For as long as I can remember I have been using the term “Superhero” when speaking about a goody comic book character and in that time I have never really thought to myself ‘What defines a Superhero?’.

With the question ‘What defines a Superhero?, what I am asking is what makes a Superhero different from just a hero and what defines them, especially in the comic book world, what makes a Superhero different from all the others in a costume with a secret identity?

Here are entries for Superhero from the first two dictionaries I checked online.

Superhero:

“A fictional hero having extraordinary or superhuman powers; also: an exceptionally skilful or successful person”

And

“A benevolent fictional character with superhuman powers, such as Superman”

This doesn’t really give me enough to answer the question and is where I start to get confused. For instance when we talk about guys in the mould of Ghost Rider and The Punisher who are quite happy to kill for the great of good are they Superheroes? And what about like Magneto and people like him because when he turned all good and joined the X-Men team do we now call him a superhero even though he has killed so many people in the past because he WAS a Supervillain but then turned good?

I have been thinking about the question now for five days or so because I wrote the above last week before work got a hold of me.

I have managed (I think) to define what I would class as a ‘Superhero’, It may not be the ‘official’ view of what a Superhero is and I would highly imagine the definition of Superhero differs from each person to the next but here is what I broke mine into and what from now on I will use it to define a Superhero.

The first thing to take into account is that Superheroes don't necessarily have to have superpowers. Batman, Green Arrow, Nightwing to name just three don’t have superpowers, yes the all have amazing talents but no ‘actual’ superpowers and yet I would class all three as Superhero’s.

People like Punisher, Ghost Rider, and Magneto like I mentioned before do not in my eyes class as a Superhero because there are a few rules one has to have to get ‘Super’ added to that Hero part in my eyes.

The rules I am talking about are not many but I believe needed to define and help separate the Superhero from the hero.

First up and MOST importantly is the moral code and what they live by, when out fighting crime and doing the greater good, which options do they chose?
Sometimes the most honourable or heroes may have to be non heroic and walk away, they may have to chose an option they don’t want too and don’t like but for them It’s about doing the right thing no matter how much vengeance or revenge is there, no matter who it is every life is equal.

Second and last rule is that they have to have either a superpower or a special talent and use it to fight a good fight, use the power/talent to try and make earth and which ever other planets they are on a better place. Fight for Truth, Justice and Honour.

I could go on and define each of my two rules more but the article is getting on a bit and we all know I can waffle so ill stop it there.

I will finish by saying the list of people I used to call a superhero has about halved.

Regards

Muldwych

For as long as their have been vampires in stories and popular culture, there have also been those who would see the undead destroyed. Vampire hunters have come in many shapes and sizes over the decades, from kick-ass men of action, to small, blonde women with superpowers, to demonic beings who may end up being just as dangerous as the very creatures they’re hunting. Then, of course, there is the greatest vampire hunter of them all. You can keep Blade and Buffy for yourself. If vampires did show up in my town, I’d want Professor Abraham Van Helsing, learned scholar, vampire expert and the arch enemy of Count Dracula himself, fighting in my corner first and foremost.

Bram Stoker’s second most famous creation (you can argue that, but you’d be wrong) may not have been the first vampire hunter the world had ever heard of, but he certainly set the template for every one which would come after. You’ll be hard pressed to find a vampire story these days which doesn’t have its very own Van Helsing figure. What else is Whistler to Blade than a modern version of Van Helsing, and in the universe of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Joss Whedon gave us an entire group of Van Helsings who worked with the Slayer in the Council of Watchers.

Surprisingly, given the number of times Dracula has appeared on screen, there haven’t been anywhere near as many actors to have portrayed the good professor, and of the ones who have, a great many of them have been awful. Christopher Plummer may be a very fine actor indeed, but his turn in Dracula 2001 was… Well, he was clearly just there for the money. Thankfully, there have also been a couple of great Van Helsings, including your favourite, Peter Cushing. Next year will also see Dario Argento bringing us Dracula 3D, featuring Rutger Hauer as Van Helsing. I like Rutger Hauer, and have a feeling that, even if the film is total crap, had I written this a year later, he would have found his way onto the list.

However, I didn’t, and so, since we have to begin somewhere…

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The misses and I took our kids to a Halloween party on Saturday where I got my picture taken with a pregnant Batman (see image, that's me on the left).

