Superhero Impact on You

So tell me Sup Forums, what positive impact have superhero stories had on you? They don't all have to be as dramatic as pic related, but maybe they motivated you to get in shape or try something new? Has this hobby of yours had any positive impact on your life?

>Has this hobby of yours had any positive impact on your life?

No.

I tried superheroes once

now I'm a faggot

Ok fair enough.

I was hoping for an actual response, but that's fine. If there is no impact, then I understand, but if has had a NEGATIVE impact, then sure, why not say what it did. Let's expand the list. I forgot, it's hard to be happy here.

After reading comics for a few years, I've now developed a love of shitposting
I've also browsed Sup Forums a lot in that time, but I doubt that was the catalyst
It was probably comics

When I was a kid I was neglected by my single mother who moved my sister and I in with a sociopath narcissistic so called step dad on an acreage. My room was a bed in the basement made out of plywood over a constantly running sump pump (that's a water pump that flows sewage through it) my "walls" were my old Batman bed sheets hung up around the bed to make it appear like I had a room with walls. Everyday I was constantly harassed and abused while my mom did nothing, my sister was old enough to drive so she was never home to defend me. I was alone and afraid, often depressed and felt worthless. The only thing that kept me going was was reading my moms old comics (spider-man, Batman, the crow, random dark horse stuff) watching whatever comic book related things I taped on VHS or my mom picked up from goodwill, but really it was looking at those fucking Batman bed sheets and thinking about how he preserved through his bad day to become something great. I never gave up and never will. For that I have the man I've always seen as a positive influence on my life to thank for that. The god damn Batman. It made me who I am today, instead of becoming like the asshole who abused me I became someone who never turns anyone down and has helped numerous people get back onto the right track in life.

That's actually really great to hear man. I'm sorry about what happened to you, but it's good to hear you turned that around into something that helps others. Seems like you kind of became a real life Batman.

What kind of work/volunteering do you do that helps pull others onto the right track? Counselor? Social Worker?

Are you Gwenpool?

Comics as whole has for sure, I am not sure I can peg any of it on super heroes


I have met a lot of amazing people through comics.

I normal Cruise the streets looking for people to help, for instance this one time I go into a gas station late at night with my buddy who I took in and was living with me at the time. A man (his name is sunny) is yelling at the cashier (we'll call him apu) they are both middle eastern. They both immediately start telling me not to trust the other and I'm confused as fuck. I decided it wasn't my business and just wanted my smokes. I purchase them as two very intoxicated girls come in. Apu tells them not to trust sunny and that he's a "fucking killer" etc etc. I'm about to head out when one of the girls turns to him and tells him to get the fuck out of the country and all sorts of racial slurs. I was half way out when I turned around and start to get involved. I asked sunny why he was being accused of being a killer. Turns out he was there for two hours because his car broke down and none of his friends would help him. I decided fuck it I'll give you a ride and told the girls/Apu to fuck off and show some respect. Sunny gets in my truck with my buddy and I, we then set off to take him home. I asked what the hell happened. He said he met a native girl on PoF and was going to take her on a pizza date. His car fucking breaks down on the way so he walks there. Once there she comes out with her mom and kids. She's acting like a bitch like, where's your car etc etc, calls him deadbeat. He says fuck it. Tries walking home but it's winter so he gets as far the gas station and decides to call his friends. None answer. Two hours pass and we meet. After dropping him off he gave me his number and invited me for soup. I still haven't messaged him.

I've also helped out complete strangers who fall on hard times and saved a girl from a meth dealing pimp. I've got stories if you've got time.

That's great too. LCS or at like comic-cons?


You know, let me throw mine in there. I appreciate comics because they made me want to exercise, so I could look like Spider-Man, as stupid as that sounds. It's a personal thing, so I don't tell any of my friends I exercise, and only my immediate family knows (since I am living with them), but it makes me feel good. It's help give me a bit more confidence. I am nothing like this guybut now if I see a situation, I try to be more proactive about it, and at least see what's going on and if anyone needs help. Try to overcome that bystander effect.

I can't speak for anyone else, but if you type the stories, I promise I'll read it.

