Okay, the Paris Hilton post was a monumental mistake. In my defense, I am still recovering from my Gephardization. Come on, you have to love 20 year old Bloom County references, right? To attempt to redeem myself from that last bit of Shark Jumping, we could talk about comic books if people wanted to. I guess. I mean, that's supposedly what we do here. I'm not sure, myself, I'm not very literate. I mean, I can read, I just generally choose not to. It's surprisingly hard, have you ever noticed that? I mean, the tiny squiggles just keep on coming.
That's basically why I chose to comment on comic books, because there's a lot of pictures and I thought it would be easier. But no! There's tons of words in there too. And some of those words are latin, even. Or have the prefix 'hyper' on them, and I have no idea what that means. Prefix, I mean. I know what hyper is, I eat a lot of sugar. I eat it out of the bag. While reading Spidey Super Stories collections.
Anyway, comic books. What should we talk about? Well, we could talk about one of the most persistent tropes of the genre, but I have a hard time remembering which color trope is. I think it's kind of purpley.
Anyway, yeah, I was thinking about talking about secret identities over the years. Superman had one, so it became an entrenched part of the genre or sub-genre or whatever you want to call it. Captain Marvel clearly has one of the best ones, since he magically transforms into a full grown adult with a serious squinting problem. Batman has one even though he's so wealthy he could probably openly beat vagrants to mush in public in front of the cops and they'd help him find his car keys in the puddle of blood. Spider-Man had one before he told everyone what it was, leading an entire stunned world to exclaim "Who?" before going about their lives and a bunch of pissed off murderers and sociopaths to start finding phone books and looking up "May Parker" on MySpace. (MySpace being so important to the American people in the MU, it actually defeated Captain America.) Come to think of it, the whole Civil War deal more or less bones the idea of the secret ID in any comics put out by that publisher, huh? I think it's called Marvel Comics, but again, the near-illiteracy makes it hard for me to tell. It could be Marvelous Grapes for all I know.
Now, there are a lot of silly ideas in comic books. Hard radiation generally doesn't kill you when it can make you nine feet tall and green, spiders can apparently sense danger, immensely wealthy people spend a lot of time designing spandex bodysuits to go punch people instead of hiring someone to do that, 'Sweet Christmas' is an effective swear phrase, flying faster than the eye can follow doesn't cause sonic booms, bras are apparently made of an invisible anti-gravity material and no one's fat unless they're really, really fat, there are people who dress like Walruses and attack people dressed in red and blue costumes that supposedly are spider-related, there's a lot there to look at and dispassionately deride as foolish. I personally don't mind foolishness, because if not for it I wouldn't be here. Is the secret identity really that bad an idea, though? Does it need dismantling?
I'm reminded of the Silver Age Flash being unmasked by one of his enemies (Captain Cold? I forget which one, I wasn't even alive yet) who then knew what he looked like under his mask, but since he wasn't famous in real life, that information didn't really help him much. Does this prove that secret identities are inherently silly and should be done away with, or that by having one, the Flash made sure that Barry Allen wasn't famous in the first place? Well, smarter people who haven't been hit in the head with such frequency will have to debate that one.
Posted by Jonathan Tuttle at June 13, 2007 10:00 AM
If it helps any, the Rogue who unmasked Barry was Heat Wave, if memory serves.
One of the really annoying things about Countdown is the fact that everyone seems to know who Jason Todd is. And if they know who he is, and was, then they know exactly who Batman is. It's not rocket science.
Speaking of Jason, I've been trying to figure out what exactly happened when Superboy punched the universe. Did he bring Jason back to life or did he just alter history so that Jason never died? The former seems more likely, since Batman's so flumoxxed about Jason being back, but then again, Bats discovered that Jason had never been in the coffin, so that makes me even more confused.
Well, back in the 90s, the Bat-editors decreed that no one knew Batman's secret identity (not even Superman, who was no longer his best friend), decades of continuity to the contrary.
So the influence of Superfriends-fetishism led by Meltzer has now resulted in everyone knowing Batman's secret ID and calling each other by first names in public.
It's pretty much the same kind of stupid.
Greg: Puhleaze--the Superfriends fetish started well before Meltzer with Waid and the whole Superman + Batman = OTP thing he's had going.
as for Spider-Man, I said back in May, and I'm restating, for the record, that my guess on One More Day is that he wishes, probably thru Doctor Strange to have his ID back and no marriage and everything.
