ABSTRACT
The secret identity is one of the most persistent tropes in superhero comics, beginning with the very fi rst appearance of Superman and continuing unabated today.1 Although the practice has its roots in literature (the double life of Dumas’s The Man in the Iron Mask [1845] and The Count of Monte Cristo [Ten Years Later, or The Vicomte Bragelonne, 1847] or the Baroness Orczy’s Scarlet Pimpernel series [1905-1940]) and in pulp novels (The Mark of Zorro [1919], an explicit precursor to Batman, or Philip Wylie’s The Gladiator [1930], which Jim Steranko [1970, 37] has argued establishes the primary elements for Superman),2 fi ction seems to have largely abandoned the practice to comics. An ordinary protagonist may be thrown into extraordinary circumstances (causing him or her to inhabit a new identity for the course of the fi ction), unlike superhero comics, where the double identity necessarily continues because of the serial nature of its narratives. Spy series foreground the use of masquerade by their protagonists, but here the duplicitous identity is fl uid (based on the espionage situation), not consistent as in the classic superhero binary.
