Markup View

Author: IndirectActiveTransport

Aug 15th 2014 at 12:15:02 PM

Beowulf maybe. He came to fight monsters and defeated a dragon, and didn't do it purely for his own gain. Gilgamesh no. He defended his city from a bull but this was the same city he ruled in tyranny and he sought immortality for pure personal gain.

Heracles no. Well, he's a better case than Gilgamesh in that he did set out to solve people's problems and sort of did so out of the goodness of his heart, but I really don't buy it. His story doesn't resemble a superheroes at all, except maybe the Argonauts being a {{super team}}(eh not really. Medea did all the work, Heracles ran away crying about his dead boyfriend)

Of course I don't consider any character who isn't an outright villain to be a superhero just because they have superpowers. I don't consider Comicbook/TheIncredibleHulk or Comicbook/GhostRider to be superheroes even if they are characters in a world full of superheroes, and frequent participants in a superhero genre story. Well, you could make cases for the versions of Hulk and Ghost Rider that have ''control'', such as "the professor", otherwise one is an atomic rage monster who is too dumb to be truly malicious and the other is a vengeance monster that cares more about burning souls than protecting people or solving societal problems.

Vishwamitra had super powers and was mostly good, but I wouldn't call that wandering sage a superhero. ''Maybe'' Ram but I'm still iffy. I think the idea of if the audience was ever supposed to believed the individual really existed is a good point to cutoff "proto superhero". After all, the Ramayana was written long before Nyctalope, yet it's the French tale that's called the earliest literary example of the superhero genre, not the sanskrit one. I'd leave the sacred text and mythology off this one. I wouldn't use Robinhood either. He may not have been of any religious significance but people did believe he existed (he kind of did) and did not start telling stories of him to make a buck on the market.