Superhero groups in spotlight

Associated Press

SEATTLE

Fabio Heuring was standing outside a Seattle nightclub on a Saturday night and smoking cigarettes with a friend when a man bolting from a bouncer ran into them. The enraged man ripped off his shirt in the middle of the street and prepared to give Heuring’s buddy a beating.

Just then, in swooped a bizarre sight: a self- proclaimed superhero in a black mask and matching muscle-suit. He doused the aggressor with pepper spray, much to Heuring’s shocked relief.

A couple of hours later, though, the superhero ended up in jail for investigation of assault after using those tactics on another group of club-goers, sending pangs of anxiety through the small, eccentric and mostly anonymous community of masked crime-fighters across the U.S.

The comic-book-inspired patrolling of city streets by “real-life superheroes” has been getting more popular in recent years, thanks largely to mainstream attention in movies such as last year’s “Kick-Ass” and the recent HBO documentary “Superheroes.” And as the ranks of the masked, caped and sometimes bulletproof-vested avengers swell, many fret that even well-intentioned vigilantes risk hurting themselves, the public and the movement if they’re as aggressive as the crime-fighter in Seattle.

Some have gone so far as to propose a sanctioning body to ensure that high superhero standards are maintained.

“The movement has grown majorly,” said Edward Stinson, a writer from Boca Raton, Fla., who advises real-life super- heroes on a website devoted to the cause. “What I tell these guys is, ‘You’re no longer in the shadows. You’re in a new era. ... Build trust. Set standards. Make the real-life superheroes work to earn that title, and take some kind of oath.’”

It’s not clear how many costumed vigilantes there are in the U.S. The website www.reallifesuperheroes.org lists 660 members around the world. They range from members of the New York Initiative in New York City and the Shadow Corp in Saginaw, Mich., to a character named Nightbow who says he has patrolled the streets of Carlisle, England, for three years.

Some take on their fictional identities while doing charity work.

Benjamin Fodor, better known as Phoenix Jones, is the most prominent face of the Rain City Superhero Movement, a collection of vigilantes who appeared in Seattle over the past year.

Many in the vigilante community point to Fodor’s arrest as a watershed moment: As more people — often, young people — fashion themselves into superheroes, they risk finding themselves in similar situations where they wind up hurting innocent members of the public or being shot, stabbed or beaten themselves. Such negative attention could doom the movement, they say.