Our heroes.note
Sarge: "So, you want us to ''go to Hell''?"
Azrael: "Exactly."
Hero Material (original Finnish name Sankariainesta) is a webcomic by Rupert Fieth.
Archangel Azrael summons together six very different heroes: Detective Noir, a drunk, chain-smoking private detective; King Arthur of Camelot, old and wise heir to the throne; Sarge, grizzled and shell-shocked war veteran; Heracles, the mythical Greek Demigod; Captain Obvious, your friendly neighborhood superhero; and Guitar Hero, a middle-aged junkie rock star. Azrael has a task for our heroes: Ominous dark powers are slowly corrupting the world. So our six heroes must journey to Hell to find out the source of the darkness. But first they would have to learn to get along...
Hero Material is notable for that it takes it cliche'd premise and parodies the hell out of it. During their quest to save the world that probably causes more destruction than they manage to prevent none of the characters learn anything or become a better person. At best they just sort of tolerate each other because they have to.
The sequel, titled "Hero Material 2", was announced on official HM facebook page in April, 2013, and the first part saw the light of day about a year later in April 25th, 2014.
The comic can be found here
in English, and for original Finnish version, go here.
Hero Material contains examples of:
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Hero Material
- The Ace: Captain Obvious.
- Accidental Misnaming: "Hey, doesn't this guy look a lot like Captain Oblivious?"
- Aerith and Bob: Well, Archibald and Bob, but...
- Affectionate Parody: Of superhero comic books, and hero stories in general. One particular target seems to be Avengers-style Crisis Crossovers.
- The Alcoholic: Detective Noir carries a bottle of whiskey with him at all times in best Film Noir fashion.
- Applied Phlebotinum: The titular Hero Material, which works as a natural protector agains the corrupting powers of Evil.
- Art Shift: Page 10, which uses different kind of shadowing to make more of a storybook look.
- Whenever the Detective Guy starts his monologuing, everything turns more Film Noir-ish and the shadows become more prominent.
- Authority Equals Asskicking: Despite being a good 20-30 years older than other heroes, King Arthur can still lay the smack down as everyone else.
- Badass Longcoat: Detective Noir.
- Beat Panel: On page 23 before the group completely cracks up.
- BFS: Fawsté's sword about twice as big as he is.
- Big Bad: Fawsté, the Ruler of Hell.
- Big Good: Archangel Azrael. Though he is more of Deadpan Snarker than your usual benevolent divine entity.
- Big "NO!": Sarge at the end of his introduction page, when one of his privates gets shot and dies.
- Bittersweet Ending: Sort of. The world is saved, but Hell is now in absolute chaos, they lost two of their teammates and the surviving heroes seemingly have no way back home.
- Boisterous Bruiser: Captain Obvious.
- Boring Return Journey: Averted. They run the whole trip back as a part of a chase sequence.
- Bottomless Magazines: Subverted. Sarge runs out of bullets just when the biggest monster shows up. He then throws his now useless assault rifle straight in the face of the beast.
- Captain Obvious: Captain Obvious. Duh.
- Clark Kenting: Captain Obvious' secret identity disguise consists of fake moustache and glasses. He even leaves his superhero mask under them.
- Cool Old Guy: King Arthur. See Authority Equals Asskicking.
- Crazy Enough to Work: Captain Obvious' plan to distract the guards. See Insane Troll Logic.
- Curb-Stomp Battle: When our Heroes first take on the Big Bad, he defeats them all with little effort. While fighting Captain Obvious he looks bored.
- Deal with the Devil: Fawsté the Victorious does this to avoid dying in the battlefield.
- Deconstructive Parody
- Deconstructor Fleet
- Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?: Fawsté eventually does this to the Devil.
- Double-Meaning Title: Hero Material as in the actual piece of materia the heroes receive from Azrael, and also as in the potential our main characters possess to become true heroes.
- Even Mooks Have Loved Ones: Invoked with Skeleton Soldier Colin's skeletal wife and children.
- Everyone Calls Him "Barkeep": Sarge, who is only referred by his military rank.
- Detective Guy and Guitar Hero also qualify, though no names are used for them in-work.
- Evil Gloating: Because it gets lonely in hell and it's nice open your heart to someone for a change.
