For a particular type of nerd back in 2004, this spiel was instantly sacrilegious. An act of comic book heresy which dared profane Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster’s shining beacon of Truth, Justice, and the American Way! QT seemed to be saying… Superman is making fun of us?!?!
I was taken back to these anecdotal comic fan debates, and really the whole arc of superheroes in pop culture, when recently revisiting both volumes of Kill Bill for their 20th anniversary. There has admittedly always been something overtly contemptuous about Bill’s monologue; it drips with the kind of devil’s advocate sneer one might associate with an edge-lord who sought to justify loving literature created for children—or in another decade down the road, someone eager to defend why Zack Snyder’s Superman so callously kills enemies when he isn’t posing like Christ. One might even say Bill’s (mis)interpretation of Superman, a character designed to radiate hope to kids, is the kind of thinking that got us a scene of Henry Cavill in a red cape moping, “No one stays good in this world.”
And yet, with a couple decades of perspective, there’s a case to be made that Superman’s use of a secret identity, as well as most superheroes in comic books, is in fact some form of commentary on the culture they reflect. I’d stop short of saying Superman is criticizing humans as purely weak or cowardly (even that reading of Clark Kent as a performative dorky disguise only applies to Christopher Reeve’s version of the Clark/Superman dichotomy). However, Superman and many of the costumed do-gooders who followed in his wake are depicted time and again as having good reason to hide their faces from the world (or at least beneath a pair of glasses).
While Superman was hardly the first fictional hero to be depicted with a secret identity—that honor probably belongs to Zorro, who was created nearly 20 years before Action Comics #1—the Man of Steel was the one who set the template for the comic book superhero genre that would define the medium for the rest of the century. By day, Superman is a mild mannered reporter for The Daily Planet, a seemingly pleasant but unremarkable man who hides his greatness.
Obviously, this was intended to be a power fantasy for young children, and that would be heightened by comicdom’s blossoming stable of heroes for the rest of the golden age: Batman, Wonder Woman, Captain Marvel, etc. would fight crime by one alias, and live their daily lives by another, often while winking at the reader when Lois Lane wonders why Clark Kent always misses Superman, or Commissioner Gordon shrugs off Bruce Wayne as an oblivious socialite.
Within their fictional worlds, there is a method to this duplicity. If their enemies knew their real names, their loved ones would be in danger. However, as the genre matured and deepened in the following decades, the reality that the characters and their various guiding writers and artists kept returning to is that the biggest danger was as much from the public themselves. They had reason to fear their villains… and you too.