The secret identity is second only to colored tights and a cape as a distinguishing mark of superheroes. While the costume serves a certain pragmatic function in comics, by offering a colorful sign of a protagonist's importance, the importance of the secret identity is far less obvious.

The only reason offered within the narrative world of the heroes themselves is that wearing a mask prevents the loved ones of the hero from being made a part of the plans of the hero's enemies. This logic is ridiculous for a number of reasons, most notably that writers can't resist including the intimates of the hero in their stories despite the protection offered by domino masks.

If we look to the first superhero, Superman himself, this reasoning is even more dubious, since Lois Lane is as close to Superman as to Clark, and is in just as much danger on her own. Nor should we expect a realistic reason to explain the existence of a secret that can be hidden by a pair of glasses.

Some readers have proposed that the secret identity is meant to make the hero vulnerable in spite of his otherwise limitless power, as an arbitrary and conventional taboo. This too is an unhappy explanation; while writers have continually developed new Achilles' heels as necessary, the secret identity is used as such rarely in comparison to its ubiquity in the genre.

The notion of a secret identity was borrowed from pulp and film adventures such as the Scarlet Pimpernel and Zorro, in which some brigand would be able to "hide in plain sight" because he wore a mask as himself and acted utterly unheroic in his secret identity. The ironies created were simple and powerful: a hopelessly effete nobleman would be free to discover information crucial to his work as a brigand, while his enemies would become increasingly frustrated by their inability to locate the romantic adventurer. The just, yet unacknowledged ruler took on the identity of a failed nobleman as a part of his plans.

As they did with so many of the tropes they borrowed from other media, Siegel and Shuster abstracted this mechanism, removing its subtext as commentary on good government, and the possibilities of talking to their enemies unrecognized. They directed it to a quite different, if equally fantastic, end, preserving only its potential for irony and the clear sense that an extravagant costume was a display of the protagonist's true character, disguising a secret that was actually false.

In the earliest stories, Clark Kent is "really" Superman. The true narrative function of the secret identity reveals itself at that moment when Clark's frustration over a seemingly insurmountable obstacle is replaced by the exhilaration of realizing that "this is a job for Superman!" The appeal of this for Depression-era readers is unsurprising; it is certainly no coincidence that a hero whose name came from writings of Nietzsche that inspired Hitler also used an epithet, "man of steel," that translated the adopted name Stalin. The '30's were years that demanded common men with uncommon virtues. The US was undoubtedly lucky that our champion was a fiction.

The most popular adaptations of this formula in the early years of superheroes were with Batman and Captain Marvel. Batman has always had the advantage of having been created by opportunistic literary and artistic thief Bob Kane; Kane had no idea exactly what Siegel and Shuster were doing with Superman, so he took the basics of costume, secret identity and crime fighting and filled it out with whatever he could use from the pulps and other comics. In his secret identity, as with so much else, the Batman was a conservative response to "The Man of Tomorrow" - like the masked avengers of movies and pulps, his mask allowed him to move around the world secretly in the guise of an effete playboy.

Captain Marvel, on the other hand, topped Superman at his own game in this regard as in many others. In the same way as magic and mythology replaced science in the world of the Big Red Cheese, the (mock) milksop Clark Kent was replaced by a (genuinely) crippled boy Billy Batson. The power of this image, an orphaned newsboy who with a magic word could turn into a superhero, for a Depression-dazed audience is easy enough to grasp. This total rupture between normal life and heroic life has only rarely been emulated, most remarkably by Michael Fleischer's stories of the Spectre in the early seventies. It was not until Alex Ross and Mark Waid worked out their superheroic meta-narrative KINGDOM COME that someone took advantage of the fact that Marvel was both fully human and fully superhuman.

For another popular hero of the Golden Age, Captain America, his secret identity as an enlisted man was essentially the human equivalent of the role he played as hero, namely a man doing his duty for his country. This equivalence of secret identity with superhero role became a dominant trend at DC during the Silver Age, although in most of these cases it was the role of superhero that was added on to the original human identity. The Flash, the Green Lantern and the Atom all developed superpowers that essentially extended their abilities to function in their chosen fields as police scientist, test pilot and physicist, respectively. The message here seems to be that seemingly mundane jobs in the military-industrial complex of the fifties and sixties potentially carry with them the ability to alter reality in a very immediate way. Superspeed and power ring serve as more personal and romantic versions of the seemingly limitless power offered by the scientists of the Atomic Age.

The initial premise of Spider-Man suggested that this too was one of the classic science heroes of the Silver Age, in this case a student whose laboratory experiments with radiation had an unintended side effect. But if we ask who is the real person and who is the pose, the question becomes complicated because Peter Parker himself wrestles with multiple identities even before the accident that makes him Spider-Man. Parker has become familiar with negotiating multiple identities in his various roles as star science student to his teachers, antisocial geek to his peers, and fragile treasure to his elderly aunt and uncle. His decision, on getting his new powers, to keep them secret is reflexive: he begins wearing a mask even before he has the idea of a uniform, let alone of fighting crime.

Stan Lee seems to have grasped that the notion that a secret identity is not merely a fantasy of power, but could serve, as it did for Superman and Captain Marvel, as a way of making plain the gap that stands between the ideals and circumstances of the reader. But by also taking advantage of more traditional narrative tools for portraying multiple social roles, Lee created a figure with whom readers could empathize, not merely because of the specifics of his situation, but because of the lack of specificity of his identity. There is no real Spider-Man or Peter Parker, only various more or less accurate versions formed by accidents of fate and affection. The gaps between the various identities that are made explicit by the presence of superpowers then become obstacles in the way of a truly authentic existence, obstacles that can never be overcome.

