There are probably a lot of difficult things about being a superhero (not that I would know, wink), never being free to tell your friends your true identity, having the woman at the Ukrop’s dry cleaners look at you all funny when you take in your costume to get the funky stench of evil cleaned out (The Funky Stench of Evil, needless to say, would be a totally sweet name for a band), and the fact that unless your car either transforms into a different car, or you can afford a second vehicle and a secret garage, everyone is going to wonder why you always drive around town in the Yakmobile (assuming of course, that you’re a yak-themed superhero).  The greatest challenge of all though, I imagine, is coming to realize that everyone you know is a complete retard.  Take Superman for instance, his costume largely consists of taking off his glasses and slicking his hair back, yet this fools absolutely everybody he knows.  And it’s not just that Clark Kent is such a different guy that no one suspects him of it, nobody even ever comes up to him and says, “Y’know Clark, this is gonna sound crazy, but you kinda look like Superman.”  Nope, even supervillians, some of whom dedicate their entire professional career to discovering Superman’s secret identity ever stop and think, “Hey, there’s that guy that always delivers Superman’s messages to the public, who also happens to bear a striking physical resemblance to Superman while never being seen at the same time as Superman.  I wonder if he could tell me who Superman really is.”  I mean, what does he do when he goes to the beach?  Does he have to wear big ol’ space goggle sunglasses and one of those little old lady swim caps?  Otherwise, he might lose his glasses and get his hair wet and then everyone would realize the truth.

            I mean, just speaking from experience here, you’d think that as you were rescuing one of your closest friends from a meteor, they might make the connection that you were, in fact, not merely a superhero but also the guy they’d been hanging out with since 6^th Grade.  To illustrate this point, here’s a true story.  For a time, while I was in college, I was severely into the dangerous and silly sport of padded weapons fighting.  Every week after pro-wrestling was over, me and a bunch of the guys from my dorm would go out on the basketball court and beat the tar out of each other with swords made out of PVC and foam insulation, held together with duct tape.  Well, as our weapon-building skills and lethality progressed, we started to develop padded armor and other protection gear to help cut down on the number of fatalities we incurred.  Now, it came to pass, that one day I was out on the basketball court with another guy, dressed from head to toe in about fifty pounds of surplus football/hockey/baseball equipment (into which I have installed, to my everlasting satisfaction, a self-contained air conditioning system), exchanging a whomping with another fellow, of similar attire.  All of a sudden, I heard a girl call out, “Ben, how’s it going?”  So I looked around, expecting to see some girl who lived in my dorm and knew my pastimes well enough to recognize me.  Instead, I saw, some 300 feet away, a girl who I hadn’t seen since high school, who I didn’t even know all that well back then, who didn’t even go to JMU but was just visiting a friend of hers for the weekend.  And yet, despite the fact that I was halfway across campus, completely covered in armor, and she wasn’t even looking for me, she recognized me instantly. 

            Which is all really just a roundabout way of saying that there is no way on Earth that Spiderman could save Kierstin Dunst from the Green Goblin and carry her halfway across town, having a merry little conversation all the while, and not have her immediately recognize him as Toby Macguire, the other guy she’s madly in love with.  Look at it this way; if I were to dress up like a teacup mammoth, and thwart the vile schemes of Spanky, Lord of the Mole People, right in front of Channel 6 News, nobody would be fooled.  Like, the new anchor (Biff Thumpchest, Richmond’s voice of reason) would say “Who is that masked man?” and simultaneously, all across town, thousands upon thousands of people would exclaim, “Holy crap! That’s Ben!” before calling in to the station and revealing my ever so briefly secret identity to the world. 

            So yeah, comic book secrecy is so totally unrealistic it’s not even funny (except clearly, its extremely funny or I wouldn’t have just written about it), unless you accept as axiomatic that absolutely everybody who lives in comic books is 200 proof doofus.  Either that, or Richmond is just populated with the most the most observant people ever to walk the Earth (which while distinctly possible, doesn’t excuse the doofishness of the rest of the world).  Next time you think superheroes have it easy then, just remember all the stuff they have to put up with from dumb people.