1: Out of the Shadows

We were getting where we couldn't pay the bill.

PG&E asked customers about their biggest concerns so we could address them one by one.

That's terrifying.

That's fair.

Joe, Regional Vice President, PG&E.

We have to run the business in a way that keeps people safe, but it starts driving costs down.

I would love to see that.

We're on our way.

I hope so.

PG&E electricity rates are now lower than they were last year.

Hear what other customers have to say and what PG&E is doing about it at pge.com slash open dash lines. Something unexpected happened after Jeremy Scott confessed to killing Michelle Schofield in Bone Valley Season 1.
Every time I hear about my dad is, oh, he's a killer. He's just straight evil.
I was becoming the bridge between Jeremy

Scott and the son he'd never known.

At the end of the day, I'm literally a son

of a killer. Listen to new

episodes of Bone Valley Season 2

starting April 9th on the iHeartRadio

app, Apple Podcasts,

or wherever you get your podcasts.

Novel.

One night in 2011, a guy named Dan was walking through a parking lot in downtown Seattle when he came upon a menacing-looking dude trying to break into a car.

Dan pulled out his phone to call 911.

But before he could reach the police,

something totally insane happened.

From the right, this guy comes dashing in

wearing this skin-tight, rubber, black and golden suit, and starts chasing him away.

Dan isn't the only one to have a chance encounter like this.

Around 2009, the rumors started to spread.

Stories of a masked vigilante jumping

out of the shadows to help the citizens of Seattle. People kept seeing this masked man

patrolling the streets at night. One person said he stopped a mugging.
Someone else caught a glimpse

of him sprinting through the back streets downtown. Rumor had it he even stopped a terrorist attack.

The accounts all said he was tall and pretty ripped.

He wore a hooded rubber mask that covered his eyes like the Batman cowl.

He had black gloves and a black chest plate molded into a six-pack

with a gold chevron across the chest and an American flag on his bicep.

When Dan tried to tell his friends about what happened the night he witnessed the attempted car break-in, they were skeptical. People are saying, no way, dude.
No way. They're like, oh, you were probably drunk.
But Dan wasn't drunk. Well, maybe he was.
But what he saw was real. The rumors were true.
There was a dark night out there patrolling the streets of Seattle, and he called himself Phoenix Jones. An ordinary citizen becomes a Dark Knight known as Phoenix Jones.
Self-appointed crusader, Phoenix Jones. Phoenix Jones.
Phoenix Jones. Phoenix Jones.
Phoenix Jones, a real-life superhero. Superman can fly, Batman has his gadgets, Spider-Man has his webs and super sharp senses, and then there's Phoenix Jones.
Maybe not quite Superman, but an extraordinary one. Real-life superheroes are people who, inspired by comic book characters, create their own superhero persona, make their own costume, sometimes weapons, and then head out into the streets to fight crime in the real world.
And Phoenix Jones, at his peak, was the most famous of all the real-life superheroes. His goal was to strike fear into the hearts of Seattle's criminals.
But in 2020, it was Phoenix who was led away in handcuffs, caught with four grams of suspected cocaine. So how did Seattle's greatest independent crime fighter end up getting busted on drug charges? Well, it depends on who you believe.

Phoenix says he's the victim of a corrupt and ineffective police department that snagged him

in a classic case of entrapment. And the police, well, they have their own version of the story.

So what exactly is real in the world of real-life superheroes?

Is Phoenix Jones a shining example of a brave citizen fighting for justice? Or is he a misguided vigilante who used a superhero persona to disguise his own criminal activity? I'm going to take you inside the world of real-life superheroes as I try to answer these questions. Along the way, there will be danger and heartbreak, friendship and betrayal, and of course all the elements you would find in any story about criminals.
Drugs and violence, and a good chase scene here and there. And maybe, if you're like me, you'll come out on the other side of this adventure with a deeper understanding of these people, who are often treated as a joke.
Going into this story, I never thought I would identify with the type of person who puts on a homemade suit and claims to be a superhero. It's hard to take someone like that seriously.
It's much easier to dismiss them as crazy or naive. But now that I've gotten to know some of the men and women who call themselves real-life superheroes,

I'm starting to think maybe it's the other way around.

