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.

A little while ago, I covered the upcoming addition of Bunker to the Teen Titans team in this column. Now, as part of that, I mentioned how I thought it was a shame that they wouldn’t be focusing on people having negative reactions to him and his sexuality in the book, especially not from his fellow team mates.

Now, it has been asked of me why I think that’s a shame, and isn’t it better that a state of total acceptance is shown. And yes, that would be lovely in the real world, certainly. And when we get to that stage when it is the norm, then yes, we should definitely only have sexuality in comics handled as such. But sadly, that isn’t how it is in the real world. This is fiction we are talking about too, but sometimes fiction bears some powerful responsibilities in the context of the real world it’s released into.

My thoughts on this are maybe a little complicated, and I myself have been struggling to clarify it, so bear with me.

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Whatever you want to call him, there’s no doubting that Frankenstein’s Creature is one of the most iconic creations of all time, and yet it’s hard to say what the definitive image of the Creature should be. If you turn to Mary Shelley’s original novel, the Creature within is an eloquent, intelligent being, who genuinely cares for the people he considers his family, but is also full of rage and loneliness, and is capable of acts of great evil, such as the murder of Frankenstein’s young son and wife. He is described in the book as being eight feet tall, with translucent yellow skin, watery eyes, black hair and white teeth. However, when it comes to Frankenstein’s Creature on screen, there have been so many different, wildly varying versions, both in terms of the physicality of the Creature and the way in which he is portrayed as a character, that picking the five best is a tough challenge.

Yes, when you mention Frankenstein’s Creature, the image which pops into most people’s heads is that of Boris Karloff in the classic Universal Frankenstein films of the nineteen-thirties, a fact reflected in the public vote for this week, which Karloff walked (or lumbered) away with by a mile. But Karloff’s is only one interpretation of a character who has been portrayed in almost any way you care to think of. What follows here, moreso than last week’s column on Doctor Frankenstein himself, is, rather than anything claiming to be the definitive top five, merely a choice selection of five Creatures, each completely different from the last, from the funny, to the sympathetic, to the calculating, to the monstrous, to the downright bizarre.

If you read last weeks column, then many of these choices won’t come as any great surprise, but I think there may be one entry here which you won’t have seen coming.

Also, special mentions to some of the actors who were considered for the list, but didn’t quite make the cut. Dave Prowse’s turn from The Horror of Frankenstein was strongly considered for a good long while, though I surprised myself by never really giving Lon Chaney Jr or Bela Lugosi, who both played the Creature at one point or another for Universal, a shot at the top five, as their performances as the Creature, especially for two such highly regarded actors of the genre, were ultimately quite disappointing.

So, who is on the list? There’s an easy way to find out.

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There have been so many good comic book adaptation movie's released in recent years like the Ironman, Spiderman and Batman movies with more recently Green Lantern (yes I liked this film), X-Men: First Class, Captain America not to mention movies coming to our screens very soon that I am excited about like the Batman sequel ‘The Dark Knight Rises’ (2012), Spider-Man reboot ‘The Amazing Spider-Man’ (2012) and the next Superman instalment Man of Steel (2013).

Along with the movies there is has been and still are some great TV shows both Animated and Live action for example Smallville, Avengers: Earths Mightiest Heroes, Batman: Brave and the Bold and not to mention the totally brilliant Walking Dead from Robert Kirkman along with the soon to come Green Lantern Animated series.

This is fantastic for comic book fans like you and I. This got me thinking, what if I could choose which was to be made next what would I pick?

After thinking about this for a while I have chosen four that I would love to see. It would be far to big a column if I chose script writers, directors and the like so all I have done is choose the medium, the comic I would like seen transformed and lastly the main actor/actress role and who I would like to see play them.

If you have any ideas as to what you would like to see please leave a comment telling me or hit me up on twitter and let me know.

Witch Doctor - Dr Vincent Morrow played by Michael Sheen

First up is my beloved Witch Doctor, I would ABSOLUTLY LOVE this comic to be given a TV deal in the same way as Walking Dead has. Brandon Seifert could help with the writing as Kirkman has done with walking dead, it would be amazing. In the lead role of Dr Vincent Morrow I could only see one person and that one person just happens to be my favourite actor in the world Michael Sheen. He not only looks a bit like Dr Morrow but he would bring that depth to the character we see in the comic to screen so well and I think it would be a smash hit.

Aquaman – Arthur Curry played by Daniel Craig

Three films ive chosen now the first of which is Aquaman, this has been the surprise smash hit of the DC new 52 titles,I think with the right direction and making him more gritty and less comedy that the film would be amazing. Ive put Daniel Craig in the role here as I think for a less comedy approach he would be great.

Animal Man – Bernhard "Buddy" Baker played by Ewan McGregor

Another DC new title here and another male, Animal Man has been one of the best received comics of the relaunch and if there was ever a time to capitalise on this with a movie its now. Ive chosen a Welshman for Witchdoctor, an Englishman for Aquaman and now a Scotsman for Animal Man, step forward Ewan McGregor, not only an amazing actor but a Jedi too how could this possibly fail.

Suicide Squad – Harley Quinn played by Zooey Deschanel

Ok lastly is another DC title and to be perfectly honest ive chosen suicide squad with Zooey Deschanel just because I would love to see her in the new Harley Quinn outfit, I am a red blooded straight male what can I say. I do though, firmly believe that she would great in the role, she has a real cheekiness about her and is not a waif like so many actresses that I could totally see her in the sexy uniform swinging a big hammer about.

This may not seem entirely comics related, but hey, it’s my column, so shut up, bear with me, and we’ll see where this goes.

This week sees Heroes and Star Trek actor Zachary Quinto come out of a frankly transparent closet and announce to the world that yes, he is gay after all; to which the world replied with a collective “Well, duh, but thanks for finally being open with us anyway.” Now, I by no means mean to belittle his statements, nor do I feel any ire at him for taking so long. I can understand the situation he was in. However, I do heartily commend him on making this move of being open and letting the world know another member of the LGBTQ community is out there, and is someone they’ve welcomed into their homes and Cineplex’s with joy.

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