Official : Bendis gets both books

[Ascended]

Those "rules" to hide the secret identity (mannerism, etc) work only if you really want them to work (sorry Ascended).

Sorry, indeed! How dare you disagree with me and bring intelligent, reasonable points with you!

Because yes, it's true, it sometimes happens that celebrities succeed in hiding themselves with a pair of dark glasses and a hat. However, it also happens (and it happens a lot of times or gossip news wouldn't exist) that celebrities, or average citizens, or heads of state ARE recognized even if they are doing their best to hide themselves.

That's very true. They do get recognized. But there's a handful of extenuating circumstances Clark has that these people dont. For one thing, they're not trying as hard. A pair of sunglasses and a hat, and that's largely the extent of their disguise. Clark changes everything down to his mannerisms, looks, voice, and way of speaking. It doesn't get emphasized as much as it should, but if you took a video of Clark having a conversation and put it next to a video of Superman having a conversation, you're supposed to see that these two act, look, sound, and move in completely different ways. The closest you're supposed to get to putting the ID together is saying "Yknow, if Clark Kent hit the gym for a while, he'd kinda sorta resemble Superman a little bit, like cousins." And that's on the creators and DC for not putting enough of a spotlight on the differences. Secondly, everyone knows celebrities are just people and they're gonna have to go buy food at some point. Superman isnt held to the same standard. People in the DCU look at him as the next best thing to a god; you don't expect to see Jesus in the produce section. You might not expect to run into a celebrity but you know it's possible. No one imagines Superman in the grocery store buying fruit. They think he eats sunlight and sh*ts rainbows and has nothing to do with something so ordinary as "regular people life." Its the same mentality that lets us overlook the celebrity next to us, but dialed up to levels the real world has no equal to.

A major problem in keeping the secret ID believable is that in movie adaptations - that is, in works where realism gets the upper hand - they never really succeeded in keeping Clark and Superman really separate to the point of making the audience themselves buy it.

Agreed completely.

Yeah, the secret ID is thin ground. I'm not disputing that. But I dont think it's *broken* ground. It just needs to be handled properly. And, I mean, we're bending the narrative already. Nothing about Superman or his world (or comics in general) holds up under scrutiny. If we accept all the other fantastical elements of the mythos despite their sheer impossibility, making the secret ID (of all things) the exception to that just seems foolish to me. Somehow, Superman pulls it off. Just like *somehow* he flies and shoots lasers out of his eyes. It doesn't make sense but that's the world of DC. Its just a weird hill to die on, yknow?

[Myskin]

People in the DCU look at him as the next best thing to a god; you don't expect to see Jesus in the produce section. You might not expect to run into a celebrity but you know it's possible. No one imagines Superman in the grocery store buying fruit. They think he eats sunlight and sh*ts rainbows and has nothing to do with something so ordinary as "regular people life." Its the same mentality that lets us overlook the celebrity next to us, but dialed up to levels the real world has no equal to.

Again, the problem is how you define "people". If you want to keep an inch of realism, there would be people who don't care about Superman's personal ID and people who don't think that he would do ordinary things, but also people who are interested in his private life and also people (including people with MANY resources) who actively look for some clues about his whereabouts. I guess that there could be also people who don't think that Superman is an alien or a god. Again, the secret ID works only if you want it to work. Now that I think about it, they wouldn't even have to keep Superman under control. They could just keep LOIS under control, since it is widely known that she and Superman have a connection of some sort.

If we accept all the other fantastical elements of the mythos despite their sheer impossibility, making the secret ID (of all things) the exception to that just seems foolish to me. Somehow, Superman pulls it off. Just like *somehow* he flies and shoots lasers out of his eyes. It doesn't make sense but that's the world of DC. Its just a weird hill to die on, yknow?

Well, I guess that among the many problems Superman have as a character is that there is simply too much to buy at this point for a casual reader.
In a bizarre way, Billy Batson/Shazam-Captain marvel is more believable. Magic doesn't exist in our world; once a reader accepts that in the Shazam universe there are magic rules, the writers can simply make them up. Nobody would ever think that Shazam and Billy are one and the same because they are completely different. And you know what? Even if it's IMPOSSIBLE to recognize Billy as Shazam, some of the most interesting stories focus on Shazam's worst enemies (including Sivana) knowing the secret ID and not forgetting it at the end of every adventure. Captain Marvel's writers took a higher risk with these characters than Superman ever did with Luthor (except for very specific storylines), even if they were justified not to do so.

