A SUITABLE JOB FOR A HERO?
Saving the world is nice, but it won't pay the bills.

The 'secret identity' has always been a core ingredient in superhero fiction, and part of having a secret identity means having an occupatin. In the early days, the easy solution was to make your hero a wealthy playboy, leaving him plenty of time to pursue his other interests, but there are only so many playboys the world can handle. That's why Spidey snaps photos for the Daily Bugle, Starman buys and sells antiques and collectables, and Voodoo makes her living as a stripper.

We decided to ask the comic fans who do these jobs for real; could you spare the time to fight crime? Would the Huntress really make a convincing schoolteacher? Is Daredevil a likely candidate for the law? And does Superman have what it takes to be a reporter? Here's what we learned.

Matt Murdock, aka Daredevil, is a criminal lawyer working with the disadvantaged in New York's Hell's Kitchen. He shares a practice with his old friend Foggy Nelson. We asked Edinburgh lawyer Paul O'Brien if he could cope with the lifestyle of the Man Without Fear.

"Let's be clear here from the outset. Of course I wouldn't want to be Daredevil. Aside from the fact that I like my eyesight, the man has spent the last fifteen odd years worth of stories in a near permanent state of mental distress and misery, with a wide selection of arch-enemies trying to ruin his life and/or kill him. In these circumstances, being Daredevil could only possibly appeal to a particularly deranged sub-species of masochist. Given a choice between being him, and having a nice cosy middle-class lifestyle complete with colour vision, I'll take the cosiness, thanks.

"I'm a solicitor, and I work in the court department for one of the biggest firms in Scotland. Which means, unlike a lot of lawyers, I really do spend all my time doing litigation, as opposed to, say, conveyancing. I spend most of my time doing commercial disputes. As a general rule, we don't do criminal work, and we don't do legal aid work.

"Which is kind of a shame, for these purposes, since that seems to be where a lot of Matt's client base lies. Like most fictional lawyers, Matt spends an awful lot of time doing criminal defence work (and living damned well off it, compared to the real defence lawyers I know), but he also seems to have a kind of broad practice beyond that. Daredevil obviously has some kind of handy thirty-five hour day in which he can fit in two separate identities on top of running his legal practice. Further, not only does he have to work the usual insane hours being put in by partners in legal practices, he has to do so while pretending that he's doing his entire job in braille, which means it ought to take him even longer than anyone else if he's going to keep up the dual identity thing at all convincingly.

"Secondly, while Nelson and Murdock could just about plausibly carve out a niche market in something or other, their continual wheeling out as the Marvel Universe's all-purpose lawyers is insane. There's no way on earth they can be specialists in all these fields - especially with the sort of library that two lawyers could afford between them - yet any broadly sympathetic character in the Marvel Universe is guaranteed to hire them for even the most challenging and unusual of cases. (If they're not available, then they ask Jennifer Walters next.)

"What Matt does have going for him as a lawyer is his whole 'I can tell whether you're lying from your heartbeat' routine. Awfully helpful, that. Great for negotiations. Lets you know if the other side are bluffing. That's something that would genuinely come in useful. I'll take that bit of his powers if it's going.

"Other than that, I'll pass. I've got a great little job with plenty of entertainingly exotic litigation, plenty of specialists on hand for the hard bits, and a decent income. Matt, in the real world, would have a much less interesting selection of cases, would be dropping dead from exhaustion and overwork, and to judge from his usual mental state, would have topped himself years ago. It's not exactly a hard choice, is it now?"

Helena Bertinelli, aka The Huntress, is one of Batman's extended family of superheroes, fighting crime in Gotham city. By profession, the Huntress is a schoolteacher at Gotham Hights high school. We asked Kate Hahn, a schoolteacher in the greater Chicago area, how the life of a teacher compares to the life of the Huntress.

"So, you're a superhero like the Huntress. You run around all night in spandex and a mask, and try to catch the bad guys. By day, you're a ... teacher?