Maybe we should question our beliefs about who the real heroes are.

I'm David Weinberg, and from the teams at Novel and iHeartRadio,

this is The Superhero Complex, episode one, Out of the Shadows. I can only imagine what it must have been like for those lucky few people in the midst of distress who were suddenly saved by a real-life superhero.
And just like in the movies, the police and the citizens of Seattle wanted to know, who is this masked crusader chasing down bad guys in the streets? Phoenix broke up a brawl, one of the guys turned on him. Phoenix called 911, put the guy in a hold and waited for police to arrive.
What the police saw when they arrived was a guy who looked a lot like Batman. Phoenix clearly put a lot of work into his costume.
By the way, he hates it when you call his superhero getup a costume. I find it offensive.
Like, ridiculous. Phoenix prefers the term super suit.
It's bulletproof. It can't be lit on fire.
It has a heart sensor monitor in it. It's connected to fucking Wi-Fi.
If someone calls Phoenix, it connects to a headset in his helmet. My suit does its job.
It's made of D3O, non-Newtonian fluid. That means it's soft to touch, but it gets harder when you hit it with force.
My suit is so awesome that the government of Seattle said I couldn't wear it anymore because it gave me too much protection if they decided they wanted to fucking get me. Before long, Phoenix became a local celebrity.
Several nights a week, he carried out patrols of downtown Seattle, where he'd searched for criminals to apprehend or those in need.

And people came up to him and asked for photos.

Reporters flew in from all over the world to interview him.

Writer and broadcaster John Ronson even did a profile of him for GQ.

Phoenix said, we'll go to Belltown to break up a gang of crack dealers.

There was about five or six different groups of crack dealers on different street corners. And they came back and walked towards us.
And Phoenix said, are we standing? Are we leaving? And they all said, we're standing. It helped that Phoenix had something the other superheroes in the comic books didn't.

His own media strategy.

He filmed his exploits and posted the videos online.

He even added his own commentary.

All douchebags depicted in these videos are innocent until proven guilty in a court of law.

One thing's for sure, it's fun as hell to watch videos of Phoenix taking down bad guys.

One of my favorites is a video titled Phoenix Jones vs. Helicopter Dick, which is a surprisingly accurate description of what went down that night.
Phoenix rolls up to a bar where something bad is clearly going down. According to a caption on the video, a guy has exposed himself to some women at the bar and then attacked a bouncer.
And Phoenix is talking to the bouncer. While they're chatting, the suspect appears, pulls his dick out again, and starts twirling it while yelling helicopter dick.
Phoenix rushes over and grabs the guy by the ear like an angry father disciplining his kid and drags him down the sidewalk until someone steps in and pulls them apart. But Helicopter Dick, who's clearly drunk, lunges at Phoenix.
Phoenix takes a step back and says to the guy, if you do that again, I will pepper spray. Eventually, the police come and cuff propeller penis and load him into the back of a squad car while Phoenix has a quick quick chat with one of the officers, telling him that he has the whole thing on video and can hand it over to them for evidence.
Phoenix says, when you start showing your junk to girls, that's a different kind of sick, and you end up in a police car. He signs off with his signature phrase, have a good night, and I'll see you in the streets.
See you in the streets. Not all the videos that Phoenix posts are about crime fighting.
Sometimes he makes videos hyping himself up. You want to blaze? Nah, man, I'm already blazing.
Blazing attractive, son. Wow.
Got my gold spangly boots on. How could you beat that? Well, I wasn't going to say it, but yeah.
Man, seriously, I make Elton John look straight right now gets vulnerable I want to be a superhero my whole life the first year fighting crime I was arrested I've been shot I've been stabbed so many bad things happen to me for something that I believed in and this is real as it as it gets. He buys ice cream for kids.