The problem with Superman is that most, if not all of his basic elements are in the middle, slippery ground between believability and pure fantasy. That's the way he was created. In order to believe the secret ID works, you have to force yourself into believing a lot of things (that he is a good actor; that no one if his fellow reporters would recognize him; that the general audience doesn't believe he has a private identity; that Lex Luthor would be so idiotic not to discover the ID himself; etc.). None of this elements, taken singularly, belongs to the world of sheer fantasy per se (sometimes celebrities are NOT recognized after all). However, the entire thing becomes increasingly "not believable" once you understand that you must buy ALL of these semi-realistic premises for EVERY story to make the concept work. And that has become increasingly difficult as years went by. The problem wouldn't exist if Superman's secret ID worked by completely fictional rules like Shazam's magic. If Superman had been created as a shapeshifter (just an example), the secret ID problem wouldn't exist today.

But again, the problem is not only the secret ID. Even if you buy the secret ID, there are more and more things to buy - as you have noticed. The powers, for example. We don't have a slightest idea of how they work and that's mostly because some of the concepts behind them (Earth's lesser gravity which allows the character to jump over a skyscraper, for example) are fantasy tropes from more than one century ago (I mean, literally; E. R. Borroughs' John Carter was introduced in 1911 and for him they used the same concept). Some writers, like Byrne with his energy shield or aura thing or whatever it was, tried to update the concept, but in the long term this caused even more problems (Larsen took a jab at Byrne in his Savage Dragon book, and I guess that he was not the only one). As long as they try to put the origins in the classic realm of the lesser gravity/yellow sun thing it will become more and more difficult to buy it. I guess that some clever, contemporary writer like Warren Ellis would be able to revisit this element in a more modern, believable way - maybe using concepts like quantum science or something like that - but it would take a LOT of time and creative freedom.

Honestly, I can't blame new generations for not being really interested in Superman. In order to read the stories they should first buy/accept the secret ID AND the powers AND Kryptonite AND Krypton being populated by dumbasses who weren't able to foresee their own end AND the costume AND Superman's morality being somehow functional even if it is something out of a pulp magazine of the 1930s AND... Too many things. And, once they have swallowed every thing, the stories should also be worth reading. Is it worth the effort?

A lot of stories and movies in the latest decades have focused on the crisis of Superman as a character (the classic "Do we need Superman?") thing. Older fans tend to dismiss it with simplistic arguments like, Naaah, it's just that DC and Didio are too incompetent to understand the character and make it work, if only TRUE FANS like me were at the helm the character would still be very popular. Personally speaking, though, I have always thought that questioning the character the way DC did is a cry of alarm, or a symptom for something deeper; to put it simply, Superman's main tropes are, for lack of better words, too dated and old to work today. IMHO the character will keep declining as long as they don't find a way to update him in a credible way and - provided it is still possible to do so - I think that such update will not come from comic books, but from movies or videogames.

[Vordan]

You’re ascribing waaaaay too complex motivations to why people have trouble with Supes. The average reader does not put nearly as much thought into the logic of capes as what you think they do. Do people have a problem with aliens that can speak English or eat our food, or that a guy like Batman can get repeatedly shot and stabbed and set on fire, etc, etc and never suffer any permanent loss of effectiveness? That Joker has a body count in the millions yet the state never executed him and Batman the supposed genius can’t lock him up permanently doesn’t hurt their popularity any. The stories have simply been bad. That’s it. That’s all anyone cares about. People complained way more about Superman killing than they did about the secret identity. This idea that everything MUST be like our reality is just wrong. Are superheroes built on a lot of asspulls? Sure but that’s never been a huge problem like you’re portraying it.

[Myskin]

You’re ascribing waaaaay too complex motivations to why people have trouble with Supes. The average reader does not put nearly as much thought into the logic of capes as what you think they do. Do people have a problem with aliens that can speak English or eat our food, or that a guy like Batman can get repeatedly shot and stabbed and set on fire, etc, etc and never suffer any permanent loss of effectiveness? That Joker has a body count in the millions yet the state never executed him and Batman the supposed genius can’t lock him up permanently doesn’t hurt their popularity any. The stories have simply been bad. That’s it. That’s all anyone cares about. People complained way more about Superman killing than they did about the secret identity. This idea that everything MUST be like our reality is just wrong. Are superheroes built on a lot of asspulls? Sure but that’s never been a huge problem like you’re portraying it.