"As someone who works with 'at-risk' high school kids, I can tell you that there isn't very much time left in a day for superheroing. You get up at 6 A.M. to get dressed and go to work, and work until 3 P.M. if you're lucky. And I'm just an instructional aide! Full classroom teachers also have hefty after-school responsibilities like chess club or girls' basketball teams. That means weekend conferences and matches. And of course, there's always a ton of homework that needs grading, and parent phone calls to make. Those don't always get finished during the school day.

"I suppose the Huntress could make a decent teacher, though. She would be able to instill a strong sense of morality and justice in her students in the classroom. If she could sponsor something like Mock Trial, she could turn some of her students into supporters of justice and law, and show how you can get sentenced in a trial. She could provide an understanding ear and a swift kick in the butt to kids who are borderline or at-risk for 'falling into the wrong crowd'.

"But, let's not forget about summer. No classes then if you can get out of summer sports and summer school. Lots of time to fight crime uninterrupted, and if you spread your salary out through the year, you don't even have to do real work to support yourself. Not that a teacher's salary is that high, but it'll do.

"People who are teachers become teachers because they have a love of knowledge, and they want to instill that same love of knowledge in their students along with a small dose of moral character. They want to help kids make those difficult decisions.

"Would I want to be the Huntress? I don't know. I care too much about my students, and I'm a bit of a wimp. It would be difficult to sweep through Gotham at night and have to pick up some of your students from third period. On the other hand, school's out for the summer. No need to worry about calling in sick the morning after a big battle, or getting semester grades in on time. So I suppose the excitement would do nicely for filling those long summer days..."

Superman, aka Clark Kent, is best known to the people of Metropolis as the mighty Man of Steel, champion of the people. He's also a journalist for a major metropolitan newspaper, The Daily Planet. Jacob Michaels writes for The Centre Daily Times in Pennnsylvania, and has never leapt a building in a single bound.

"A journalist with superpowers in a contradiction in many ways, though also does make some sense.

"On one hand, journalists are supposed to stay above the news. It's not our job to make stories and force readers to think a certain way. Journalism, at its best, explains what happens so readers can understand it. It may analyze trends or investigate official business, but its job is to disclose information. It should serve as a watchdog so the public can hold its government accountable.

"On the other hand, it is there to serve the public. It is the only job given protection in the American Constitution. The idea of a free press is considered an essential basic of a true democracy. Journalism has a critical job of ensuring the 'evil' people in our society - those who would prey on people who can't defend themselves - are brought to light, so the proper authorities can bring them to justice. Is that so different from what a superhero does?

"A superhero in a newspaper would have easy access to information he or she would need to fight injustice. He would hear immediately reports on the police scanner about fires, medical emergencies and other crimes. He would have first access to stories about corruption, letting him take a hand in that. However, it would run into the same basic problem any part-time hero would have. Taking off all the time will get you fired really quickly.

"Ignoring that reality, I don't think a superhero could be a good news journalist. He would have to constantly violate a code of ethics that demands impartiality. How does someone cover a robbery when he was the one that foiled it in an alter ego? How do you criticize a fire company for being unprepared to save three children in a burning tenement when you know you could have saved them if you weren't being forced to re-write a town council story by your editor? The conflict of interest would just be far too much. Journalistic heroes are men like Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, men who did their job and uncovered crimes at the highest posts of American government.

"It's been a while since I've read Superman, but my main recollection of his newsroom is that it's similar to most fictionalized newsrooms. It gets it right when something exciting (i.e. some type of disaster usually) is going on, but it misses all the hurry-up-and-wait of regular stories. I don't recall Kent ever sitting there waiting for some source to call him back, or having to deal with some idiot who refuses to go on the record, or some other moron calling because he doesn't like where a comma is in his horoscope.

"On the other hand, I do often call my boss 'chief', mostly due to reading Jimmy Olson's exploits as a young boy. I've yet to have her yell 'don't call me chief', though."

Andrew Wheeler is Editorial Consultant of PopImage.

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