Alright so back when I lived with my mom about two years ago, this is years after we got away from the shithead who abused me. I had a military family who lived next to us. They were good quiet neighbors. However the youngest daughter had no respect and was heavily into drugs, she was 14 at the time. She often would run away and I'd hear yelling sometimes. One day she runs away and I came home to find her mother and step dad crying outside. I asked what was wrong and they told me she was on a drug bender with someone who was pimping her out. They had no clue where she was. Like the detective I pretend to be I promised them I'd get her home. Using facebook, multiple accounts and manipulating a string of people I made her get so angry she called her house to tell them to fuck off and for me to leave her alone. Well she used a land-line and the dad had cop friends who traced it back to an address. He went and picked her up then had an intervention for her which he had me attend. I talked to her and told her about my childhood friend who fell into some pretty serious drugs and how it hurts those close to you, long story short she moved back with her real dad and is doing much better now, hopefully she'll be finishing high school in a few years. I believe she wants to become a life coach now and hasn't used anything harder than weed in a while. She still hates me though.

Really? After all that she still hates you? Give it time. If she stays on track, maybe she will look back and realize you saved her from a bad path. Even if not, well I guess that's the price of being Batman.

If you got more stories, I really feel like you should toss on a trip like GDBatman or something. I'm liking these stories.

JMS' and Zeb Wells' Spider-Man stories distracted me from my terrible intrusive thoughts and gave me some short-living moments of peace before I went on medication for OCD. Does that count?

Of course it does. What thoughts are caused by the OCD?

The shit like "if you don't whatever the brain tells you someone you love dies" or just simple imagery of bad things happening.
I know it's not real and if I don't do anything nothing will happen, but the brain does a good job at making it feel real enough to not try to resist.

That sounds like hell man, I'm sorry. Do the meds help?

I credit reading Daredevil: Born Again with helping me get through a severe depressive episode in college.

I learned that life hurts a lot of times, but nothing about just laying down and despairing about it will change any of it. And also being with people who care about you makes it hurt a little less.

That's good to hear. I work in a lab and we were doing depression research, and a lot of the people just felt lost, so it's good you had something to anchor you and help move forward.

It's still there, but it's much better than during my teenage years.

Yeah that was about four years back, I was panicking hard about graduating with a degree I had no clue what to do with, and just dealing with a really poor self-image. More than senioritis for my last semester, it was just that I feel like even though I was finishing college, I still failed at everything and was never going to make anything of myself.

Took me a bit, but I finally figured that even if I didn't think I was worth it, I still wanted to live up to other peoples' expectations of me and at least try to make other people's lives less shitty. Superheroes don't mean much unless people can see the ideals they represent played out in their own lives.

That trade volume of Born Again has since gone missing since I lent it to a friend who moved to the other side of the country and I lost contact with. I hope it's helping him out though.

That's good to hear it has gotten better. Do comics still provide occassional relief?

I actually have/had a similar issue, though not as extreme. did you find work that you enjoyed?

What have superheroes done for me?

Alright, so as a kid, I was into the X-Men and because my parents took me to see it when it first came out, Iron Man. I started by reading the classic volumes because I wanted to start at the beginning of the story.

Anyway, my expose to superheroes before this was the Justice League cartoon. So, to me, Superheroes were these infallible good guys who always did the right thing no matter what. I mean, they were awesome, but at the same time, I couldn't really empathize with them.

To give context as to why I couldn't empathize with them, I was a fuck up as a kid. Bullied like all hell, ignored by the teachers, had a higher intelligence then most kids my age but I was never encourage to do anything and anger problems. Approaching my teens, I was just about ready to commit suicide and tried on a couple of occasions, first was a miserable attempt at cutting and a hanging that I chickened out of.

Then along come these two characters, Scott Summers and Tony Stark. Those guys were flawed as fuck. Tony was an absolute mess as he tried to juggle his personal life and his responsibilities as Iron Man, eventually leading to him making some pretty shitty decisions and having things back fire on him spectacularly.

Meanwhile, reading X-Men, particularly from the Claremont-Era, Scott was not any better. He had to juggle being a hero and suffered through so much shit. He lost the woman he loved, friends, family and all the works.