Some of the elements you mention - heroes with no superpowers who are apparently invulnerable - are such common tropes in action movies that people universally accept them. And by the way - I have never said that everything MUST be like our reality. Come on.
The problem is not that one single element of Superman is hard to swallow. The problem is there are too many elements which don't work because you have to swallow ALL of them at the same time and, generally speaking, the elements of the Superman lore simply don't click together. And they don't click because no one - when the time was right, that is 30 years ago - started a serious work by reflecting on these weaknesses and trying to understand how they could be changed or rethought in order to make them work better. In the Batman lore there are many contradictions as well, but they worked on him so long and so thoroughly that now they can use some of his flaws and contradictions as the basis for the story themselves. There are stories - and some of them are exceptionally well done - about Batman being as crazy as his enemies. There are stories about the Joker being so surreally homicidal that he almost seems a supernatural being. There are stories about Batman indirectly creating his enemies, too.
Yes, Superman stories stank. But I'd say that many of them were terrible because DC had some good ideas - especially about Superman's morality when he has to face some serious challenges - but failed in the execution because they never had the guts to carry on the premise to the very end. And in almost every case (New Krypton, Grounded, Truth, but the list is way longer), doing so would have meant putting into discussion some of the basic premises of the character - exactly the very same premises which often don't click together. Which is something I would have really liked to see and it is due at this point, even if a lot of fans consider them the unmodifiable basis of the character.

By the way, it's not that fans always buy stories when they are clever or well-done, or Jimmy Olsen would sell way more than it does.

[Vordan]

Hmm I’m not sure I agree that there haven’t been attempts to reconcile the Superman lore. But first I would need for you to specify which elements in particular that you’re thinking of. I personally do think there are some things at the core of Supes that could stand to be examined certainly. I’m not even altogether opposed to this ditching of the SI.

But frankly I feel like you’re giving too much credit to the attempts to reconcile the Bat-Lore. Yes they’ve tried to reconcile it all but they’ve never really successfully done so because you can’t really attempt a “realistic” examination of Batman because the world he lives in is not our own. It’s perfectly acceptable for a billionaire to dress up as a bat and beat the **** out of a clown because it’s a world where it doesn’t matter how much money Bruce gives to charity, crime will never end. In that world it’s totally acceptable to buy that Clark can escape notice with his SI because he faces a 5-D imp who messes with reality when he’s bored. Spider-Man is regularly lauded as the “hero who could be YOU” but he’s also the genius who invented web fluid in his aunts basement. Saying Superman doesn’t hold up to scrutiny doesn’t really mean anything when not much about superheroes does. That is after all how they got deconstructed in the first place.

[Frontier]

Hmm I’m not sure I agree that there haven’t been attempts to reconcile the Superman lore. But first I would need for you to specify which elements in particular that you’re thinking of. I personally do think there are some things at the core of Supes that could stand to be examined certainly. I’m not even altogether opposed to this ditching of the SI.

But frankly I feel like you’re giving too much credit to the attempts to reconcile the Bat-Lore. Yes they’ve tried to reconcile it all but they’ve never really successfully done so because you can’t really attempt a “realistic” examination of Batman because the world he lives in is not our own. It’s perfectly acceptable for a billionaire to dress up as a bat and beat the **** out of a clown because it’s a world where it doesn’t matter how much money Bruce gives to charity, crime will never end. In that world it’s totally acceptable to buy that Clark can escape notice with his SI because he faces a 5-D imp who messes with reality when he’s bored. Spider-Man is regularly lauded as the “hero who could be YOU” but he’s also the genius who invented web fluid in his aunts basement. Saying Superman doesn’t hold up to scrutiny doesn’t really mean anything when not much about superheroes does. That is after all how they got deconstructed in the first place.

People want more Wonder Woman content and she's from an island paradise of all women, loving and compassionate to all (with BDSM undertones), stronger then any man, and depending on the continuity an actual demigoddess.

[Myskin]

Hmm I’m not sure I agree that there haven’t been attempts to reconcile the Superman lore. But first I would need for you to specify which elements in particular that you’re thinking of. I personally do think there are some things at the core of Supes that could stand to be examined certainly. I’m not even altogether opposed to this ditching of the SI.