The ice cream shucks showed up in my neighborhood, so I bought all the kids ice cream because I'm rich now so I can do crazy things. And even if he is the self-proclaimed greatest living superhero and a model of perfection, he still likes to sing in the car like us mortals.
Superman got nothing on me.

I'm only one.

Call away. And it seems that being a superhero comes with perks.
He's landed several sponsorship deals with local health and fitness brands. After a hard workout, there's pretty much only one thing that your boy needs.
And thank God they gave me

the secret sauce. Epic smoothie, babe.
He even got invited on a press tour to England to promote

a new model of cell phone. Phoenix became a sensation.
He seemed to tap into people's

mistrust of the institutions that are supposed to keep us safe. But long before his drug charges, Phoenix Jones was not popular with Seattle's law enforcement.
In one video, Phoenix comes across a bartender on the street who says a guy assaulted him. Phoenix sees the suspect in a bloody shirt outside the bar.
Don't touch me, man. Hey.
Don't touch me. Watch behind you, watch behind you.
Don't touch me. Hey, give me a 911 call, please.
Thank you. A chase ensues.
Come on, let's go. Let's go.
The suspect hides in the back of a truck, and Phoenix and his sidekick pretend that they don't know where he is while they call the police. 911, I have your call again.
But when the police arrive on the scene, they seem more pissed off at Phoenix than the alleged criminal. Excuse me, ma'am.
Um, can I talk to you for a second? to you for a second? Phoenix tells the police he has video that would be useful evidence. But we have to give you a statement in our video and...
They don't seem interested. Well, could I have an incident number, though, please? Because I'd like to file all my stuff.
No, this isn't gonna work. The video stops.
Text appears on the screen, which criticizes the Seattle police for their incompetence and says that Phoenix is going to file a formal complaint. It ends, quote, It is the job of the police to arrest and investigate suspected criminals.
Your feelings about my protective outfit and your politics should not impair your legal obligation to the people. Sincerely, Phoenix Jones.
This scenario plays out time and time again on Phoenix's YouTube channel. Whenever he encounters a criminal, he detains them, calls 911, and waits for the police to arrive on the scene.
The same police that he says are out to get him. I've been arrested 118 times.
I've only had four charges ever stick, and none of the charges of Phoenix Jones have ever stuck because I'm flawless at that job. The police have repeatedly told Phoenix to leave the crime fighting to them.
Unless you are the victim of a crime, you are not allowed to corner somebody, hold somebody.

You cannot do that because then it becomes a crime where you are the suspect.

And they have also taken to the media to discourage copycat superheroes.

Police say it's not illegal to dress up in costume and patrol, but they're asking the superheroes to just call 911. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the dislike between the police and Phoenix is mutual.
The police are just a gang, man. I mean, I hate to be like that, but they're a gang.
And people are going to get mad at me for this, but that's because you're stupid. As Phoenix got more famous, the tension between him and the police escalated.
When it finally boiled over, it spilled out of the superhero world and into his civilian life with disastrous consequences. But we'll get to all that later.
First, we've got to meet Phoenix's superhero ancestors. That's coming up.
We were getting where we couldn't pay the bill. PG&E asked customers about their biggest concerns so we could address them one by one.
That's terrifying. That's fair.
Joe, Regional Vice President, PG&E. We have to run the business in a way that keeps people safe, but it starts driving costs down.
I would love to see that. We're on our way.
I hope so. PG&E electricity rates are now lower than they were last year.
Hear what other customers have to say and what PG&E is doing about it at pge.com slash open dash lines. Something unexpected happened after Jeremy Scott confessed to killing Michelle Schofield in Bone Valley Season 1.
I just knew him as a kid. Long, silent voices from his past came forward.
And he was just staring at me. And they had secrets of their own to share.
Gilbert King. I'm the son of Jeremy Lynn Scott.
I was no longer just telling the story. I was part of it.
Every time I hear about my dad, it's, oh, he's a killer. He's just straight evil.
I was becoming the bridge between a killer and the son he'd never known. If the cops and everything would have done their job properly, my dad would have been in jail.
I would have never existed. I never expected to find myself in this place.
Now, I need to tell you how I got here. At the end of the day, I'm literally a son of a killer.
Bone Valley, Season 2. Jeremy.
Jeremy, I want to tell you something. Listen to new episodes of Bone Valley, Season 2, starting April 9th on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
And to hear the entire new season ad-free with exclusive content starting April 9th, subscribe to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. At Valley Strong Credit Union, we know that local businesses are the backbone of the Central Valley.
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Phoenix Jones was not the first person

