The point is not that the muggers pose no threat to Superman. The point is that muggers pose a genuine threat to members of the audience. In the real world, a significant portion of the audience has had to grit their teeth, give their wallets to the muggers, and let the criminals get away with the crimes. Superman is doing what we wish we were able to do.
Nitpick: what The Kingpin has is a superhumanly large build; he’s about the size, weight and strength of a grizzly bear. However, as Peter Parker amply demonstrated in his famous beatdown of the Kingpin, that’s not even in the same league as someone whose bones and muscles are stronger than carbon-based biology has any right to be.
Which only happened because he lives in a universe where there are people with paranormal powers, one of whom regenerated Batman’s injuries. Even by Batman standards it was an extreme stroke of good fortune.
Superhero as a word came from a translation of Nietzsche’s Ubermensch in 1908.
Newspaper databases show that the word was in general use by 1909. WWI heroes were often called superheroes. Early comic strips picked it up. Hairbreadth Harry had a designated superhero - created by the villain to be a better hero than the do-gooder Harry whose name was in the title - and this was back in 1931.
The place that didn’t use the word superhero was, ironically, comic books. I don’t find a hit for the word until ads for the Superman comic strip began appearing in newspapers in 1940. Then WWII brought lots of mentions of superhero soldiers, pushing aside the comics.
A few articles tied together comic books and superheroes, usually when denigrating them, over the next decade. Everything we think about superheroes comes from the Silver Age, with DC and Marvel reusing tropes from the Golden Age comics to kids too young to remember them. They got to define superheroes as a newfangled term. But they both had only a dozen or so characters to worry about, not the thousands wandering around today.
I thought the idea was that he’s got the build and size and weight and strength of, well, a human sumo, is all: impressive, and doubly so if you expect waddling slowness from a fat businessman — but he’s only supposed to be moving an entirely human amount of mass around at entirely human speeds.
Officially, Kingpin is 6’7" and 450 lbs. Which gives him about two inches and a hundred and thirty pounds on Michael Clarke Duncan, who played him in The Daredevil movie. He’s supposed to be remarkably strong even for a man of his size, but not actually super human. Of course, a lot of comics take artistic liberties with his size and capabilities - pretty sure I’ve seen him throw a car at least once, which should be super human by definition.
Batman is super- he is trained beyond any human limit. Also superscience gear makes a superhero.
Not Zorro. Doc is likely the line- he is either the most powerful non-super, or the lowest super.
Nope to Holmes, yep to Heracles.
A mugger with a gun may not endanger Supes- but he does endanger Lois and many bystanders. Superman is careful to modulate his strength - as see when Supes went against Darkseid.
See 3:00 mark
In the ’ What is extremely common in TV or movies but almost never happens in real life?’ thread I mentioned the lack of real-world superheroes (which is apparently not entirely correct), and I posited this as my thinking for what might make a superhero (a real-world version, so no crazy superpowers from radioactive spiders or space aliens getting powers from our yellow sun):
I’d say to qualify as a real-world superhero, one would need something like, but maybe not all, of these qualifications:
- A desire or obsession to fight crime outside of the normal channels of law enforcement
- Some sort of identifiable costume or uniform
- A secret identity (probably the most optional)
- Gadgets or abilities that give them an edge over bad guys as well as conventional law enforcement
I’d change the above only to say “crime and/or evil”. Constantine, for instance, doesn’t fight crime most of the time.
Neither do the Avengers, X-Men or Justice League (other than Batman).
One of the minor plot threads in the webcomic Strong Female Protagonist was the recognition of “innates” (certain people with skills and talents well beyond normal levels) as a type of “biodynamic” when it turned out that they had the same genetic markers as people who could lift cars overhead and whatnot. In a universe without something testable like a genetic marker, the issue would get fuzzier.
IIRC the DC universe calls this the “metagene”.
Double post.
I’m not sure there is a connection. Ubermensch is more accurately translated as ‘over-man’. Nietzsche’s meaning was an idea of humans who create their own values based on their experience of life. A vision of what we each could be, were we not so bogged down by outdated religions and moralities. For Nietzsche, the Übermensch is a being who is able to completely affirm life.
So it was more about self-help and not saving the world.
Mensch (Yiddish: מענטש, mentsh, from Middle High German Mensch, from Old High German mennisco; akin to Old English human being, man) means a person of integrity and honor".
That’s interesting. There’s a scene in the Avengers cartoon where Captain America asks Ms. Marvel if she wants to join. She replies she is no hero, to which he replies that she rescued a bus full of people, and that makes her a hero.
Dick Tracy is basically a low tier Batman who catches grotesque looking individuals who often have some kind of gimmick. He’s a hero sure, but is he a super hero?
I like to joke that the Scarlet Pimpernel is a Hungarian noble woman’s romantic fantasy of a French aristocrat. From this point of view all comics are power fantasies.
Anybody reading the current run of Dick Tracy? The Batmobile (though not Batman himself) has been appearing for the past few days.
Here’s today’s strip: Dick Tracy by Mike Curtis and Charles Ettinger for May 09, 2024 - GoComics
I felt the strip was skirting the edge of who Dick Tracy is when he nearly teamed up with the Green Hornet, I think teaming up with Batman is taking things too far.
The comic from yesterday is really interesting:
B.O: You want a ride?
Tracy: No thanks, I’ve ridden in the real one.
OED and Miriam-Webster both cite the first recorded usage of “superhero” to the 1890s, so probably not a connection there. Ubermensch is often translated as “Superman,” and the proliferation of the term in popular culture inspired Siegel and Schuster, but not directly: Bernard Shaw borrowed the term for his play, Man and Superman, which got picked up by Edgar Rice Burroughs who used it to describe Tarzan in one of his stories. Jerry Siegel got it from Burroughs, and used it for a short story he and Joe Shuster submitted to a sci-fi fanzine, called “Reign of the Superman,” where the titular character was a villainous telepath.
Five years later, they recycled the name for our favorite underpants-on-the-outside character, and the superhero genre was born.