But frankly I feel like you’re giving too much credit to the attempts to reconcile the Bat-Lore. Yes they’ve tried to reconcile it all but they’ve never really successfully done so because you can’t really attempt a “realistic” examination of Batman because the world he lives in is not our own.

Sorry, but you keep bringing up the world "realistic", but that's not the point here. I have never thought that Batman is realistic. The point is, the elements of the Batman lore work and click together. They are coherent. As for the stories themselves - they can be allegories, thriller stories, horror stories and - in some very specific cases - also semi-realistic thrillers. There are some archetypes in the Batman lore which are not realistic and cannot be otherwise because that's what "the rules of the game" are. For example, the idea that someone could seriously think about wearing a mask and hunting criminals. As for the elements themselves, well, just think about the difference between the Adam West Batman and, I don't know, Rucka's Batman.
I am oversimplifying here, but let's say at one point Frank Miller said: mmh, ok, Batman has no superpowers; he's basically a man driven by an obsession; why don't we write a story about that and examine the inner working of such obsession (Yes, I know that it is more complex than that and Englehart and O'Neil came before Miller - I repeat it: I am oversimplifying here), including the darkest elements? After him, Alan Moore came up and said: mmmh, but if Batman is disturbed maybe the Joker has something in common with him; let's write a story about that. After him, Bryan Talbot came and said: mmmh, what if Batman is just a psycho? Let's write "Masks" about it. After him, Rucka came and said: mmmh, Batman is obsessed , but maybe his surrogate family saved him, let's put this in "No Man's Land". And so on and on and on. So at this point you have a very multi-faceted character, who can work in surreal, nightmarish stories like Arkham Asylum, or more realistic ones like Nolan's Dark Knight. Because they worked so well on him and experimented so much with different types of narrative that now Batman is way "stronger" than Superman is - even the secondary characters of his cast are strong enough to be main characters in stories or movies.

For Superman, nothing like that came up because the closest thing we had - Byrne's Man of Steel - was decent enough to relaunch the character in the 1980s, but to weak to really start a long list of experimentation like "Dark Knight Returns" did. Let's say that if Gerber or Moore or Miller had written a "Man of Steel Returns" story int he 1980s, maybe Superman would be in a very different place right now. As for the elements which don't "click" together, I'd say that the list is pretty long and IMHO Superman's morality, relatability and mission are high in that list. But the secret ID thing in it too. It's another archetype, but a very dated one and while you can accept that a masked man is not recognizable, it's way harder to accept that a man could cheat the entire world for years the way Superman did in his stories, mostly because we have never seen it happen in functional ways with real people (in movies, for example).

[Marvel Man]

Naaah, it's just that DC and Didio are too incompetent to understand the character and make it work, if only TRUE FANS like me were at the helm the character would still be very popular.

As for the elements which don't "click" together, I'd say that the list is pretty long and IMHO Superman's morality, relatability and mission are high in that list. But the secret ID thing in it too.

Sorry to ask, but the starting point was that you were a TRUE FAN of Superman, wasn't it? Because after saying that Clark's morality, relatability, mission and secret ID doesn't "click", I'm not sure anymore. I mean, which are the traits of the character that you do like? What are the elements that you do think that actually "click" together?

[Myskin]

Sorry to ask, but the starting point was that you were a TRUE FAN of Superman, wasn't it?

No. It isn't and it never was. The way I used that term was to describe what for "some" fans (well, a lot of them to be fair) "being a TRUE FAN" means/implies, of course. Personally speaking, I don't like the expression and I don't think that it means much. In too many cases, it's just a definition some particularly biased readers use to define themselves in juxtaposition to more critical, or simply impartial readers. I have been a reader of Superman for many years (with some pauses here and there), I know the character pretty well and here on CBR forum I have always talked just about Superman (way less about other characters). I hope that this answers your question.

Sorry, but I find it a little inquisitive that I have to explain what the positive elements of Superman are in my opinion, as if I had to prove something in order to criticise what doesn't work with the character these days. I have been a user of this forum for so long that I think that a lot of people (at least, old users) already know my opinion in that regard. I have no problem in explaining my opinion again, but I'd prefer not having to demonstrate that I am a true Superman fan just because I am strongly critical about the character. I think that I have explained my points in detail in my previous posts.