- Evil Is Hammy: Averted with Fawsté, who is very calm and almost polite. His One-Winged Angel form hams it up for all it's worth, though.
- Evil Makes You Ugly / Evil Makes You Monstrous: Fawsté See Fisher Kingdom.
- Exact Words: "We need a way to crosseth this lake!"
- Expressive Shirt: King Arthur's sun eblem changes it's expression depending on the surrounding events.
- Face Palm: Several, usually from Detective Guy.
- Fallen Hero: Fawsté the Victorious.
- Fire and Brimstone Hell
- Fisher Kingdom: Hell. Any mortal not equipped with the protective Hero Material will over time be robbed from their human features.
- Floating Continent: Azrael's Castle.
- Fluffy Cloud Heaven: Where Azrael's Castle is located.
- Flying Brick: Though flying isn't one of many superpowers Captain Obvious possesses, he still manages to be rather destructive...
- Funetik Aksent: Interesting variation: King Arthur speaks Ye Olde Butcherede Englishe complete with different font and big, ornated initial letters.
- Funny Back Ground Event: Everywhere. For Shout-Outic ones, see Shout-Out.
- When Heracles releases Cerberus, it can be seen chasing one of Azrael's servants and eventually catching him.
- Outside Arthur's Castle there are a bunch of cows assembling as a tower in order to climb up the castle wall.
- After sitting by the campfire Sarge accidentally sets the photo he's holding on fire without him noticing it. It burns in his hand for couple of panels before he eventually shakes the fire out.
- Heracles is seen quoting Hamlet with one of the skulls he has decapitated. Then he collects a few more, starts juggling with them and eventually gets his head stuck inside one. Then he proceeds to scare the crap out of Detective Noir.
- Ground-Shattering Landing / Megaton Punch: See Red Herring, below.
- Hammerspace: Sarge pulls an assault rifle out of nowhere at one point. Naturally this is lampshaded.
- I Will Only Slow You Down: Watch what you say, Detective Noir...
- Idea Bulb: When Captain Obvious get his "Eureka!" Moment.
- Idiot Hero: The whole group of Heroes, all the time.
- Insane Troll Logic: The Guards accept Captain Obvious's Paper-Thin Disguise because even though he could have grown the moustache, he couldn't have grown a refractive error.
- Ironic Echo: "Welcome, 'heroes'!"
- Killed Mid-Sentence: Twice, both times the victim is one of Hell's Guardians.Skeleton Soldier: (After cathing a live grenade) "Ha! Catched it in midair!"Demon: "What do you think of that? We can easily just toss it back to y-" BOOM
- Klingon Promotion: Fawsté took this up to eleven by offing Satan and becoming the new ruler of Hell.
- Legions of Hell: Mainly of skeletal and demonic variety.
- The Load: Guitar Hero. Having no combat skills and being constantly stoned out of his head do not exactly make you an effective part of a team of heroes.
- Love Makes You Evil: Fawsté.
- Manly Tears / Single Tear: Here, where Sarge is remembering his fallen friend.
- Meaningful Name: Fawsté is weird derivative from Faust. Fitting considering his Deal with the Devil.
- Detective Noir is every Film Noir protagonist distilled into one. And then we have Captain Obvious...
- Mook Chivalry: Inverted, only ones to utilize this are the heroes.
- More Dakka: Sarge and his assault rifle.
- Oh, My Gods!: By Heracles, naturally.
- One-Winged Angel: Utilized by the Big Bad, of course. It doesn't help.
- Oral Fixation: Sarge is constantly chewing on some kind of straw.
- Perma-Stubble: Sarge and the Detective Guy.
- Phrase Catcher: "Thank you, Captain Obvious!"
- Punch-Clock Villain: Many of the guardians of Hell seem to be this.
- Punctuated! For! Emphasis!: "You. Can't. Be. SERIOUS!"
- Ragtag Bunch of Misfits: The group of six heroes. While they're claimed to be the greatest heroes of their times, that still doesn't prevent them to not being able to stand each other.