Yet, the thing that drew me to these characters was that at the end of the day, both of them did what they believed was right. Sure, Tony took a while longer than Scott sometimes, but at the end of the day, they both did what was right. Even after everything it cost them, they did what was right.

To me, that was inspirational. It said that I didn't have to perfect to be good. What I had to do was try and if I maintained course, that might be enough.

Only old capes and non-capes. I can't stand modern cape comics, although there are exceptions.

>did you find work that you enjoyed?

Not so much as I found work that keeps me busy and interacting with other people. It's when I spend long stretches of time on my own without social interaction that things get worse. The longer I stay cooped up in my own head, or don't have anyone to hold myself responsible too, the more self-destructive patterns I tend to fall in.

Thanks, most of the people I help often times turn their backs on me. But I keep an eye on them and so long as they stay on that good path it's worth it. I'm working on becoming a PI for a while then I'd like to write comics that'd hopefully inspire people, then I'd like to open some charities and community centers in hopes of going full Batman/Bruce Wayne. It's just on bad my bank account is more like Peter Parker's. Now time for the tale about the joker/hush in my life
His name will be Mark for the story. Now mark and I met back in grade one, he ran up to me and shit you not said, "you farted" I then said no you did, he replied wanna be best friends? From that day forth we've been best friends, well up until roughly three or four years ago. In grade four his dad killed himself, in grade 5 his mom met his step dad (lots of step dads I know, but in Alberta that's normal) they then move from Shitty legal (small town) to Shitty Edmonton (big crime infested city, in fact they have the most murders in Canada almost every year) they are roughly an hour apart so I no longer got to see him. In grade 7 I moved to Edmonton after my mom left corporal cocksucker. We were back together again and it was like we were never separated. We hungout all the time, well until mid grade nine after my mom married yet again another loser. I couldn't hangout as much because I often had to take care of my younger siblings (one was corporal cocksuckers kid the other was the new fucking losers kid [more on him later]) at the end of grade 9 mark started to fall onto a dark path and started exploring with drugs. Grade ten rolled around, he and I went to two different high schools. He fell in with a bad crowd and his mom kicked him out. He started couch surfing the and still is to this day. I went through a really bad break up mid grade 11 and lost all my "friends" we started hanging out again and boy did I meet some his interesting "friends" continued in part 2

Part two
So my mom was diagnosed with fibromyalgia, around the beginning of grade 12 I stopped hanging out with Mark because my loser step dad left her because he didn't want a disabled wife. So I dropped out of school to get a job at Walmart to help pay bills and did all I could to watch after my siblings. A year passes and I move to another city to work for my uncles landscaping business, I would send her money and after the summer I came back. Meanwhile mark started to mix drugs like adderall and MDMA. Any sanity that he had left was slowly waning away. I worked at dulux paints for about a year and half when I got back and rarely could hang with Mark, when I did he was almost always fucked up. Within this time Mark was in and out of mental institutions for his bi polar issues. The worse time was when he thought he became a BBQ and started humping a window. They locked him up. But this fucker doesn't ever stop. He broke out of the first room, so they kept putting him in more restraints and more rooms which he kept escaping until finally they put him in a fully body restraint in a room. He then proceeded to do the only thing he could, he jacked himself off used the jizz to slide his hand out and free himself. They then drugged him up and through him in the loony bin for a few months. Time passes my mom was better so I moved away, I guess mark took it hard and started using meth and lsd at the same time. Continued in part 3

What are the exceptions?

Yeah. It is good to be alone occasionally, but to be isolated for long stretches can do some harm. I remember with the book Frankenstein, the whole theme was that isolation from humanity can lead a person down a dark path. Same goes with depression. It's why having a support group is so important. It's why women tend to fair better with depression than men. They typically have that support group, and can thus mitigate the symptoms of depression better.

I'm reading/waiting for part 2.

Ellis' Moon Knight and Nu52 All-Star Western come to mind.

Haven't read All-Star Western, but I am with you on Moon Knight. He is just a fun character to watch.

