Ashen Hood

Ashen Hood is a fictional character, a superhero, appearing in the Overlap webcomic series created by writer and illustrator Joseph Fake Cross. He is a mysterious man in a long, dark gray cape and hood who never shows his face. He commonly speaks in a natural, serious tone, but his voice seems to be distorted by some kind of eletronic device.

The character was inspired by the well-known fictional DC Comics superhero Batman, and shares multiple attributes with the latter. Just like Batman, Ashen Hood wears a long, dark-collored cape and acts mostly during the night, hunting criminals in the shadows and using the fear of his targets at his advantage. However, the comic never shows how Ashen Hood gets rid of the criminals, most of the time, only that they are in great pain after he "abducts" them. The biggest differences between the two characters is that, one: Ashen Hood does not seem to despise the idea of killing unredeemable villains or causing severe injuries to incapacitate others of coming back to crime; and two: his identity and backstory are still to be revealed.

One of his more notable qualities is that he always has a "plot-device" under his cape to solve any situation that runs out of control, making the efforts of the rest of the team during the chapter to have been completely in vain. He also seems to appear randomly at the best times, like he just teleported from another place. This allows Joseph, the writer, to be able to solve any kind of situation, no matter how complicated, in just one page using Ashen Hood and even nicknamed him "Edge Ex Machina". When accused of lazy writing, Joseph defends himself saying such thing only happens in "slice of life" chapters, and it prevents the plot to be overcomplicated and still allowing continuity in later episodes (even though he explicitly admitted being lazy to think through these moments with an actual solution).

It is common for Ashen Hood to show his arms and gadgets, but he almost never opens his cape or allows others to see through it, making the rest of his equipment a complete mystery to both his enemies and allies. Some characters even expeculate the possibility of him being some kind of extradimensional entity, and that his cape is actually a portal to a space from where he can get (or create) anything he might need at the moment. Needless to say, his real identy and origin are currently unknown by any other character in the comic. However, the fact that he can be affected by the same effects that other heroes was exposed to, such as age reversion and "personality extraction", suggests he is a human being.