Was Carlos Ramirez her sidekick?
No it does not. It means man.
No you didn’t. You didn’t include “Uber = over”.
Regardless, I know what it means, see my post 53:
Had you read more than just one post, you would have realized I was reponding to Exapno_Mapcase’s claim that it means “hero”.
Mine either, I’m to busy building ships and boats.
Game ubermensch! Game uber!
Must have super powers of some sort and must work for good. Sorry Batman.
Magneto who they fought in the first issue was a terrorist. Later on you find out he’s tired of mutant discrimination, but still a terrorist.
Definitely a superhero. Appeals to the fantasy of flight. Uses superpower to save the day/episode. She even has a costume. Samantha in Bewitched? Superhero. Genie in I Dream of… Superhero.
Except they don’t inhabit the superhero genre: all of them reside in situation comedies. The tell is that none of them wear spandex or a cape. No spandex (or spandex like garment, interpreted loosely) or no cape, no superhero. (John Constantine is an edge case - he seems more like a detective to me, but I’ve only encountered him via Neil Gaimen.)
I uses to watch Forever Knight. I like to joke that Nick Knight was basically a vampire version of Superman. But is he really a super hero?
Never seen it, but the show appears to exist outside the superhero genre. IOW it’s not based on or inspired by an American Superhero comic book character.
Why do Superheros wear tights? Printing technology. It’s easier to draw easy-to-distinguish characters when they wear a costume.
I’m seeing a fun new graphic novel. A darker version of the FN… and now she wears her underwear on the outside! That would put her in the genre with a qualifying costume!
Beware of her razor-sharp rosery.
Relocate the setting from Puerto Rico to a narco state dominated by cartels, corrupt politicians and death squads, and her mission is to rescue innocents.
The Courageous Nun of Cartagena
Counterargument: They often protect homo sapiens from Magneto. There was at least one issue where he wanted to load us into incinerators.
I’m not saying they don’t save us grudgingly, but they do it.
Baloney! Beware of Mother Superior!
We wish we could punch down? Superman doesn’t have our problems, but we want to project our courage on him. It doesn’t belong there is what I am saying so ‘hero’ is not an appropriate term for that character.
Firefighters are brave and I wish I could do what they do. Human Torch wouldn’t have as much of an issue running into a burning building to save a baby for instance, so Super Helper is closer to the mark.
Muggers deserve to be punched, regardless of the direction.
It’s not that superheroes don’t punch muggers - it’s that people aren’t interested in reading stories about superheroes punching muggers, not really. For a story to be interesting, the protagonist has to face some sort of challenge, and a superhero who’s challenged by muggers isn’t that much of a superhero, are they?
I read a lot of comics from the 1940s, and there were a lot of superheroes punching muggers. I think that’s because muggers may have been a bigger threat to the average reader back then. Crooked business owners, extortion rackets, conmen, corrupt police, just plain bullies, and other real life villains also received attention from the hero’s fist. These were the kind of people that threatened the average reader in real life and there was a real catharsis in seeing them get their comeuppance. I think modern readers (well from the 1960s on) are more sheltered from these everyday villains, so the supervillain has become the default foe of the superhero.
I may write to the OED. I found a hit from the London Daily Mail for May 31, 1899 for superhero. When I found the actual article, however, the word was supererogatory.
The British Newspaper Archive doesn’t seem to include the Daily Mail, oddly. I did find a hit in the "Daily Mirror* from October 13, 1911. It was an ad for Super-Hero handkerchiefs. "The daintiest of all handkerchiefs. You can’t make this stuff up.
Except that the British Newspaper Archive can. The ad was for Super-Aero handkerchiefs.
All the early hits are for OCR errors of staggering proportions. I did find a large number of uses of super-heroic, though, as in super-heroic ambition. More intriguingly, an 1866 review of the novel Chandos by “Ouida” referred to super-heroic characters. C’mon, guys, the word was just hanging there ready to pluck. How far can it be from a super-heroic character to a character being a superhero? Why did it take more than half a century for that apple to fall on someone’s head?
Language take weird turns. Much like translating ubermensch as superhero. It may not be literal but it got the point across and English never looked back.
Only to the extent people now think of comic-book characters as Beyond Good and Evil; clearly some are.