Posted in: Comics, Recent Updates | Tagged: Comics, entertainment, grinding.be, J.J. Armes, Klint Finley, real life superheroes

The Man Who Claimed To Be the First Real Live Superhero – Fact or Fiction?

Published Sun, 08 Dec 2013 12:00:14 -0600

by Hannah Means Shannon

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Back when Warren Ellis' series Doktor Sleepless was first published by Avatar Press in 2007, Avatar spun out into a fan discussion blog called grinding.be, which has been maintained for years since then to address the relationship between technology and culture in keeping with the "grinding" ethos of the Ellis comic series. Avatar Press, of course, also founded Bleeding Cool, to discuss, well, the craziness in comics culture and deliver the goods on the industry itself. You might say that grinding.be is about possible futures whereas Bleeding Cool is about the bizarre excesses, and equally strange virtues, of the here and now.

Recently, grinding.be uncovered a very odd and intriguing story, that of a man who claimed to be the world's first "real life" superhero back in the 70's, and still maintains that this is his status today at age 81. It's possible that if you were around in the 70's, you might have heard of him then, or not, depending on which version of history is in fact, true, given the web of contradictions surrounding J.J. Armes.

Armes claimed that his hands were blown off in a childhood accident and replaced by hooks, and that he engineered the ability to fire an attached gun from one hook, powered by his arm muscles, in order to operate as a Private Investigator. He claimed to live in a mansion with lions and tigers, be driven by a chauffeur buddy in his drive to fight crime in real life, and to have inspired superhero and secret agent mythology. He claimed to have been recruited by Hollywood directors to star in documentaries and up to 13 feature films. He revealed these details of his life back in 1976, and inspired a line of toys based on his persona, but how far was he stretching credulity?

Klint Finley at grinding.be engaged in some extensive research to try to sift through the facts and the fictions surrounding Armes, who identified as an Italian American, but turns out to be a Mexican American who struggled to overcome cultural prejudices. Finley came up with even more surprising answers in his own investigations that reveal a man who did, indeed, tackle massive obstacles in life but also seems to have desperately needed the mythology that he helped create to reinvent his own life.

According to Finley, Armes "came clean" in his later autobiography about a number of details that had been greatly exaggerated, however, there are some real-life truths behind Armes' achievements that help explain how the man became legendary. As Finley asks,

"Why then has his story largely been forgotten by the national media? Maybe it's because of the tall tales in the beginning. Or maybe it's because the media has little time for aging, disabled minorities".

It's a strange, strange tale and you can find the complete research piece here at grinding.be about this odd corner of real-life superhero history.

A tip of the hat from Bleeding Cool to grinding.be and the relentless curiosity that inspires their investigations.

Hannah Means-Shannon is Senior New York Correspondent at Bleeding Cool, writes and blogs about comics for TRIP CITY and Sequart.org, and is currently working on books about Neil Gaiman and Alan Moore for Sequart. She is @hannahmenzies on Twitter and hannahmenziesblog on WordPress. Find her bio here.

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