Villain Names and Secret Societies

Anytime you talk about comic books and the like, someone outside the genre notes that the entire thing is unrealistic.  While the superpowers and a number of the pieces of equipment are definitely in the land of fantasy, a lot of other things take flack as well.  A number of people note the ridiculousness of the different code names and villains, secret identities and secret societies and what not.


But I've noticed more and more that the ostentatious names are not that far fetched from the real world:

Real world serial killers with fanciful titles:

The Death Angel
The Night Caller
The Granny Killer
Auntie Thally
The Mutilator
Lainz Angel's of Death
The Vampire Rapist
The Beast
Al-Tourbini
The French Ripper
The Angel Maker of St. Pauli
Metal Fang
The Fisher
The Hippopotamus
Phoenix Strangler
Wolf Man

And that is without getting into some of the more famous instances like Jack the Ripper, the Zodiac Killer and DB Cooper.

Then we have various societies such as:

Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn

And then there's the Killdozer incident.

Really, the world is a bizarre, bizarre place.  And these tendencies are NOT recent.  Fanciful titles are centuries old, thousands of years old.