Who is that masked man? The real-life superhero who inspired a wild podcast
The superhero genre needs to shake itself up. We’ve spent the last decade and a half being told the same handful of tales. We know the origin stories. We know that all the superheroes are contractually obliged to join forces, like a cover of We Are the World performed by people in funny costumes. What we need is something new.
Perhaps that thing is The Superhero Complex. The new podcast is part investigation and part characterstudy about a scarcely believable figure, Phoenix Jones, a man who bills himself as a real-life superhero.
Jones – real name Benjamin Fodor – is a costumed vigilante who began patrolling the streets of Seattle just over a decade ago: stopping car thieves, preventing drunk drivers from entering their vehicles, breaking up fights. He gained notoriety as citizens compared stories of the masked man who emerged from the shadows to come to their rescue. Then the stories grew. At one point, it was said that Jones had foiled a terrorist plot. He has been shot at and stabbed in the pursuit of justice, and has inspired a wave of copycat superheroes in the process. He took up mixed martial arts and filmed himself buying ice-cream for children, but it all came screeching to a halt when Jones was arrested for allegedly trying to sell class A drugs to an undercover police officer in 2020. It is a story that’s fascinating and bewildering in equal measure.
The Superhero Complex tells it perfectly, but this has nothing to do with its creator’s love of costumed crusaders.
“I’ve been dreading having to say this in public”, says its creator David Weinberg over Zoom from his loft in Los Angeles. “But I’m not a comic book guy. Growing up I didn’t really care for the Marvel movies. I find them really boring. It’s like, ‘I know who’s gonna win this fight’. It all just feels very formulaic.”
But, despite Weinberg’s ambivalence towards superheroes in general, even he could see that Jones’s story had the potential to be fascinating.
“I got an email from (podcast producers) Novel,” he says. “They were like: ‘You wanna host this podcast about Phoenix Jones?’ And I was like, ‘Who’s Phoenix Jones?’ I never knew anything about him. I didn’t know anything about real-life superheroes and that excited me. I wanted to explore this world because it was new to me, and I didn’t have any preconceived ideas about it”.
It is this distance between host and subject that makes The Superhero Complex so compelling. Weinberg notes that many of the people who have previously covered the Phoenix Jones beat have dressed up in costumes and fought crimes alongside him – “I think there’s something about certain journalists who are drawn to this, maybe,” he smiles, wryly – whereas there’s something of an uncertain tone about his particular investigation. If the first few episodes are any indication, at least, Weinberg and Jones spend much of their time at arm’s length, unsure of how much they can trust each another.
Early on, for example, we hear Weinberg travel to Seattle to meet Jones, only for Jones to ghost him upon arrival. Weinberg talks to other Seattle superheroes, instead, who all voice their hatred for Jones. When they do eventually meet in person, Jones refuses to be interviewed until he’s paid. These encounters help build a picture of a man who is at best complicated and at worst outright horrible.
“I had formed pretty strong opinions about him, and they weren’t good”, Weinberg recalls of the moments before their first meeting. “I was nervous about how I was going to confront him. He’s so charismatic that he won me over. I was like, ‘Oh, you’re right and everyone else is wrong.’ I made three trips up there. I would interview Phoenix, and come away being like, ‘Oh my God, this guy’s the real deal’. Then I would go do some reporting and talk to other people, and they would correct a lot of the things he said. Then I’d be like, ‘This guy’s a fucking liar.’”
Jones isn’t as active as he was a few years ago. This is partly down to his arrest – it’s hard to see someone as an unassailable bastion of justice when they’re accused of trying to sell drugs to a police officer – but even before that, his reputation took a public knock.
“There’s a moment in Phoenix’s career, a turning point, where he fights a guy in public”, Weinberg explains. “Phoenix claims this guy is harassing him, and he says ‘Fine, let’s just fight.’ Phoenix is a semi-professional MMA fighter, and this is just a drunk guy. Is this what superheroes do? Pick on people who are clearly not equipped to fight? When that video came out, a lot of people turned on Phoenix, saying ‘This is just a bully. This is the guy who’s going around beating up drunk people.’”
Yet, Weinberg can’t quite bring himself to come down hard against real-life superheroes. This is because, unexpectedly for him, he found value in their services. Speaking of one superhero in particular, who devotes himself to performing qualified medical work to those in need, he says, “I have a lot of the same criticisms of the US justice system. There’s a housing crisis in the US. The amount of homeless people on the streets is vastly higher than it should be. So I identify with that desire to do something about it. I did not think about those aspects of it at all when I was doing research, that a lot of what they do is basic humanitarian stuff. Like I said, I’m not into superheroes, so I’m not going to put a costume on. But outside that, pretty much everything else they do is good work that needs to be done.”
What he thinks of Jones, on the other hand, remains to be seen. As we speak, Weinberg is gearing up to write the final episode of the podcast, and he
knows that he will be expected to give his definitive judgment on the man. “I still don’t know. When I’m with the guy, I believe him. Then when I talk to everyone else …” He pauses to sigh. “It’s been a really disorienting reporting experience.”
Nor is he expecting a particularly welcome reaction from Jones, given that in his interviews with Weinberg, he was less than complimentary about previous journalists who had profiled him. In an upcoming episode, we hear him describe Jon Ronson as “hiding in a cab in a cardigan”.
“He can attack me but he’s still the type of person where, if I was in Seattle, I would text him and be like, ‘Hey, do you want to get a cup of coffee?’”, says Weinberg. “He’s a super fun person to be around, but he has a knee-jerk reaction to being criticised”.
Does that mean that he and Jones are still in touch? “He’s super flaky,” Weinberg shrugs. “So I’m in touch with him in the sense that I have sent him multiple texts and emails about factchecking, and he has not responded to any of that.”
The superhero life must be busy, I say. “It’s so funny”, Weinberg grins. “The last time I texted him, I said, ‘I just need you to respond to these things that people said about you’. And he’s like, ‘Sorry, I’m in the middle of trying to get a visa to go and fight in Ukraine. That was the last I heard. That was the last text I had from him, which was more than a month ago.”
That’s incredible, I say, my jaw now fully dropped. He’s a war hero now. “I’m pretty sure he can’t go to Ukraine”, Weinberg scoffs, good-naturedly. “He’s on felony probation.”
He’s a super fun person to be around, but he has a knee-jerk reaction to being criticised