MARTIN: And I can hear that, by the way, that for people who are wondering what that sound is, you're both in costume now right? I mean, Phoenix was telling his story, but why do you wear a costume? Well, tell me about the costume in your case. We didn't do anything more than 30 years ago what a normal citizen would've done, but it took to dress up in costume to get people's attention to the problems at hand. We would hand out flyers for missing persons. And like Phoenix Jones, I saw apathy.Īnd so I teamed up with a gentleman who was already there, called Captain Prospect, and we would do patrols. They were waiting for somebody else to come in. They were waiting for the police to do it. And what I noticed was everybody wanted somebody else to do it. There's a lot of very bad crime areas in Washington, D.C. MARTIN: And so what do you do? Do you patrol? What do you do?ĭC's GUARDIAN: Well, actually, in Washington, D.C., I would patrol around the National Mall, behind the Capitol area. I was associated with the RLSH, and I decided that if I'm going to be associated, I was going to take an active role in it. But my role with the RLSH, or the Real Life Super Heroes, began when my name started to get out. And that led to the creation of Skiffytown League of Heroes. How about DC, what about you? How did this get started for you?ĭC's GUARDIAN: There was a show several years ago called "Who Wants to be a Superhero?" And I was asked to try out for it, because I was a comic book geek, if you couldn't tell. And that's kind of how Phoenix Jones was born right there, but it was originally from the break-in, is where I got the mask. And the police showed up, and they were able to arrest him. So I opened up my glove box to call 9-1-1 to get my phone out and saw the mask, put on the mask and kind of made a commotion and chased the person a little bit. And I didn't want to just walk up and be, like, hey, you shouldn't do that, because I knew people would see my face. And a friend of mine gets assaulted outside the bar.Īnd there's about 70 people watching, and the guy who did it had a whole lot of friends there. And a couple weeks later, I'm at a bar doing what I normally do, driving people to the bar, dropping them off and waiting for them. JONES: You know, I know that sounds like a large leap, but what happened is I'm cleaning my car up from the glass, and I found a rock inside a mask that they had used to smash my window. MARTIN: But, wait, how did you go from that story, which a lot of people, I think, can relate to - which is a terrible story, by the way, and I'm sorry that happened to you - to wearing a costume and deciding you were going to actually do patrols? And it wasn't till I was able to get help another way that we were able to get help, and it really disturbed me. And I said why? He said, it'll ruin my YouTube clip. And I'm trying to stop the bleeding, and I see a guy run across the street with a camera phone. And his knee is cut open, and he's bleeding really badly. And we leave and we were running back to my car, and he falls in this glass right by my car because someone had broken in my car and broke the window.
And we were at Wild Waves, and we were playing in the water. You know, a little time went by, and I had a son. My face was pretty out there, and I didn't feel very comfortable. After I'd been breaking up bar fights for a little bit, I stopped because people started recognizing me. JONES: I used to do a - like, a little bar patrol where I drop people off at the bar, and then since I was already going to have to wait for them, I decided to break up bar fights. So, Phoenix, why don't you start? How did you get started on this? But I do think people would like to know how this got started. You don't like to put the focus on your individual identities.
MARTIN: Now, I understand that each of you doesn't like to talk about your other lives very much. PHOENIX JONES (Superhero): Well, thank you, ma'am.
But he happens to be on the West Coast today, where we caught up with him. And DC's Guardian is based in our nation's capital, as you might expect from the name. Phoenix Jones is from Seattle, Washington. We've invited two so-called superheroes to talk about what they do and why they do it. And you can see where this might sound a bit strange. They are a group of people, adults, who aren't just fantasizing about being superheroes, they're actually taking on the personas. They call themselves Real Life Superheroes. Now we talk about an effort to bring superheroes to your neighborhood. But first, we just heard about the revival of the Black Panther comic book hero. I'm Michel Martin, and this is TELL ME MORE, from NPR News.Ĭoming up, my weekly Can I Just Tell You commentary.
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