This image led on to a conversation at work today which I found quite fascinating and led me to a few questions which I thought I would share as an article with you.

My work colleague said after seeing the picture “Well it can’t really be Batman as they are pregnant and Bruce Wayne being a guy is not going to fall pregnant is he?”

I could see where they were coming from BUT I then felt compelled to start explaining the multiverse concept to them whilst simultaneously explaining Flashpoint too.

I was explaining that in flashpoint ‘The Flash (Barry Allen)’ in his attempt at saving his mother's life went back in time to stop the killer which in avertedly alters the entire course of history in the DC Universe, it changes Batman to become Thomas Wayne and not his son Bruce, it also changes The Joker to become Martha Wayne and not the guy we have known for so long, not to mention what happens to everyone else in the DC Universe like Kal-El, Aquaman, Hal and Wonder Woman to name just a few whose lives were altered by Flashpoint.

Take this into account with the multiverse (or meta-universe, metaverse) which is the hypothetical set of multiple possible universes (including the historical universe we consistently experience and mainly read about in the DC comics) that together comprise everything that exists and can exist: the entirety of space, time, matter, and energy as well as the physical laws and constants that describe them, then I think that the possibility for a pregnant Batman is there or thereabout.

The DC Multiverse consists of numerous worlds, most of them outside DC's main continuity or the DC universe where our main DC hero’s live. The first time DC used this was way back in 1953 where Wonder Woman fell through a space-time warp and encountered her other self, so tell me why couldn’t a flashpoint type scenario have happened on one of the multiverse universes, its earth 1, 2, 3, or whatever???

NOW taking all this into account AND the fact there is already a guy who gave birth to children (Thomas Beatie), granted he used to be a woman but lives his life as a man and gave birth to the children as a man (if you haven’t seen before please check Google) this leaves me with a few questions.

Could a multiverse Batman who has gone through a Flashpoint event become pregnant?

Could Batman go though a possible transgender operation on a multiverse which turns him from a man into a female that can give birth?

Could this Flashpoint type event have altered Thomas and Martha’s pregnancy which in turn then makes Bruce Wayne a she who could then become a man and give birth?

Could multiverse Bat's get a woman's womb implanted into him to carry a child?

So many questions/theories my head may explode!!!!!!!!

Time for me to finish for the week but before I go I will tell you that YES!!!! This is the stuff that goes through my head on a daily basis, so if you ever speak to my misses please say well done as she has to put up with this type of conversations on a daily basis.

Regards

Muldwych

Um... I'm supposed to write some kind of preamble to these things, but how do I do that when it's just a continuation of what I wrote on Friday? Ooh! Let's pretend it's a TV show!

Previously on Behind the Masks - Dracula...

People voted Gary Oldman and Christopher Lee as the best Dracula of all time. They were wrong about Oldman, 'cos he wasn't very good, in point of fact. The top ten currently stands like this:-

10. Gary Oldman
9. John Carradine
8. John Forbes-Robertson
7. Peter Stormare
6. Rudolf Martin

But who made the top five? And will Spider-Man and Iceman rescue Firestar? Find out... Right now!

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Vampires are shit now. No two ways about it, thanks to crap like Twilight and The Vampire Diaries, instead of the evil, sadistic, scary, blood-sucking fiends they should be, vampires are instead seen as whining emos, or sham-pires, who sparkle in the sunlight and want to love you, but can’t, so they’ll just complain about it for a while. The monster has been defanged.

Quite frankly, if Dracula, the most famous, and the greatest vampire who ever (un)lived met any of these modern pussy vampires, he’d cut their heads off for being an insult to monsters everywhere, doing each and every one of us a favour in the process.

I patiently await the day, and it has to come, when vampires are scary, evil bastards again. In the mean time, we have plenty of proper vampire stories from the past we can dive into which give us a superior breed of vampire, and many of the best of them feature Dracula.

Dracula isn’t just the best vampire ever, but he’s also one of the greatest, and most well known, figures of popular culture. He’s appeared everywhere, on screen, in print, on stage, on the radio and on, and on. There’s an almost endless list of other characters who have encountered Dracula, including King Arthur, Batman, the X-Men, Scooby Doo, Spider-Man, Buffy, Billy the Kid and, perhaps most bizarrely, Emmanuelle.