[Marvel Man]

No. It isn't and it never was. The way I used that term was to describe what for "some" fans (well, a lot of them to be fair) "being a TRUE FAN" means/implies, of course. Personally speaking, I don't like the expression and I don't think that it means much. In too many cases, it's just a definition some particularly biased readers use to define themselves in juxtaposition to more critical, or simply impartial readers. I have been a reader of Superman for many years (with some pauses here and there), I know the character pretty well and here on CBR forum I have always talked just about Superman (way less about other characters). I hope that this answers your question.

Sorry, but I find it a little inquisitive that I have to explain what the positive elements of Superman are in my opinion, as if I had to prove something in order to criticise what doesn't work with the character these days. I have been a user of this forum for so long that I think that a lot of people (at least, old users) already know my opinion in that regard. I have no problem in explaining my opinion again, but I'd prefer not having to demonstrate that I am a true Superman fan just because I am strongly critical about the character. I think that I have explained my points in detail in my previous posts.

I don't really believe in true fans, so I agree with you on that front. But I'm really curious about what you do like of the character because I think it's more constructive to talk about the elements that works today.

[Vordan]

Sorry, but you keep bringing up the world "realistic", but that's not the point here. I have never thought that Batman is realistic. The point is, the elements of the Batman lore work and click together. They are coherent. As for the stories themselves - they can be allegories, thriller stories, horror stories and - in some very specific cases - also semi-realistic thrillers. There are some archetypes in the Batman lore which are not realistic and cannot be otherwise because that's what "the rules of the game" are. For example, the idea that someone could seriously think about wearing a mask and hunting criminals. As for the elements themselves, well, just think about the difference between the Adam West Batman and, I don't know, Rucka's Batman.
I am oversimplifying here, but let's say at one point Frank Miller said: mmh, ok, Batman has no superpowers; he's basically a man driven by an obsession; why don't we write a story about that and examine the inner working of such obsession (Yes, I know that it is more complex than that and Englehart and O'Neil came before Miller - I repeat it: I am oversimplifying here), including the darkest elements? After him, Alan Moore came up and said: mmmh, but if Batman is disturbed maybe the Joker has something in common with him; let's write a story about that. After him, Bryan Talbot came and said: mmmh, what if Batman is just a psycho? Let's write "Masks" about it. After him, Rucka came and said: mmmh, Batman is obsessed , but maybe his surrogate family saved him, let's put this in "No Man's Land". And so on and on and on. So at this point you have a very multi-faceted character, who can work in surreal, nightmarish stories like Arkham Asylum, or more realistic ones like Nolan's Dark Knight. Because they worked so well on him and experimented so much with different types of narrative that now Batman is way "stronger" than Superman is - even the secondary characters of his cast are strong enough to be main characters in stories or movies.

For Superman, nothing like that came up because the closest thing we had - Byrne's Man of Steel - was decent enough to relaunch the character in the 1980s, but to weak to really start a long list of experimentation like "Dark Knight Returns" did. Let's say that if Gerber or Moore or Miller had written a "Man of Steel Returns" story int he 1980s, maybe Superman would be in a very different place right now. As for the elements which don't "click" together, I'd say that the list is pretty long and IMHO Superman's morality, relatability and mission are high in that list. But the secret ID thing in it too. It's another archetype, but a very dated one and while you can accept that a masked man is not recognizable, it's way harder to accept that a man could cheat the entire world for years the way Superman did in his stories, mostly because we have never seen it happen in functional ways with real people (in movies, for example).

Again I’m not really seeing how Batman fits together better. You talk about Batman’s mental state but that doesn’t really correlate to a more cohesive whole, that just means writers have played around with Batman’s psychology not his world. For example how do you reconcile the Batgod of Justice League who can out prep Cthulhu and has plans for the JL going rogue, but is routinely surprised by mentally unbalanced yahoos from Arkham escaping? Those two characterizations just don’t fit together at all. Batman’s a super genius who can build a mech suit to take down Supes but he can’t build one to use against his common rogues? They use the “he doesn’t want to rely on it” hand wave but that’s every bit as bull**** as Supes raising his voice a pitch and slouching to hide his identity. An excuse to keep an important feature of his story going. But Batman’s fanbase enjoy those stories anyway. Stuff not fitting into one neat package is pretty much a feature of superheroes.