The thing that intrigues me about secret identities is the relation of the civilian identity to the heroic identity. Because there are so many ways it can work:
- Superman uses his Clark Kent identity as a way of relaxing and staying connected to humanity, and in a perfect world would be Clark Kent all the time
- Batman uses his Bruce Wayne identity to facilitate his Batman activities, but if it was possible he'd just be Batman all the time
- Spider-Man would like to use his Spider-Man identity as a way of blowing off steam and taking a break from the quotidian pressures of his Peter Parker identity, but the Spider-Man identity has pressures of its own, which means he's got to do a tricky balancing act. Up until recently, anyway.
- the Legion of Super-Heroes basically don't have secret identities. They're the same people in or out of costume.
- Captain Marvel's secret identity is a whole other person.
- The Hulk's secret identity is almost a whole other person.
- Firestorm's secret identity is more than one whole other person... sort of.
- Wonder Woman's secret identity is just a convenience. Even if she likes being Diana Prince she could do without it at the drop of a hat if she had to.
- Pig-Iron of the Zoo Crew doesn't have a secret identity anymore, but the event that transformed him into a superhero also changed his personality.
- the Thing can't use his civilian identity either, but in his mind he's still pretty much the same guy.
And so on. I'm sure there are more different examples, but the point is that this is a fruitful area for characterization, and therefore I don't think we're done with it.
I think between Identity Crisis and Civil War any story that involves secret ids as a plot point will be avoided by the writers. Look at how quickly Bart dropped his in Flash. And before that almost as soon as Wally got his back
he revealed it to many of the people who had known it before.
I think they have to accept that readers are a bit older and understand that a secret id would be virtually impossible to keep in an era when you can Google anyone and paparazzi are everywhere.
Nevertheless, it is a long standing convention that won't be going away and has lent itself to a few decent stories over the decades. Certainly the last few years of Daredevil wouldn't have even been possible without secret id as the starting point.
By the way, I think there should be a supervillainess whose secret identity is Mia Culpa.
That could be Maxima's assumed civilian ID. Mia "Maxima" Culpa.
I'll get my coat.
They did something like the Flash thing in an episode of Justice League Unlimited. Flash and Lex Luthor have switched bodies, and Lex/Flash finds himself in front of a mirror and says, "Well, at least now I can find out the Flash's true identity." He unmasks, waits a beat, and deadpans "And I have no idea who that is."
DNA databases killed the secret identity suspension-of-disbelief.
The thing to do is not look at someone's face (how many people in your city would you recognize?) but get their fingerprints and DNA (mail it to your hideout if temporarily in their body). Fingerprints and DNA are still much easier to search than faces.
And of course the CSI elements you are talking about are the very things that make a story like Identity Crisis not work in the 21st century. Writers cannot expect readers to ignore plot points that they see every week on tv.
Secret identities have always been a little dodgy. I've been reading Showcase Presents Hawkman and there's one story in which Mavis Trent happens to have dyed her hair red (the same color as Sheyra "Hawkgirl" Hol). You can imagine what happens next ... Mavis happens upon Hawkgirl's costume and puts it on. Then Hawkman comes along and, seeing a red-haired Mavis Trent in the Hawkgirl costume, says "Hey Mavis! Why did you dye your hair and what are you doing in my wife's costume?"
Just kidding. Actually, Hawkman does not realize that the woman in the Hawkgirl costume is not his wife. Apparently, the only distinguishing features about Sheyra Hol (and Mavis Trent, for that matter) are hair color and wardrobe.
Likewise, it's hard to see how anybody who has ever met Dick Grayson would be fooled by Robin's domino mask, and yet somehow they are.
If you think about these things too much, you get stories like "Superman uses super hypnosis to subtly change the way everyone sees Clark Kent." Best not to think about these things too much.
The revolving Batmen back in the '90s gave a lie to the unrecognizability of secret identities. It was never a problem to tell Michael Keaton Batman from Val Kilmer Batman from George Clooney Batman. Admittedly, all of those people have famous faces, but then so does Brice Wayne. If Donald Trump started running around in a Batman costume, would we all sit there wondering who the hell it could be?
In a medium of fantasy, "it just does" is an underrated explanation.
Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman revealed their secret identities to the Justice League in either the Divided We Fall or United We Stand stories, in the aftermath of the Rha's al Ghul story "Tower of Babel."
Basically, revealing their identities was a way of saying mea culpa for Batman plotting countermeasures against all the leaguers.
I'm not thrilled with Meltzer's new league, but I really enjoyed his scenes with the big three, partially because it drew on this (more recent) continuity in ways that I thought were pretty nuanced and fun. In a larger sense (and this will displease a lot of you) I enjoyed the whole cycle from Identity Crisis through One Year Later because it draws on continuity and character development over the last decade, to the point where I can't say for sure where the "backward compatibility" ends and the forward planning begins.