The Crusader: This last character is the real superhero of the novel. He arrives at the castle while Sir Rupert is away and attempts to put things to rights. All the while, his identity is kept hidden because he wears a velvet mask. He is described by Eldred as “a whopper,” meaning he is large and strong, true heroic elements, yet his mask is more reminiscent of the Gothic. It is interesting that his name in the book is “The crusader”—he is the masked crusader, but that is not such a far cry from the “caped crusader,” Batman. In the end, it amounts to the same thing—he is fighting crime to see the castle saved and returned to its rightful owner. The astute reader will guess his identity before the novel is over—he is King Richard, and his return restores the social order to not only the castle but also to England.
I'm glad Tichelaar drew my attention to the book, and I can see why he draws attention to the resemblances between the "crusader" (not given a capital in the reissued novel) and later types like Batman. However, I see some objections to this comparison.
As I said in Part 1, I don't view "the crusader" or any of the other goodguy character in MONK, to be the main characters. They all exist to react against the schemes of Morgatani, much as Nayland Smith and Petrie define themselves by striving against Fu Manchu. Now, when one is dealing with putative ancestors of the superhero, it might not be strictly necessary that all such ancestors should be the stars of every show. Indeed, I tend to view Dirk Peters, a supporting character in Edgar Allan Poe's 1838 CONFESSIONS OF ARTHUR GORDON PYM, to have certain "superhero-like" qualities.
Like Peters, the disguised Richard is, as Tichelaar says, shown to be very strong. However, there's nothing really "super" about his strength: he's just a tough, experienced warrior. Furthermore, the crusader doesn't actually do much in the story. He fights off a trio of assassins, and bullies Eldred and Agatha-- and that's about it. Morgatani tries to take his life a couple of times, but the two of them never engage directly, though Richard does seal the Black Monk's doom at the end.
I surmise that Tichelaar's biggest reason for viewing the crusader as a proto-superhero is that during part of the novel, he wears a mask, in contrast to the Richard of IVANHOE. However, the mask is only briefly an element in the crusader's getup. When he first comes to Brandon Castle, posing as a pilgrim, he enters with his regular face hanging out, and is simply fortunate that no one there recognizes him. The author then reasoned that a subtle fellow Morgatani probably would recognize the true King of England, though-- and for that reason, the author belatedly has the disguised king wear the velvet mask, at least until he's ready to unveil himself to all and sundry.
In a word, I don't consider that everyone who wears a mask fits the mold of the superhero. In this essay, I noted how a character in Zane Grey's 1912 RIDERS OF THE PURPLE SAGE went around in a mask, and was even given a fancy name, but that this character in no way participated in the superhero idiom:
This employment of a "masked rider" trope is thus entirely functional. Bess wears a mask not to create an attitude of awe, as Zorro and the Durango Kid do, but only to camouflage her gender. (Since she is not known by any locals save the rustlers, the mask doesn't even serve to conceal her identity.)
Richard's mask does conceal his "secret identity," but again, I don't consider that he has created a double identity by donning a mask. Until the other characters in the novel are made privy to the Big Secret, he's just a pilgrim who evinces some weird habits.
If the crusader even had a moment in which he crossed swords with the main villain, as Nayland Smith and Petrie do with the minions of Fu Manchu, I might deem King Richard to be sort of a "subordinate hero" figure. But like the Richard in IVANHOE, the crusader is little more than a plot-device. He's less a subordinate hero than the "wild man" Nemoni, or a couple of the knights who more or less stand in for the absent Sir Rupert.
So-- supervillain yes. Superhero no.
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