In general, Lee and the writers who followed him at Marvel had less interest in the secret identity as something to be hidden, and instead viewed how superpowers could dramatically transform how a normal person was viewed in the eyes of the world. The Thing and the Hulk replace Superman as an image of superhuman strength, suggesting that such power can serve to separate a man from his fellows. Thor proposed an even more radical situation, in which the superman was the functional social persona in a world of gods and extraterrestrials, while his human hosts and poses became essentially disposable tools.

In the late sixties and early seventies, a number of writers discovered even more bizarre variants of the secret identity that reflected a sense among the young people of the time that the self was a shifting, transient thing. Deadman was a ghost who could enter into the body and life of anyone he chose, and whose sense of self was reduced to his desire for revenge against his killer. Swamp Thing had a similar origin in murder, but in his case the remnants of his personality went beyond both the human and the animal to animate the plant realm.

These transhuman identities have continued to stand as a sort of outer limit to which superhero books occasionally return, but they have never set the standard. By the mid-seventies, a reworking of the Marvel themes of the sixties produced the most popular identity crisis in comics, that of the young X-Men. Originally a creation of Lee and Kirby, the identification of these superhumans as "mutants" emphasized the notion of alienation from humanity. The separation of powers from "true self" was complete: for the X-Men the primary question raised by their existence is whether they are the superhuman beings that their powers have created, or the teenagers, with simple human desires for acceptance and love, that their emotions indicate.

Given that the X-Men have remained the most popular comic heroes for 25 years now, it seems clear that this particular development of the secret identity has touched an aspect of modern life that transcends particular economic crises or fashions of thought. By positing that being a mutant and being a person are two poles of identity, the drama of the X-Men articulated a general sense that the power offered by the military-industrial complex and big business was insufficient to assure a meaningful life. Rather, such meaning needs to be found within the friendships and sexual relationships that create for the modern Westerner a sense of "family." The craving for family has in general arisen as the primary obsession of the West in the late twentieth century. It may be significant that the adolescent eroticization of the family in works like X-MEN has been accompanied by a sense that eros, and in particular a sexual desire for children, is the primary threat to the integrity of the family.

The power of the X-Men paradigm has limited the experimentation with secret identities among American writers. This has not been the case among British writers, probably because superhero comics have preserved a closer relationship with the counterculture than they have in the US. The study of identity in the works of Alan Moore, Grant Morrison and Neil Gaiman is a project worthy of a dissertation, but a few observations will serve as a useful conclusion to this article.

Alan Moore has been the most fluent in his play with the notion of identity in superheroes. Starting from his use of the Swamp Thing to depict various occult notions of self and will, he has received the most critical acclaim for his work in WATCHMEN, a sustained meditation on how the idea of costumed crime-fighting could allow various broken personalities to find transhuman modes of living. Nevertheless, it is in his recent experiments in the various "America's Best Comics" titles that his most extensive developments of the trope can be found. Whether he is relocating stolid superman Tom Strong throughout space and time or playing out the HILL STREET BLUES-style soap opera of TOP 10, Moore continues to see new expressive angles in the interplay of superheroism and daily life.

For some of his successors, most notably Grant Morrison and Warren Ellis, Moore's play has been seen as a challenge to imagine a more fully human being, that the gap between human persona and superhero can be transcended on some barely conceivable plane. For instance, in the conclusion of Morrison's run on JLA, Superman, Batman and the Martian Manhunter defeat an alien menace in part because of their ability to merge their personalities through the shared archetypal shape of their lives; this merging is accompanied by the participation in their superpowers of the entire human race. Ellis has turned away from the more esoteric aspects of Moore and Morrison's ideals to rediscover in the superhero the "great man" of 19^th-century political and philosophical thinking. Such Romanticism seems quite natural to the superheroic milieu, and one hopes that Ellis will soon get his turn with one of the classic Golden Age heroes such as Superman or Batman.

Neil Gaiman is less rarely discussed within the context of superhero comics, largely because his most famous work, SANDMAN, is supposedly an example of the mainstream comic industry abandoning superheroes for more serious literary and mythical themes. While this notion has produced useful readings, the origin of the Sandman character in superhero comic books suggests that reading the work in terms of superhero tropes is not inappropriate.

With respect to secret identities, the most interesting character of the series is Death. While Death appears in a recognizable form for the reader, the wide range of occasions in which she appears to characters in the stories prevents the people themselves from grasping who she is. Indeed unless she is acting in her capacity as the being who takes people out of life, characters often fail to believe that she is Death, much as Lois Lane consistently refuses to believe that Clark Kent actually is Superman.

Yet the altogether different poles of Death's identity suggest a different model of personhood, one which may reflect contemporary experiences of gender. The traditional superhero situation opposes a dichotomy of power to a unity of will: both human identity and superhuman identity are morally good, but the superhuman identity has a greater ability to enact good. What remains constant in Death is her concern for the emotional realities of the world; what changes is whether she is responding to the needs of individuals in an essentially human way or imposing the fact of death on them in her role as one of the Endless. In terms of Western gender ideals in which men possess technological will and women provide the sustaining emotional support, she may well be the first truly female superhero.

The works of these British writers certainly deserves more attention than I can give here, indeed, I would argue that all of the comics I have mentioned deserve more sustained analysis on the plane of identity. My purpose here is to suggest the richness of the topic, that if superhero comics deserve discussion as an important American art form (as I believe they do) it is in part because of their ability to talk so powerfully about the very twentieth-century obsession with identity. Imagery from superhero comics drifts in and out of the American popular consciousness, but it seems very probable that the secret identity will become a lasting part of Western thought.