From the moment that I decided somewhere deep inside myself that I wanted to try my hand at being a costumed adventurer, to be the moment I first stepped out into the night with a mask on my face and the wind on my bare legs, took about three months. Three months of self-doubt and self-ridicule. Three months of self-conscious training down at the Police Gymnasium. Three months figuring out how the hell I was going to make myself a costume. The costume was difficult because I couldn't start designing it until I thought of a name. This stumped me for a couple of weeks because every name I came up with sounded stupid, and what I really wanted was something with the same sense of drama and excitement as "Hooded Justice."
Eventually, a suitable handle was provided inadvertently by one of the other cops that I worked with down the station house. He'd invited me out for a beer after work two or three times only to be turned down because I wanted to spend as much of my evenings working out in the Police Gymnasium as possible, after which I'd usually go to bed around 9'oclock and sleep through until five the next morning, when I'd get up and put in a couple of hours workout before donning my badge and uniform in readiness for my day job. After having his office of beer and relaxation turned down yet again by reason of me wanting to be in bed early, he finally gave up asking and took to calling me "Nite Owl" out of sarcasm until he finally found somebody else to drink with.
A masked adventurer's costume is one of the things that nobody really thinks about. Should it have cape, or no cape? Should it be thick and armoured to protect you from harm, or flexible and lightweight to allow manoeuvrability? What sort of mask should it have? Do bright colours make you more of a target than dark one? All of these were things that I had to consider.
Eventually, I opted for a design that left the arm and legs as free as possible, while protecting my body and head with tough leather tunic, light chainmail briefs, and a layer of leather-over-chainmail protecting my head. I experimented with a cloak, remembering how the Shadow would use his cloak to misguide enemy bullets, leading them to shoot at parts of the swirling black mass where his body didn't happen to be. In practice, however, I found it too unwieldy. I was always tripping over it or getting it caught in things, and so I abandoned an outfit that was as streamlined as I could make it.
I first became Nite Owl during the early months of 1939,and although my first few exploits were largely unspectacular, they aroused a lot of media interest simply because by 1939, dressing up in costume and protecting your neighbourhood had become something of a fad, with the whole of America at least briefly interested in its development. A month later after I made my debut, a young woman who called herself the Silhouette broke into the headlines by exposing the activities of a crooked publisher trafficking in child pornography, delivering a punitive beating to the entrepreneur and his two chief cameramen in the process. A little after that, the first reports of a man dressed like a moth who could glide through the air started to come in from Connecticut, and a particularly vicious and brutal young man in a gaudy yellow boiler suit started cleaning up the city's waterfronts under the name of The Comedian. Within twelve months of Hooded Justice's dramatic entrance into the public consciousness, there were at least seven other costumed vigilantes operating on or around America's West Coast.
There was Captain Metropolis, who bought a knowledge of military technique and strategy to his attempt at eradicating organised crime in the inner city areas, and who is still active to this day.
There was the Silk Spectre, now retired and living with her daughter after an unsuccessful early marriage, who in retrospect was probably the first of us to ever realise that there could be commercial benefits in being a masked adventurer. The Silk Spectre used her reputation as a crimefighter primarily to maker the front pages and receive exposure for lucrative modelling career, but I think all of us knew her loved her a little bit and we certainly didn't begrudge her a living. I think we were all too unsure of our own motives to cast aspersions upon anybody else.
There was Dollar Bill, originally a star college athlete from Kansas who was actually employed as in-house super-hero by one of the major national banks, when they realise that the masked man fad made being able to brag about having a hero of your own to protect your customer's money a very interesting publicity prospect. Dollar Bill was one of the nicest and most straightforwasrd men I have ever met, and the fact that he died so tragically young is something that still upsets me whenever I think about it. While attempting to stop a raid upon one of his employer's banks, his cloak became entangled in the bank's revolving door and he was shot dead at point-blank range before he could free it. Designers employed by the bank had designed his costume for maximum publicity appeal. If he'd designed it himself he might have left out the damned stupid cloak and still be alive today.There was Mothman and the Silhouette and the Comedian and there was me, all of us choosing to dress up in gaudy opera costumes and express the notion of good and evil in simple, childish terms, while over in Europe they were turning human beings into soap and lampshades. We were sometimes respected, sometimes analyzed, and most often laughed at, and in spite of all the musings above, I don't think that those of us still surviving today are any closer to understanding just why we really did it all. Some of us did it because we were hired to and some of us, I think, did it for a kind of excitement that was altogether more adult if perhaps less healthy. They've called us fascists and they've called us perverts and while there's an element of truth in both those accusations, neither of them are big enough to take in the whole picture.
Yes, some of us were politically extreme. Before Pearl Harbour, I heard Hooded Justice openly expressing approval for the activities of Hilter's Third Reich, and Captain Metropolis has gone publically on record as making statements about black and Hispanic Americans that have been viewed as both racially prejudiced and inflammatory, charges that it is difficult to argue or deny.
Yes, I daresay some of us did have our sexual hang-ups. Everybody knows what eventually became of the Silhouette and although it would be tasteless to rehash the events surrounding her death in this current volume, it provides proof for those who need it that for some people, dressing up in a costume did have its more libidinous elements.
Yes, some of us were unstable and neurotic. Only a week ago as of this writing, I received word that the man behind the mask of Mothman, whose true identity I am not at liberty to divulge, has been committed to a mental institution after a long bout of alcoholism and a complete mental breakdown.
Yes, we were crazy, we were kinky, we were Nazis, all those things that people say. We were also doing something because we believed in it. We were attempting, through our personal efforts, to make our country a safer and better place to live in. Individually, working on our separate patches of turf, we did too much good in our respective communities to be written off as mere aberration, whether social or sexual or psychological.
It was only when we got together that the problems really started. I sometimes think without the Minutemen we might all have given up and called it quits pretty soon. The costumed adventurer might have become quietly and simply extinct. And the world might not be in the mess it's in today.
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