Markup View

Author: Hodor

Jul 31st 2014 at 12:41:31 PM

*Literature/TheCountOfMonteCristo has a pretty good claim for being a proto-hero as well as an inspiration for Batman.  He's a brooding loner bent on revenge who is [[Fiction500 massively wealthy]], a MasterOfDisguise, and has [[CharlesAtlasSuperpower picked up immense physical prowess along the way]]. The Batman villain Bane, who is an EvilCounterpart of Batman, has a backstory based off of that of Dantes/The Count.

^^ This novel ''Literature/SnowInAugust'' talks about that issue as well.  The protagonist, a young boy, is a big comic book reader, and the Rabbi he befriends compares the Golem story (which is a big part of the novel) to superheroes.  IIRC, one specific comparision is to ''ComicBook/Shazam'', and how his ByThePowerOfGreyskull thing is very similar to this "magic of names" thing in the Golem story (the Golem has the word EMET- the Hebrew word for Truth on his forehead and is alive because of that, and can only be shut down by erasing one letter, so instead the inscription is MET- Death in Hebrew)