LUDIC LOG

Let's talk about secret identities, ba-by.

The retention of a civilian alter ego was one of those comic book tropes I had a lot of trouble dealing with even when I was a shorty, and it hasn't gotten any easier since I grew up and kept reading comics, but this time because I hated them. Maintaining your straight life after being imbued with powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men struck me as somewhat analogous to the people who win $75 million in the Powerball and still go back to their jobs doing data entry for a welding supply company: sure, it might happen from time to time, but it certainly can't be the rule.

All the explanations given for sticking with the non-powered schmuck you once were before hitting the genetic jackpot always rang false to me. For instance, let's take the argument that it's not like winning the Lotto at all: superheroing don't pay the bills, this argument goes, and something's gotta keep you in house and home while you aren't off saving the world. This one's easy: why doesn't superheroing pay the bills? Surely, given the service they provide, superheroes could find someone to reimburse them for it. The government would be the obvious solution: after all, cops get paid, and so do soldiers. And responding that the heroes don't do it for money, but out of a sense of altruism doesn't really wash. After all, a lot of soldiers join the army out of a desire to do right as well, but they still expect to be given room and board and enough jack to take care of their families. If I were, for example, Spider-Man, I might decide that a lifetime of scrambling for chump change as an amateur photographer is a sucker bet, and approach the Marvel Universe equivalent of Mayor Bloomberg with a proposition: I'll go on risking my ass in exchange for a small stipend, just enough to keep Mary Jane in tight t-shirts. And if he balked, I'd inform him that L.A. and Chicago have already made me some pretty attractive offers and if he didn't like my terms, he was free to try and defeat Dr. Octopus himself, and where should I send the condolence flowers?

Another argument, slightly more sophisticated, is that superheroes make a lot of enemies (something to do with the fact that they spend all their time whaling the shit out of people), and if their civilian identities were known, people might threaten their friends and family. The goody two-boots ethical stances of most superheroes obviate the clearest solution to this problem ("Attention supervillains of Star City: anyone who harms my family or friends will be picked apart in the most painful way humanly imaginable by a giant pair of ring-powered tweezers. Love, Green Lantern"), but it's still a bit hard to understand. In fact, by maintaining a civilian identity, you're endangering far more people (your co-workers, your neighbors, everyone one your immediate vicinity) than you would by completely forsaking it. Sure, your wife and kids might be vulnerable, but you'd spare every fucking person within 100 feet of you sixteen hours a day. Besides, for some superheroes, it doesn't even make any sense on the most basic level -- for existence, Batman. What the fuck does Batman need a secret identity for? He doesn't have any loved ones to endanger. The whole reason he became a superhero in the first place is because some panicky numb-nuts wiped out his loved ones. And it's not like he has to work for a living; he can just be Batman 24/7 and stop by a P.O. box from time to time to pick up his divident checks.

In fact, the whole notion of maintaining a civilian identity often causes more problems than it solves. For Superman, it's in keeping with the nature of his character as an immigrant-made-good: even though he's an alien, he's 100% true blue American, and he recognizes that it's important for him to fit in, right down to having a day job, because that's what normal people do. (The fact that he isn't a normal person in the least, and is pathologically incapable of admitting it, is the subject of a crappy novel by Leonard Pierce, coming someday I swear to God to a bookstore near you.) But let's face it: Mr. Truth, Justice and the American Way is one big, fat, blue-haired ethics violation. He's a journalist, for Christ's sake! And he not only lies to himself and his employers on a daily basis, but he constantly exploits and even influences the news which he's meant to be reporting, a cardinal no-no in the Fifth Estate. (Peter Parker's habit of selling 'exclusive' photos of Spider-Man is equally iffy.) And look at Wonder Woman. (Look close, fellas, but don't be obvious.) She has no conceivable reason whatsoever to have a secret identity, and so people invent one for her! This is like a mailman walking around carrying an anchor.

Part of the reason that it's not immediately obvious how problematic the notion of secret identities can be is that writers are awfully damn selective about who they give super-powers to. Just as there are a lot of superheroes who are fit young white guys and not a lot who are one-legged Filipino crones, super-powers tend to manifest themselves almost exclusively in people with high-paying, rewarding careers and very rarely happen to show up in guys who work the graveyard shift at an inner-city convenience store. There are a huge number of superheroes who are millionaires, lawyers, scientists, doctors and college professors, and very few who are janitors, plumbers, shipping clerks, migrant farmworkers and dead-animal pickup technicians. The reason for this is that it strikes the writers as unseemly that their moral exemplar would just say "You know what? Fuck this! HA HA I can do anything I want!" Of all the mainstream superheroes, only the Fantastic Four seemed to realize that the acquisition of superhuman powers was their ticket to give up 9-to-5ing it forever, and only the destitute schnook Billy Batson and the Barry Allen Flash (whose day job involved lots of handling the blood and feces of dead people) had anything even remotely resembling a crappy job.

In the end, you can't really attribute this strange hiccup to anything but laziness. Most comic writers deal in trope, things that have been done a million times before and always the same way; they're not really capable of exploring the idea in any depth, so it's probably a good thing they don't try. To the slightly more skilled, though, there's a bit of fear: thinking too hard about why a superhero would bother to hold onto his old life might make him seem almost like a villain -- a little too proud, a little too self-interested. (The counter-example to this and almost every other problem I have with the storytelling in superhero comics, Alan Moore's Miracleman, throws down a gauntlet so heavy no one has yet been willing to pick it up.) But the way it stands, it's no solution. In an attempt to prop up a moral tradition, you end up selling it short: you present heroes not as people who believe they have a duty or a calling, and who are willing to make sacrifices for it, but as a sort of hobbyist, dabbling in something dangerous in between work days. It's in this way, the way of endangering their friends for the sake of a secret, that they really resemble villains; after all, when is the guy in the mask who won't let you see his face ever your friend?

You start out with a tradition. But all you end up with is a bunch of dead Pete Ross.