In Sweden Batman is called Läderlappen which translate to The Leather Patch. Originally Denmark used this name too where it could be translated as The Leather Flap (as in piece of cloth), taking it directly from the Swedish word, but it has since gone out of style. So yeah, I suppose Sweden should be saying Leather Patch but Leather Flap is so much funnier.
In Norway he was known as Lynvingen, The Lightning Wing, for a while.
There is one enlightened translation for Peanuts character Woodstock; in Finnish that little bird is known as "Kaustinen" - which is again a town famous for its folk music festival - the analogy of the characters name survives the translation.
I also like the old Swedish name for Superman: Stålmannen (the man of steel). There is a good reason for that as "super" means drinking too much alcohol in Swedish. I guess it's kind of hard to take Drinkstoomuchman seriously as a hero.
@Rogers On the one hand, I now want comics about (the heroic) Drinkstoomuchman. On the other hand, I don't think alcoholism should be depicted as a superpower and without that, the franchise sounds awfully depressing.
@Rogers #9719557 @VeryCreativeName #9719561
Isn't that like the entire premise behind Naruto? People who get superpowers when they're drunk?
And it's actually not *too* far off when you consider that pretty much all of the world's best music was made by people who were high as a kite when they made it. Now that's drugs rather than alcohol, and it's perhaps not a superpower in the traditional sense, but still.
@Zeust Don't know much about Naruto. Well, I don't know much about Superman, either. But, you know, less about Naruto. Could it be that it's not really about drunks with superpowers but about how the drunks remember the night before? ;-)
As for the musicians, that's kinda tricky. On the one hand, superheroes usually rely on physical prowess of some sort (seriously, they are usually much dumber and stronger than their antagonists) whereas creating music is much more cerebral (and thus dips more into not necessarily morally ambiguous but less-than-heroic territory).
On the other hand, drug-using musicians are usually much less frequently depicted as a role model than superheroes and their drug use usually bites them in the ass in some way (of course, entirely fictional drug-addled musicians are rare and in the case of biographies the downsides of drug (ab)use are typically written by real life).
On the third hand (lots of hands here) it largely depends on the drug you take. Alcohol is a depressant while, say, cocaine is a stimulant. I doubt that anyone has ever done anything worth doing both under the influence and because of heroin. I could go on but quite frankly, I don't know much about drugs.
On the fourth hand (second foot?), I somewhat doubt that there will ever be a summer action blockbuster about an artist using his drug-powered super song writing (or painting, sculpting or whatever, it's really not just musicians, is it?) to save the day against monsters, supervillains or something.
@AlephFIN
It's already existing in Italy. He's called superciuk (superdrunk) and his superpower is to knock out his enemies by using his stinking breath (he usually drinks cheap wine and eats a lot of garlic)
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Oh neat, SatW is back. Just in case Humon reads the comment sections, for the past day and a half, Firefox considered this site to be malicious. It didn't give me much information as to why, but I thought I would mention it.
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