Mop

Not all heroes fight crime. Some of them just bounce around.

Billy was just an average boy until, one day, his fairy God-father (the rather unfortunately named Mr. Gas) gave him a balloon suit which he could inflate like a balloon and... yeah, that's it. In his strips, he'd bounce around and interact with various characters like Santa Claus and Mother Goose.

Really this character is more notable for their illustrator - one W.W. Denslow, who you may know as illustrating the first Wizard of Oz book and none of the other ones due to him falling out with Baum while making the Wizard of Oz stage musical. He also at one point owned an island in Bermuda and crowned himself "King Denslow I, Monarch of Denslow Islands and Protector of Coral Reefs", which isn't too relevant to this, but I thought it was fun. If I had no self-control, I'd be going on about his later Scarecrow and Tin-Man series (made to rival Baum's "Queer Visitors from the Marvelous Land of Oz" comic strip).

Billy Bounce would go on for 7 years with various stories published in newspapers as well as an original book published in 1906. Since he first appeared in 1901, Billy is one of the earliest characters we've covered here (with the earliest being the Human Bat).

Sometimes you look at a superhero and all you can think is "Wait... are they meant to be shirtless?"

Brad Hendricks was probably normal, maybe. I can't verify that since the only time I see him is when he's wearing the Papyrus Undertale costume we see above, which does sound like he may not be normal... but then again, that would also be a case of fundamental attribution error on my part since I only see him when he's fighting crime.

But yes, he dresses like a skeleton, drives around in a skull-themed aeroplane and fights Nazis which is admittedly not the worst hobby someone can have.

But is he shirtless? The world may never know...

The Ghost soared on for 15 issues before crashing into obscurity... Spooooooky obscurity (since this is the Halloween post).

Some heroes fade into obscurity because they're too generic: Why do we need Cat-Man when we have Batman? Why do we need Captain Battle when we have Captain America? Why do we need Kaza? Sometimes however, a hero can have the problem of not being generic enough.

Dean Alder was just your average headmaster of a private school named after him until, one day, while on holiday in Tibet, he saved the High Lama from being assassinated by a random drunk guy. As a reward, they gave him a magical red garment.

What does it do? Well, whenever he's wearing it, he can walk through a mirror and turn invisible. He can also walk through any reflective surface, but those don't turn him invisible, only the mirrors do - and while he's invisible, he's also intangible... except he can also punch people and can't go through normal walls... and he can also heal quickly in his invisible form... oh and all this is contingent on if he's using the suit for good - if there's any evil intent, he can't use it.

One has to wonder if passing through a mirror has the same bad luck effect as smashing one because a lot of his adventures take place literally back-to-back. Like, he'd stop a bank robbery, save a local youth, run his school for three seconds and then someone would go in and tell him one of his students went missing - and then when he finished solving that problem, there's now a troubled youth getting involved in a gang that he needs to stop, and then... It's like that one Astro City comic where the Superman analogue is surrendering every hour of his day to stop 50 million crimes a second.

His run of bad luck didn't stop there. In total, Mirror Man had about 7 stories before he disappeared from the human eye... forever...

There are many ways to disguise yourself: put on a mask, change your voice, maybe even don a costume. However, only one hero has gone so far as to go without a head for the sake of fighting crime.

Betty was just your average teacher in the Wild West, fed up with how Wild and Western it all was with all the crime and... yeah that's it, I'm sure there were no other injustices going on around that time. Her solution was simple: put on a really big shirt that conceals your head and fight crime as the Headless Horseman!

(She had eyes cut out in the torso, don't worry about it.)

Unfortunately for her, Betty realised all too quickly that you can't ride a horse for too long without a head to see anything. She went on for two comics before disappearing into the sunset, never to be seen again...