to don a mask

and attempt to become

a real-life superhero.

But it's hard to know for sure

who the first,

the original real-life superhero, was.

Some say it was master legend.

And that's a lesson for all those people who like to abuse little kids.

In the 1980s, he was a fixture on the streets of New Orleans,

handing out water to the homeless in a cape and stormtrooper vest

with long hair sticking out from under an old army helmet.

And he's still at it today, in Florida, though his methods are questionable. Here he is shooting eggs out of a cannon he made out of PVC pipe and spray-painted silver.
Master legend, hard-boiled egg there. There it is.
The yelp splattered. He's one of the only real-life superheroes who claims to have supernatural powers, super strength, speed, and the ability to see the future.
There's even a TV show about his life, The Legend of Master Legend. Hey.
Who the hell are you? I'm Master Legend. I'm a real-life superhero, registered in two counties.

I love Master Legend, but the idea that he fights crime with his beer gut and goofy outfit does seem a bit preposterous.

More like a piece of performance art than an effective crime fighter.

And before Master Legend was Master Legend, there was Willie Perry. A.K.A.
the Birmingham Batman. Willie drove around Birmingham, Alabama in a souped-up 1971 Ford Thunderbird with a Batman license plate and rescue ship painted on the hood.

Mostly, he focused on helping stranded motorists.

My car had a flat tire. I didn't have a spare.

And I was stranded. I was on the highway, me and my kids.

No one stopped to help us.

And along came this strange car.

And in 1960 Chicago, a school teacher called Jim Phillips called himself the Fox.

It's said that he took his name from the Fox River, which runs through northern Illinois, west of Chicago.

He defended his community against the heartless corporations that were dumping toxic waste into rivers.

His calling card was a note signed with a fox face in the place of the letter O. Legend has it he'd canoe down the river to put caps on drainage pipes that were releasing pollutants into the water.
Once, he even dumped 50 pounds of sewage from Lake Michigan into the office of the company responsible for it. There's a sort of one-man guerrilla force against pollution.
He has become a local hero of sorts. And then there are groups like the Guardian Angels, a nonprofit started in New York City in 1979 by Curtis Sliwa, who recently ran for mayor of New York City.
We are going to do what we can in a nonviolent way without having any weapons available to us whatsoever to curb this violent crime that is on a continuous rampage. The Guardian Angels started by patrolling the subway in New York, a bit like Phoenix Jones on the streets of Seattle.
And their numbers grew. Today, there are thousands of members spread out in chapters around the country.

Also like Phoenix, the Guardian Angels prided themselves on their ability to stop crime without carrying guns.

But there are lots of examples of groups who did arm themselves.

Like the Minutemen, for example.

