Once upon a time, one of the essential defining elements of superhero narratives was the secret identity.
The cultural history of the secret identity and its slow unravelling in the genre is a compelling overall subject, I think. Down at the roots, in its pulp origins, it was an early 20th Century storytelling device that allowed a hero to be both of the system and against the system, typically as a wealthy man of influence who nevertheless also wanted to strike directly at criminals, corrupt political bosses, oppressive authorities and so on. Batman is something of a latecomer version of the template with his initial 1939 appearance: The Scarlet Pimpernel in 1905, Zorro in 1919, The Shadow in 1930, The Green Hornet in 1936. There are deeper antecedents, too: The Count of Monte Cristo is basically built around a vigilante’s secret identity.
The early 20th Century pulp version generally centered on the idea that there are enemies who cannot be fought with laws (either because they make the laws as instruments of oppression, or because the representatives of law and order are so feckless and weak) and who will have no scruples about killing any declared enemy and their loved ones. In the United States during and just after Prohibition, the entanglement of organized crime and municipal political power particularly stoked the convention that a man with a lot to lose might have to hide or disguise himself in order to fight back directly, outside the law. Which, of course, was not incidentally a sentiment that flirted with the spirit of fascism in the same age, a problem that all superhero stories have had around the edges ever since.
The secret identity as a plot device didn’t develop its more elaborate features until later, I think—the idea that it expressed psychological duality; the torment of protagonists who long to tell their secret to friends, family and potential lovers but fear the consequences; and some of the hilariously overwrought storytelling that centered on the preservation of secret identities, are all tropes that really didn’t settle in fully until the so-called Silver Age.
The secret identity also spread to all kinds of superheroic characters, with a few fascinating exceptions. (The Fantastic Four most prominently so.) It’s interesting to try and track why and when the concept began to slowly erode. Famously, almost all cinematic versions of superheroes since Tim Burton’s Batman at least partially discarded the secret identity in the sense that the villain and the love interest in many of the films comes to know who the hero really is (whereupon the villain usually dies: that’s another thing that the films have done differently). The Marvel Cinematic Universe has accelerated that lack of interest in secret identities still further.
In the comics, I think you could see writers and editors begin to chafe restlessly against the secret identity as a required element of plotting and characterization by the mid-1980s. One memorable example is John Byrne’s second issue of his revamped Superman following the substantial rebooting of the character after Crisis on Infinite Earths.
I had mixed feelings about Byrne’s Superman from the outset. I was no fan of the Silver Age Superman when I was a kid: I thought the character was boring and silly, with a ridiculous supporting cast and set of adversaries. So I was the reader that DC and Byrne had in mind: they wanted to make Superman more contemporary and interesting.
I hated some elements. Clark Kent is now a successful novelist as well as journalist even though he never talks about his writing. He was never Superboy and was in fact a successful high school athlete whose powers only really developed at the end of his teen years. Krypton was a terrible place that Superman is actually grateful to have escaped once he learns more about it.
But there were some great ideas, too. Lex Luthor’s reboot was especially excellent. He went from being a criminal mad scientist angry at Superman for absurd reasons going back to their teenage years to being the oligarchic owner of the dominant corporation in Metropolis who is well-respected in polite society but is also deeply unprincipled and a serial sexual harasser. He hates Superman because Superman is a rival for power.
In this famous issue, Luthor is trying to learn more about Superman not long after his initial appearance in Metropolis. He has a task force of employees monitoring Superman’s every appearance and has sent others to investigate Clark Kent’s background. (In this reboot, Clark gets his big break at the Daily Planet by filing stories about himself. It works for Peter Parker but it feels a bit unseemly for Superman to do that.)
Luthor’s monitoring of Superman’s public activities turns up a woman who is repeatedly in the crowds when Superman is spotted, who turns out to be Lana Lang, Clark’s high-school girlfriend. The goons sent to look into Clark Kent’s background capture Ma and Pa Kent and end up bringing Lana in as well, though they didn’t know who she was. Luthor is happy to have Lana in custody—she’s the ‘mystery woman’ in the crowds. She plot-conveniently can’t be given a truth serum, so Luthor’s people physically torture her and then allow her to escape.
It’s a distressing, borderline offensive scene, with an element of what later became known as “fridging”: harming or killing a female character in order to trigger character development in a male protagonist. (In some ways, the scene presages the absolute low-water mark of the secret identity story, DC’s franchise event Identity Crisis, where an important long-term supporting character gets raped by a supervillain in the kick-off to the company-wide story.)
But it’s also Byrne announcing that everything’s going to be different now with this version of Superman: he won’t always be able to save and protect everybody. Especially not where Luthor is concerned, because Luthor has the law on his side and forms of power that mere physical might can’t counteract.