Part 3
Sorry if this isn't perfect I'm typing fast and not really proof reading
So fast forward to then end of last year. I worked all year landscaping and now had the winter off. I then took in mark and my buddy from the sunny story. I was trying to help mark quit and get into rehab but no matter how hard I tried he kept going back to meth. Shortly after new year's my sister was due with her 3rd child and would need some help at home, so I volunteered to help her and take mark to rehab in Edmonton. Well things fell through and in this awkward attempt to help him, my sister, my drug addicted ex girlfriend and her homeless friend (I call him my Jason Todd, the one I failed) I was unable to stop him from getting worse. Eventually March rolled around and I was done, my knight fall asleep had happened. I was broken. I couldn't even help myself at that point so I left for Calgary to prepare for my next season of landscaping. Mark went to jail after. Two months pass he's out again two weeks pass and he's back, he just got out two weeks ago and hasn't talked to me since. He's completely out of his mind now and acts like a complete fool. Convinced the government and the Illuminati are out to get him because he's a self proclaimed indigo child he lives in a world of illusion. Post videos of himself acting incredibly strange on facebook twirling lighters and ranting about the strangest shit he claims the happiest we'll be together is when the bombs fall and all that's left is him, the cockroaches and I.

So Mark has pretty much fried himself out from all the drug use?

And what exactly happened to Jason Todd? Did his habits just get extremely bad?

Jason is a really neat kid. A fantastic musician who's parents turned their backs on him after they found out he was gay. He was homeless for a while and lived with numerous different people but after both him and my addict ex got kicked out he had nothing. I took him under my wing, I was teaching him how to drive, was going to get him a real job, let him live with me and would even do fun things with him like shows and bar karaoke. But one day he missed work and was fired as a result of me ignoring a call for my drug addicted ex and not taking him to work which was in the next town over. He went on a drinking bender for a week stopped talking to me and all his friends, he moved into a shoddy drug house with a bunch of grungy punk crust kids. I really wanted to see him succeed and I regret it all the time. He's doing a bit better now and sometimes I get to see him. But he's very unambitious now and has no goals in life. He also refuses my help now.

Shit man. Just one bad day, and it all went this bad? You can't save everyone all the time. The fact that you took him in and tried to get him on his feet was more than most anyone would ever try to do. Sometimes life just takes it's own path, for better or worse.

This. I won't attempt to compare my past to yours, and in all honesty though there were plenty of things in my own life to be miserable about, I daresay yours was a much tougher trial than mine.

Nevertheless, the distinctly Batman "hope and justice through gritted teeth" style of courage really resonated with me and it's this kind of mentality that pulled me through a lot of tough spots in life. It gave me the will to keep going and refuse to let past injustice limit me. Considering his own history and the state of his city, the path of an anti-hero seems much more reasonable. This is why it is so inspiring to see Batman as a character ti refuse that path and choose instead, in spite of everything, righteousness. Batman is not just about "doing the right thing". Batman isn't just about "doing the right thing when it's hard". Batman is about choosing to do the right thing even when you're bruised and bleeding and this "right thing" may be the last thing you'll ever do.

Yeah, I agree with you. Perseverance is admirable, and characters that have that as a defining character trait are attractive, and we want to see that in ourselves.

I think I developed a nervous tick growing up because I read too much fucking spider-man.

I'm almost always talking shit and cracking jokes because I constantly put myself in stressful situations where I'm incredibly nervous as fuck.

It really helps me feel like I'm in control and helps keep me centered and focused.

I guess it also doesn't help that I have my fair share of parker luck too.

What kind of stressful situations are we talking about here?

Shit, I have the same big problem, too bad I have no one to talk. I just hope it goes away and I can be a decent person

You could always turn your head to the internet, if you need to vent.

Careful now, identifying with a character too much can get really creepy.
And not just for the people who have to put up with you, for you too.

I fell in love almost instantly with Dick Grayson. The way he moved. The way he smiled. His calmness through almost everything. I've become for active because of nightwing. Even though my expectations might be high because of him. But they keep me going. That'd be it oddly. It's weird.

>I've become for active
What does this mean?

More** my bad. More active. I wasn't lazy. But I took it to a new level.

They're literally one of the main reasons I haven't killed myself.

Batman and booze are good enough for me to not say "good bye cruel world".

This just made me tear up user.