A few different groups using that name have been around since the early 2000s, and they execute armed border patrols looking for undocumented immigrants. They name themselves after the civilian militia groups who fought during the American Revolutionary War.
Robert Crooks, a 67-year-old retiree from Las Vegas, patrols the U.S.-Mexican border and tracks what he calls invaders and enemies of the United States of America. They're not coming this way.
If they do, I'll be here waiting for them, watching. And long before any of these groups, there was the bald knobbers.
This group that wore masks and executed vigilante justice in the Wild West. T.
Krulos is the author of the book Heroes in the Night, Inside the Real-Life Superhero Movement. I put a lot of research into any sort of vigilante movement that I thought might be sort of a president for the real-life superheroes.
The bald knobbers dispensed vigilante justice in Missouri from 1885 to 1889. They took their name from a mountaintop where they met.
Their leader was a bar owner named Nathaniel N. Kenny.
They wore suit coats backwards and donned homemade masks with devil horns protruding from the top and red and white stitching around their eyes and mouth. It must have been a terrifying sight to see them tearing across the plains on horseback with their whips in hand, looking to kill suspected horse thieves.
Each member of the group lived by this oath. Our purpose is to punish the evildoer among

us. The courts have failed us.
We administer punishment to those the arm of the law cannot

or will not reach. In doing this, we do not break the law because we have no evil intent.

So they started out by, you know,

hanging people that were cattle thieves or stuff like that.

But as their reign sort of went on,

they became a little bit more petty.

Like you could be visited by the bald knobbers

and whipped if you were accused of being ornery.

And it wasn't just people with an irritable disposition

that the knobbers went after.

Back then, many of the poorer couples in the community

I'm sorry. accused of being ornery.
And it wasn't just people with an irritable disposition that the Knobbers went after. Back then, many of the poorer couples in the community couldn't afford to pay marriage license fees, so they were technically not married but lived together as though they were.
The bald Knobbers believed these unwed couples were living in sin, and so they went around beating them. One day, some of the Knobbers set out to kill a man who criticized them.
They ended up killing two of his family members in a shootout, and they were jailed. Their leader was also killed, and as Krulos writes in his book, the condemned Knobbers were hung on a poorly constructed gallows in 1889 in a scene described as gruesome.
The Knobbers' feet dragged on the ground as they writhed in pain. The gallows were quickly fixed and the Knobbers were hung again.
It's kind of an example of vigilantism that spun out of control. One of the main arguments I've heard people make against the real-life superhero movement is that they are nothing more than modern-day bald knobbers, vigilantes, people who take the law into their own hands.
But Phoenix and the other real-life superheroes I've met don't consider themselves vigilantes because when they apprehend a criminal, they immediately call 911 and hand them over to the police

so they can be prosecuted within the legal system.

In fact, Phoenix argues that it's the police,

not superheroes like him, that act like they're above the law.

It's one of the reasons he's not a fan of the cops.

The job for the police union is to make sure the police officers do not get in trouble.

Right?

They have the inner policing system.

All of the inner policing system is run by police.

There is no outside accountability in the police department at all.

There are lots of examples throughout American history

where the police have often been protected from punishment

by the very system that is supposed to keep them in check.

So where does that leave Phoenix Jones?

Well, it's complicated.

He relies on the police to complete the work he started,

but he despises the way they do their job.

Phoenix isn't alone in his standoff with the cops, though.

After all, what's a superhero without sidekicks?

That's coming up. You know how in the Batman series, Commissioner Gordon shined a giant bat-shaped spotlight into the sky whenever a hero was needed to save Gotham City? The bat signal.
Well, Phoenix Jones never had one of those. But his rise to fame turned him into the human equivalent of that call to action.
Because as news stories about Phoenix spread around the world, of him stopping car thieves and breaking up street fights, regular citizens were inspired to join him in his fight against evildoers. And before long, Phoenix had a crew of masked Avengers who fought crime by his side.
Together, this band of ragtag heroes, former soldiers, reformed criminals, aspiring activists and medics, all patrolled the streets of Seattle under the leadership of Phoenix, striking fear into the heart of Seattle's criminal underworld. They called themselves the Rain City Superheroes.
And the media ate it up. Rain City superhero crime-fighting movement.

Real-life superheroes. Real-life superheroes.

Superheroes.

Real-life superheroes.

Vigilante crime-stoppers in Seattle.

The patrols Seattle looking for crime.

Prepared to fight it.

Are they for real?