As for writers not exploring Superman’s psych... they do though? Not at the level of DKR obviously, but they still do explore how a man like him works. Like Bendis just recently explored how while Supes can hear all the terrible stuff going on but he can also hear all the good that people do as well. And then you’ve got stuff like Peace on Earth which explores the limits of Superman’s mission and ability to enact change. If anything DC has done too much navalgazing with Superman at this point, too many origin stories exploring how he became Superman, and not enough modern day stories about him. Again you need to list some stuff you think doesn’t work for me to know specifically what doesn’t work for you, because this whole “the SI just isn’t believable” doesn’t work for me. Nothing about superheroes is believable, they’re inherently fantastical. Spider-Man knows tons of billionaires and is a super genius himself, it’s preposterous that he has to get a roommate to make rent.

Edit: Just for the record: I absolutely agree that there’s some aspects of Supes that could use a rework. Positioning his “rural small town values” as being the source of his morality and inherently superior to “them cynical city folk” doesn’t really work as well as it did nowadays for a variety of reasons that I won’t go into. It’s why I enjoy stuff like Birthright where being Superman is as owed to his travels abroad as it is to his Smallville upbringing.

[Ascended]

For Superman, nothing like that came up because the closest thing we had - Byrne's Man of Steel - was decent enough to relaunch the character in the 1980s, but to weak to really start a long list of experimentation like "Dark Knight Returns" did. Let's say that if Gerber or Moore or Miller had written a "Man of Steel Returns" story int he 1980s, maybe Superman would be in a very different place right now. As for the elements which don't "click" together, I'd say that the list is pretty long and IMHO Superman's morality, relatability and mission are high in that list. But the secret ID thing in it too. It's another archetype, but a very dated one and while you can accept that a masked man is not recognizable, it's way harder to accept that a man could cheat the entire world for years the way Superman did in his stories, mostly because we have never seen it happen in functional ways with real people (in movies, for example).

I agree that Batman has had better stories over the last thirty years and that's helped define and evolve the IP to a point Clark's hasn't matched. And it seems true that Superman doesn't appeal to people today as easily as he did decades ago, or as easily as Batman does now. It's a cynical age, what can we say? The teenager edge-fest that is Batman is an easy sell, while Superman demands a little more from the audience. But I dont think the cause of this is really in the bricks of the foundation. Yeah, the secret ID is out of fashion today, and it's a ridiculous concept that never really held water in the first place. But I don't think the concepts are the problem; everything here works within its own rules and other characters like Dr. Who, Thor, and tons and tons of others are just as fantastical, weird, and make no more sense than Superman does. Those IP's are still popular, some more than they've ever been.

Its not the elements of Clark's mythos that are the problem, I think. Yes they require suspension of disbelief, and yes they've got one foot in a realm of quasi-realism and one foot in the completely impossible. So do most comic characters, and it doesnt hold them back. The problem has been in the execution and lack of definition/evolution of those concepts, not the concepts themselves.

And like Grant Morrison said; this is only stuff we adults struggle with. Kids, the audience Superman is/was actually aimed at? They have no problem here. They just accept the inner logic of Clark's world. We're the idiots who can't just roll with the fact that an alien can fly and disguise himself with a pair of glasses.

[manwhohaseverything]

I refuse to believe that superman isn't appealing anymore. When we have characters like one punch man, all might being fan favourites. The only reason batman is doing well and superman is not is because mediocre media adaptations. Lets face it wb doesn't know how to handle dc properties.

[DragonPiece]

I refuse to believe that superman isn't appealing anymore. When we have characters like one punch man, all might being fan favourites. The only reason batman is doing well because mediocre media adaptations. Lets face it wb doesn't know how to handle dc properties.

Problem is not Superman, just general lack of excitement around all of DC right now. Just look at how little people cared about Superman revealing his identity, it even got announced by the New York Times but didn’t really get a lot of buzz besides that.

[manwhohaseverything]

Problem is not Superman, just general lack of excitement around all of DC right now. Just look at how little people cared about Superman revealing his identity, it even got announced by the New York Times but didn’t really get a lot of buzz besides that.

There was fair bit of excitement for rebirth.They just screwed up the entire thing. Now, here we are. Clark being outed in current climate after captain America was nazi is not seen as a big deal. It has happened many times before. There is also the fact that currently secret IDs are not seen as essential for superheroes anymore.