There have been so many incarnations of Dracula on the screen that it was all but impossible to whittle them down to five only. So you’re getting ten in what I refer to as a two-part Halloween Behind the Masks special! Aren’t you lucky? Aren’t I amazingly self-indulgent while Gav’s away? As with the last two weeks, on Frankenstein and his Creature, this isn’t so much a top ten, as a selection of ten Draculas worth checking out. The top three though, that’s definitely the three best Draculas ever, and in the right order. You’ll be seeing them on Monday, and anyone who disagrees with their ranking is a wrong person.

You lot voted for a number of different Draculas as your favourites, with the eventual result being a tie between Gary Oldman and Christopher Lee. As for those of you who voted for Gerard Butler (if you weren’t a woman voting for reasons of, as it was described to me, filth) and the hilarious individuals who went with Leslie Nielsen, you need to watch more Dracula films.

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Thought I would post and let everyone know that some of the best comedy on TV is BACK next week in the UK on Thursday 3 November E4 at 8PM (20:00).

Series 5 Episode 1 Brand new series -The Skank Reflex Analysis: In the opening episode of the fifth series, Penny worries that she's screwed things up with her friends after her night with Raj.

This is a whole new series so if you haven’t watched the show before here is your hop on point, no program will give you more laughs and chuckles.

I know that it’s been on US for a couple months now and a lot will have watched online but if like me you have waited the wait no more.

Geez, you go away on business for a couple of days and Marvel have the indecency to release a fully fledged teaser trailer for possibly the most anticipated comic book movie of all time; The Avengers. SO please watch the trailer and then join me after the jump for a Sidekick's view:

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In the last few months with everything that has been happening in the comic book world I have noticed something, I have noticed that as in life so many people are negative and love to put down a comic, a character or a story line much more than they will praise it or even just say it was ok.

I've come to believe that the majority of comic book fans (not me or the people I talk comics with) are looking for something to be negative with, in fact there are a few who rip into everything from Marvel and DC yet praise all from Image or Dark horse which is clearly just because they don’t see them as mainstream so must be “cool”.

These comic book fans annoy me and I don’t mind telling you that at all, they are as bad as the music Nazi’s we all know, who love an underground band until they sign a major record deal and are then suddenly sell outs and crap, even though the first album is the same songs they were singing happily along too when no one knew who they were.

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Link: http://www.secretstashcasting.com/

Would you like to be in AMC's (The Walking Dead, Breaking Bad, Mad Men) reality TV show based around Kevin Smith's comic book shop Jay & Silent Bob's Secret Stash? If the answer is yes and you live anywhere near Redbank, New Jersey here is your chance. All you need to do is go here, fill out an application, upload a photo and a youtube video and you're on your way to geek heaven. The show seems to be based around the staff and the customers who visit the store to buy and sell geeky collectibles, kind of like Cash in the Attic/Antiques Roadshow for fanboys. No doubt much of the hilarity will come from the staff in the store which includes sometimes Batman artist, co-host of Tell 'Em Steve-Dave and lifelong friend of Smith, Walt Flanagan.

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Recently, it’s been announced that Teen Titans, as part of its New 52 reboot/relaunch, will be seeing a new gay member, in the form of the awkwardly named Bunker:

Bunker, real name Miguel Jose Barragan, is also Mexican, Catholic and camper than a row of tents (at least visually, as we have yet to see him in the pages on the comic actually speaking). He creates some kind of weird purple energy/telekinetic barriers, and his homosexuality is apparently a fundamental part of his character, so it will be focused on and dealt with, whilst still showing that he is heroic and a badass new member to the team.

But wait, what was that one word I used to describe him?

Camp, flamboyant, a flamer, queeny, gayer than the day is long, out and proud and throwing his hands around in such a fashion that there’s a genuine danger they could fling off him and cause a major traffic accident.

Hell, we can see it in one of the first images shared by artist Brett Booth, where Miguel appears to dress when out of his costume in a style of fashion not a million miles away from current famous gay teen, Kurt Hummel of Glee.

Bright, colourful, and a definite statement, it’s still an improvement on his rather garish superhero costume.

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