To find out more about Phoenix, I needed to speak to the one group of people

who knew his crime-fighting days better than anyone else. When you watch any video of the Rain City superheroes on patrol, it's easy to see where they got so much media coverage.
They are a spectacle. Phoenix wears his black and gold super suit, and he does look like a superhero from a movie, but the rest of the crew looks a lot more, how can I put this without sounding mean? Ridiculous.
There's Midnight Jack, who claims to be a former gang member with a new set of skills. Charity outreach, homeless handout, animal rescue, and pedophile investigations.
He's wearing regular street clothes, black cargo pants, and a black and gray fleece, and a black Spider-Man mask. Basically, the kind of kid would wear on Halloween.
There's Ghost, a veteran who joined Phoenix's band of crime fighters after returning from a tour of duty in Iraq. I put on my white bandana for the first time, and someone tried to stab someone else, and I did a palm strike right in their diaphragm.
They collapsed, and then I was ghost. He looks like a waiter who just got off work.
He's wearing black slacks and a white button-down collared shirt and a black ski mask. There's Phoenix's girlfriend, Purple Rain.
She's wearing a cross between a leather jacket and purple spandex, with a black leather beret and a purple mask that looks like the one that Scorpion from Mortal Kombat wears. I helped out from the sidelines kind of behind the scenes, and then it was only a matter of time before I took on a mask of my own.
There's Evocatis, another war vet. He's in black motorcycle leathers and a silver mask that covers his entire head.

He looks like a cross between a medieval knight

and a member of Daft Punk.

At least once a week, I'd be asked,

are you a cop?

And just like, why?

What cop do you know that looks like this?

But okay.

And then there's Phoenix's best friend

and right-hand man.

My name

is El Caballero.

I'm about

protection and safety for all

human beings. El Caballero

looks like a cross between 70s

era Hugh Hefner and a Mexican

luchador. He wears a purple

top that straddles the line

between cape and vest.

It has a purple fur collar and giant fur-covered cuffs,

and a gold-embroidered dragon on the back.

And he's wearing black bell-bottoms with a tactical belt similar to Batman's.

And to top it all off, a red and purple sequined luchador mask

with some sort of pyramid-looking emblem that he's sewed onto the forehead. This is the camera guy.
You make sure he does not get punched. It's a poor shot.
It is very hard not to laugh out loud when you see them together. Jack, you should be my number one guy.
The video footage of their patrol has the feel of a mockumentary about nerds who think they are warriors. And this is pretty typical of the type of media coverage that the Rain City superheroes got at the peak of their fame.
A mix of, look at these goofballs, and a heartwarming snapshot of some passionate do-gooders. And while it is easy to mock them, you can see in the videos of their patrols that Phoenix and his crew are actually doing good in their community.
They help stranded motorists and make sure drunk people get home safe. Are you a cab? Can you give my friends a ride back down here? They administer first aid to the injured, and sometimes they save lives.
A man was getting violent with security at a nightclub. He proceeded to get violent with me and my group of friends.
Here's a clip from the daytime talk show Life Changers, hosted by Dr. Drew, featuring a guy named Fabio who says that Phoenix saved his life.
Phoenix ran in and pepper sprayed the guy and diffused the entire situation. Dr.
Drew then turns to Phoenix and Purple Rain, who are seated on stage in their superhero suits. How did you hear about it? Were you eating dinner in the restaurant? You know, most situations aren't like this one.
I happened to be on top of the parking garage across the street, and I saw the thing happen, and I was able to, there's like a little pole, and I was able to jump from the top, shimmy the pole down, and get into the situation. Racing over rooftops, descending drain pipes, icing bad guys, the Rain City Heroes had a good run.
From 2011 to 2014, they were a fixture of downtown Seattle. They were local celebrities, but a lot of the media coverage felt like it was laughing at them rather than with them.
But it also legitimized them. They formed the type of bond that comes from being in the foxhole together, risking their lives for a righteous cause, but it didn't last.
And when things went wrong, it seems to have started Phoenix's downfall. Maybe the group's demise was inevitable, given Phoenix's belief that he is the only one who is a real superhero.

