the first sign of trouble. Jones was “in one of his moods” when the day actually arrived, according to Marx, refusing to talk to his teammates and seemingly uninterested in the whole affair. He led them into a large throng of people, where a shouting match over the team’s presence ensued. A group of about sixty protestors, angry that a group of masked individuals was drawing attention away from their cause, surrounded the team and the situation escalated into shoving and punches. The costumed group was lucky to escape without serious injuries. “We were clearly making things worse by being there,” says Marx, who had served ten years in the army including a tour in Iraq, where he developed post-traumatic stress disorder. “We had crossed that Rubicon of no longer being a benefit to the city. We were actually turning them violent. I was getting really triggered.”39
The team had a group chat on Facebook shortly after and it was evident that everyone in the group was mad at everyone else—especially Jones. In response, Jones announced that new rules, including fitness requirements, would be forthcoming. “I was just seething—it was the worst disappointment,” Marx says, “the worst and most poorly executed May Day we’d ever had. Any time he did something wrong he’d throw a completely unrelated curveball.” Marx knew he was done, as did other members. El Caballero quit and formed a new team, the Emerald City Heroes Organization, similarly angry at Jones. “He’s a grown-ass man,” El Caballero says. “He’s got to do what he’s got to do, but I just couldn’t work with him anymore.”
Jones’s life was already unraveling by this point. A year earlier his wife, Purple Reign, had announced they were splitting. His teammates were now questioning him about the money they had given to him to secure liability insurance and armor. He had failed to deliver on either count. “If anyone ever brought it up, he would just shut down,” Marx says. “The final total was like eight people who he had taken money from and never gave them their armor,” El Caballero says. “That was so disrespectful.” His teammates suspected he had personal problems, judging from his frequent social media posts emanating from casinos and parties. Marx remembers seeing Jones tweeting that he was out on a solo patrol, when in reality he was sitting next to him at home playing video games. “He’s always got a different story based on who he’s talking to,” he says. Jones’s patrols became less frequent, until he disappeared from the streets altogether. In early 2019, he posted what looked to be a cry for help on his Instagram account, commenting on how he was at a weird point in his life and needed to be alone. “I don’t think I’ve met enough people I would get shot to save, I don’t think people would get shot to save me,” he wrote. “I was wrong, maybe everything I’ve ever believed in was wrong.”
Shortly after that, he tearfully told the NW NERD Podcast that he had lost in faith in people and in himself, leading to his hanging up his rubber armor. “I didn’t make a difference. The people who saw it were not supposed to act this way anymore and they have not gotten that lesson… I’m not going to win. Who plays a game not to win?” Despite that, later in 2019, he was showing signs of reconsidering by making noise on social media about coming out of retirement.
His situation deteriorated further in January 2020, when news broke of his arrest for selling MDMA—a street drug known as Ecstasy or Molly—to a police officer in Seattle. Police said an undercover agent contacted Fodor via text message, posing as a buyer, after receiving tips that the former real-life superhero was selling drugs. Fodor requested three hundred dollars be paid up front to his online Venmo account, then met “Mike,” the undercover agent, in a Starbucks. He collected the remaining two hundred dollars he was owed, placed a paper bag on the table in front of Mike and left. Police tested the contents and confirmed them as just over seven grams of MDMA. Mike tried to contact Fodor again to buy cocaine, but he got no response. Police tried again using a new identity, “Laura,” and successfully made contact. Fodor and his girlfriend, Andrea Berendsen, were then taken into custody when they showed up at a hotel to make the exchange.40
Fodor had yet to appear in court to answer the charges as of this writing, but the news set off a wave of discussion amongst the real-life superhero community online. Many expressed disappointment and feelings of betrayal, but others pointed out that the arrest wasn’t entirely unexpected. “I believe he may have had some good intentions as a real-life superhero, but he cared more for his ego and chasing fame than actually doing good,” said New York’s Dark Guardian on Twitter. “Him being arrested for dealing drugs is no surprise to people that knew him.”41
Fodor initially did not respond to my multiple attempts over the course of two years to get in touch, though he did reply once to suggest contacting Peter Tangen, the Los Angeles photographer who had previously acted as his de facto publicist. Tangen didn’t get a response from him on my behalf either.
How the saga of Phoenix Jones ends is, as of this writing, unknown. But his legacy is a key chapter in the history of real-life superheroes. Despite his shortcomings and his apparent downfall, his former teammates nevertheless recall his charisma and intelligence. He was a force on the streets and an erudite spokesman in front of the cameras who brought an unprecedented spotlight to what the hundreds of real-life superheroes were trying to do, even if not all of that attention was positive. “He wasn’t the first, but he was the first to be marketable,” Marx says. “Without that over-the-top personality, none of that would have happened.” With his overt and aggressive style, Fodor also unintentionally did much to galvanize the community into policing itself, which in turn led to the kinder and gentler wave of real-life superheroes that would follow. “The superheroes themselves are as good, if not better, than the villains were at pruning the branches of the heroes who were too far out or dangerous,” says Lord Mole. “Before, it was sort of a vigilante core that was leading them. Now, it’s a community-focused core.”