- Red Herring: Captain Obvious gets and idea how help his teammates escape the hordes of Hell. After he ponders his own words "Burden" and "Carry", it seems obvious that his "Eureka!" Moment would lead to using his Super-Speed and Super-Strength to carry his allies to safety, right? Nope. He hits the ground so hard that the wall that carries the ceiling breaks, causing the roof to collapse on the chasers.
- Royals Who Actually Do Something: King Arthur Again.
- Run or Die: See Screw This, I'm Outta Here, below.
- Sanity Ball: Tossed around a lot, but Detective Noir and Sarge are the most prominent holders.
- Screw This, I'm Outta Here: The heroes decide not to accept Hell's Ruler's invitation to stay.
- Shield Bash: Utilized by Heracles against hordes of Skeletal Soldiers.
- Shoo Out the Clowns: Averted, as the biggest clowns of the story are our heroes.
- Shout-Out: Apart from Arthur's numerous Monty Python references, we have following:
- Heracles's shield is identical to the one Hercules carries in the adaptation.
- The Mad Scientist Captain Obvious catches during his introduction page is called Dr. Merkwürdigliebe.
- A Team Fortress 2 Sentry can be seen among the Mad doctor's devastated machinery.
- The two cops arresting Dr. Merkwürdliebe are modeled after the idiot cops in Superbad.
- The flying house from UP can be seen drifting behind Azrael's window.
- A skeletal version of American Gothic Couple can be seen hanging on the wall of the Skeleton Mooks.
- The two skeleton soldiers we meet are named Colin and Ryan.
- The priest orating Colin's funeral is Frollo.
- Sarge's childhood flashbacks are very similar to several scenes in Calvin and Hobbes.
- The Big Bad's line when transforming to One-Winged Angel form are from Maleficent, word to word.
- Sliding Scale of Silliness vs. Seriousness: Very deep in the Silly end.
- To Hell and Back: The main objective of our heroes. Also, Fawsté's Roaring Rampage of Revenge consists largely of this. The result is Shrouded in Myth.
- Unreliable Narrator: Detective Guy's Private Eye Monologue doesn't always match with the actual events we see...
- Unusually Uninteresting Sight: When the heroes first arrive at Azrael's Castle, nobody seems to give a second look to Heracles's three-headed dog. Might be justified with King Arthur and Captain Obvious, who both have magical/supernatural home worlds, and with Guitar Hero, who is as high as a kite, but it doesn't explain why Sarge or Detective Guy don't react to him in any way.
- Wham Episode: Pages 24-25, when it's revealed that Fawsté has taken over Hell .
- What Measure Is a Mook?: There's a two pages showing us how one unlucky Skeleton Soldier gets mauled by our heroes. Then they thrash his funeral and kill all the skeletal guests.
- Whole Costume Reference: King Arthur has very similar attire to the one Monty Python's King Arthur wore.
- Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds: Fawsté
- Wrong Genre Savvy: Guitar Hero seems to be the Only Sane Man of the hero group, and even acknowledges the fact that he's a musician, not a real hero. Then he lets the heroes carry on without him, which means leaving him alone and defenseless.
Hero Material 2
- Evil, Inc.: MalevoCo, whose slogan seems to be "We're the good guys! Honest! Seriously! TRUST US!"
- Gas Mask Mooks: The MalevoCo guards, complete with appropriate longcoats.
- Shout-Out: The main character tries to infiltrate the MalevoCo Facility wearing a cardboard box.
Supplemental Material
- Animated Actors: Making of Hero Material which presents the comic as a film studio -type project that was filmed rather than drawn. We see things like Guitar Hero actually being a Classically-Trained Extra in reality, and Big Bad and Big Good having common actor background.
- Breaking the Fourth Wall: Making of Hero Material is rife with these. Special mention goes to King Arthur's actor, as he apparently leaned on the fourth wall so hard he fell out of the comic.
- Creator Cameo: Three times in the Making of Hero Material comic. Though his face is never seen.
- Funetik Aksent: Discussed as the actor of Arthur explains how challenging it was to get those big ornamental initial letters to his speech bubbles.
Don't ask how it works. - Funny Background Event: You can see a pair of skeletons trying to break into the vending machines when Noir is being interviewed.
- Who Writes This Crap?!: Fawsté giving his opinion of the script is the opening scene of Making of Hero Material