I'm not a part of that group at all.

Like, me, I'm a crime fighter.

I'm a masked adventurer.

That's what I do.

You know what I mean?

You guys are playing superhero.

I am a superhero.

I'm the world's first legally defined superhero.

It's in legal documents.

The FBI has me as a superhero.

I'll see you next time. I'm not a superhero.
I am a superhero. I'm the world's first legally defined superhero.
It's in legal documents.

The FBI has me as a superhero.

I'm not playing a game.

You guys got dressed up. I put on my uniform.

It's different.

I tried to verify Phoenix's claim,

but when I asked the FBI about this, they said,

the FBI does not provide endorsements.

There's no single moment in time you can point to and say,

this was the day

the Rain City superhero movement died.

Each member of the team

had their own reasons for quitting.

But they all blame Phoenix

in one way or another. Here's Midnight Jack.
Phoenix Jones was so hooked on the attention. It was so hooked on the media following and the celebrity status and things like that, that it was a problem, which kind of led to a lot of us kind of losing respect for him and wanting to be disassociated from things.
Admittedly, I was the last person to leave him. But, you know, I mean, when you're in a cult, you don't necessarily understand you're in a cult.
And that's really what Rain City was at the end, was a cult. Midnight Jack was not the only one who referred to the Rain City superhero movement as a cult.
Here's Evocatus. There's one person in charge, fundamentally, for better or for worse.
If you say anything that challenges this person, it all falls apart. If you question it or ask for further clarification or anything to say, it all falls apart, and you are ostracized.
It's cult-like in the, we had a cult leader, I guess. Today, none of the Rain City superheroes who I spoke to are on good terms with Phoenix.
I think Phoenix Jones is a sociopath, is what I think. He's a master gaslighter.
I think Phoenix Jones is a liar, 100%. He pawned a bunch of team equipment for drugs.
Dude, this is the mafia. This is what a mafia does.
At first, the Rain City superheroes were inspired by Phoenix, and they were willing to risk their lives because they believed in his mission. But over time, they came to see Phoenix Jones as less than a hero and more of a fraud.
So how did it all go so wrong? How did the world's greatest real-life superhero fall so spectacularly from grace? Alienated from his crime-fighting friends, a defender of justice who used to chase down drug dealers, but ended up pleading guilty to a drug charge. Over the course of the last year, I've spent a good amount of time with real-life superheroes.
I've patrolled the streets with them, seen firsthand what their version of crime-funding looks like, and I've gotten to know the people behind the masks. I have to say, it's been a wild ride.
And disorienting. At times, I've been convinced that Phoenix Jones is an egomaniac who uses his superhero persona as a means to enrich himself.
Other times, I've felt that Phoenix is the only sane person in a society that has lost its goddamn mind. Everyone in Phoenix's orbit has their own version of what happened.
Each of them is the hero of their own story. Honestly, I'm still trying to make sense of it all.
You never know what anyone says is true. Ever.
Right? You should always know that. So what do you say we fire up the old Batmobile and take it for a spin? We've got a lot of superheroes to meet and the truth to uncover.
Oh, and I forgot to mention the real-life supervillains. So you better bring your grappling hook because we might get into some sticky situations.
The Superhero Complex is hosted and written by me, David Weinberg, and reported by me, Amalia Sortland, and Caroline Thornham. Production from Amalia Sortland and Caroline Thornham.
Sean Glenn, Max O'Brien, and David Waters are executive producers. Fact-checking by Andrew Schwartz.
Production management from Cherie Houston, Frankie Taylor, and Charlotte Wolfe. Sound design, mixing, and scoring.
Thank you. Special thanks to Peter Tangen, the Unplanned America team, Willard Foxton, Matt O'Mara, Katrina Norvell, Beth Ann Macaluso, Oren Rosenbaum, Shelby Schenkman, and all the team at UTA.

For more from Novel, visit novel.audio.