It took Topher Moore, a Gretna 13-year-old, nine hours to finish trick-or-treating on Saturday. People kept stopping to talk to him, said his mother, Manda Arnold-Moore.
“Someone was like, ‘Oh my gosh, it’s our local celebrity,’” Arnold-Moore said.
That’s because Topher is a quarterfinalist in the Stan Lee Foundation’s Super Kid contest. It’s a nationwide online competition that recognizes “everyday heroic kids” — children who are kind, courageous and creative in their daily lives.
Arnold-Moore said she heard about the contest at a comic-con, a convention for comic book fans, over the summer.
Topher is on the autism spectrum and has “a deep love” for superheroes and their worlds, she said, so the Gretna Middle School seventh grader and his mother attend lots of local comic-cons.
“It was kind of just like a whim, like one of those random competition things,” Arnold-Moore said. “I thought, ‘Might as well.’ So I applied to it, not thinking, and then he got through the first round, and then the second round, and then the top five, and then it just kept going. I was like, ‘Oh wow, we’re really doing this.’”
The competition is based on votes, and the winner will be animated into a comic book character in the Stan Lee universe, win a trip to the 2027 Comic Con in Los Angeles and $25,000.
Voting closes Thursday, and you can vote for Topher online here.
When Topher started to move up in the competition, his mother said she was shocked — in a good way.
“How did you feel, Toph?” she said she asked her son.
“I felt like you did,” he said.
Topher is hoping to win, although he’s nervous about being on a plane for the first time, he said.
He already has ideas for the character he’d like to be animated into, a superhero he created named Blue Justice.
“The storyline is going to be this mad scientist named Professor Scarface who makes a robotic version of me,” Topher said.
Professor Scarface and the robotic Blue Justice are evil, and the real Blue Justice has to fight them, he said.
Even if he doesn’t win, the experience has been a “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” Arnold-Moore said. She and Topher have met so many people — both locally and across the country — through the competition.
Gretna Middle School has encouraged students to vote for Topher, and his mother said she’s spoken with the parents of other finalists, who live in different places across the country.
“Sometimes they’re like, ‘My kid didn’t make it, so I’m voting for your kid,’” she said.
“That’s so cool,” Topher said with a smile.
All of the attention is what prolonged his Halloween trick-or-treating, to the point where his feet hurt afterwards, Topher said, though it was worth it because of the amount of candy he accumulated.
Dressed as Spider-Noir, a black-and-white version of Spider-Man from an alternate universe, Topher trick-or-treated with a group of his friends, who were dressed as other characters from the Spiderverse.
Topher and his mother are no strangers to making superhero costumes. They buy some pieces and make others for his comic-con outfits. Topher has been Red Hood from the DC Universe, Batman from the 1999 Batman Beyond television series, and Metal Sonic and Bowser Junior from the Super Mario franchise.
But Spider-Man is Topher’s favorite superhero, and he prefers the Tobey Maguire character, although he and his friends went to the movie theater on opening night to see the new Tom Holland movie.
He likes to talk to other kids about superheroes, Arnold-Moore said, and when picking him up from his summer program, she’d find him reading comic books to younger kids.
“The little kids just kind of flocked to him, and he’d just be out on the playground with a circle full of kids in front of him, just reading away,” she said. “They were like, ‘It’s reading time with Toph, just give us five more minutes.’”
Topher is also an advocate against bullying, which he’s had personal experience with, his mother said.
“Bullying, historically, has led to bad things,” Topher said. “Not for me, but in history in general.”
His middle school and his elementary school went “above and beyond” to handle any incidents, Arnold-Moore said, and Topher has a good group of friends who stick together.
“He does a good job of speaking up for some of his friends who are quieter,” she said.
These are all reasons why Topher is a good fit for the Super Kid competition, she said.
Topher said he loves representing Gretna in the competition. He loves that the Pittsylvania County town goes all out for Halloween and has all of his favorite foods, including a Dairy Queen with the full menu.
He hopes that the small town gets more recognition as “the best place on earth,” he said.