This is the first of the ways that the secret identity trope started to slowly decompose, namely, in an odd way, comics writers confirming that in fact the bad guys really do pose a serious threat to the family and friends of a superhero. (Frank Miller did a famous Daredevil story later that took this even further.) That sounds like a strengthening of the trope, but it really actually undercut its story potential somewhat. Nothing really very bad happened to heroes and their loved ones in the Silver Age in secret identity stories—if the villain learned the truth, he usually developed traumatic amnesia or had the memory wiped or some such thing by the end, and he never did anything worse than tie some supporting cast members up in his lair in the meantime. (The Green Goblin and Gwen Stacy being a major exception to this rule.)
Now suddenly here’s Lex Luthor violently torturing Lana Lang and Superman can’t touch him. Luthor kills off the underlings who kidnapped Lana, uses the only piece of kryptonite in the world to keep Superman from attacking him, and mocks Superman’s inability to do anything about it. “Yes, Superman, I was behind everything that happened in the last few days, but only you and I know it, Superman. There’s no way on earth you can connect the burglary of the Kent home or the kidnapping of the Lang woman, with Lex Luthor, Superman. Now get out of my office before I call a cop!”
By making it clear that a secret identity really is important, Byrne also makes the secret identity story something he and future writers have to treat very seriously, something they can’t just do for a lark. No more Superdickery with robots and Batman dressing up as Superman, etc.
It’s the twist ending that’s really memorable, though. Having gathered all of this evidence about Superman, Luthor’s lead computer scientist (whom Luthor has just violently coerced into having sex with him: he’s a truly despicable character in the reboot) delivers the obvious conclusion to her boss: Superman IS Clark Kent. Luthor is infuriated and rejects this out of hand. Not because he reads the evidence differently, but because he simply cannot believe that someone with the power of Superman would ever voluntarily spend some portion of his life as an ordinary person doing an ordinary job.
And again, this is in a complicated way actually eroding the future prospects of the secret identity. The other basic unstated premise of most secret identity stories is that somehow the hero’s enemies (and supporting cast) are unable to think with any clarity about what should be obvious to all of them.
The people who know the hero are often aware that their friend or family member has a habit of running out of the room whenever there is danger, is often a flake about showing up to important events, and so on. Sometimes that has real emotional and personal costs (perhaps most famously in the case of Peter Parker) but much of the time folks just shrug it off. I think more than anything else this is why the secret identity just never made it into most superhero films and has faded in the comics too: there’s a kind of soft sociopathy in a person we’re meant to like deceiving friends and family so badly, and at the same time as comics started to get slightly more adult characterizations, thinking about how you’d feel if a friend or family member always deserted you when danger threatened started to seem less light-hearted or fun as a repeated story trope.
More importantly, the more that the villains became darker and scarier, you’d think they’d start putting two and two together. In the Silver Age, there was a kind of understanding baked into the milieu: none of the people who regularly encountered a superhero, friend or foe, would recognize their voice, or the visible part of their face. Or in Superman’s case, somehow nobody would notice that Clark Kent was just Superman with glasses. That’s what Byrne is playing around with in this issue. It’s not just Luthor who can’t believe that Kent and Superman are the same. Superman doesn’t wear a mask, so nobody even assumes he has a secret identity—they just think he’s out saving people all the time. (In his almost-metafictional comic book Astro City, the writer Kurt Busiek more or less takes this proposition to the next step with his Superman-ish character Samaritan, who really is essentially stuck with having to save people every waking hour of the day.)
Once it’s perfectly plausible that villains should or could figure it out—Ra’s al-Ghul in the Batman comics was one of the earliest to simply think it through (Batman has to be wealthy; Batman lives in Gotham City; Bruce Wayne is wealthy and lives in Gotham City; Bruce Wayne’s corporation has bought all the equipment that Batman needs; Bruce Wayne has a motivation to be Batman; hence Bruce Wayne is Batman) then the need to develop more character-specific reasons why villains either can’t figure it out, don’t want to figure it out, or won’t do any of the obvious retaliatory things if they do figure it out. Or otherwise, just slowly phase out the secret identity for the most part, a genre development that was underway even before the MCU.
I think that’s been for the best. There are still occasional stories about alter egos that work, but it was mostly a limiting and sometimes unintentionally ugly feature of the genre by the end of the Silver Age. Byrne’s attempt here to develop a new narrative structure around Clark Kent/Superman didn’t really hold up very long (among other reasons, because Lois Lane became privy to the secret and eventually married Clark) but it still an interesting story to read in terms of marking the genre’s transitions.