Batman spends most of the time he has to be in his Bruce persona cultivating the image of a womanizing trust fund baby with just a bit of charm as his only redeeming feature. Even if someone were to deduce that they have a connection, without definitive proof they’d at most believe he is being forced to fund Batman.
We know as a fact that the superman disguise works because the actor for Superman literally used it irl and stood next to a Superman poster, nobody knew who he was.
Or it was New York city and nobody cared.
Metropolis and Gotham City are not too different from New York, so…
And in the real New York people are obsessed with superheroes even though they’re not real. Imagine how obsessed they’d be if those heroes were real and could be spotted out in the wild. I mean sure, you’d probably have some Gothamites / Metropolites who were too cool to care. But, you’d also have obsessed fans staking out the places where these heroes were likely to appear.
And, for Henry Cavil’s stunt, people didn’t notice him or didn’t recognize him. But, he was in Times Square. The place people would stake out to try to find him would be red carpet premieres of things. Similarly, Superman superfans would stake out The Daily Planet. Even if they didn’t know he was Clark Kent and worked there, they’d know that he always seemed to be around whenever Lois Lane was in danger.
Yeah but you’re not getting the disguise, it works because nobody expects to see Super Man walking around looking like a nerd.
There are countless stories of people spotting a teacher at a nightclub, or someone they know from church at some fetish event. Just because you don’t expect to see someone somewhere doesn’t mean you won’t recognize them when you see them.
Also, as far as everyone knows, Superman doesn’t have a civilian identity. It’s pretty public knowledge in most continuities that his name is Kal-El, that he’s a Kryptonian, and that he lives in the Fortress of Solitude somewhere in the arctic. Sure’s he’s in Metropolis a lot, but he also clearly has something going on with Lois Lane.
Wasn’t there a plotline about a reporter trying to kidnap Lane to force Superman to show up, or am I hallucinating?
In a movie? A TV show? A comic book? In the golden age? Bronze age? Silver age? Platinum age? Modern age? Copper age? Chrome age? Plastic age?
idk, it could have been fanfic for all I remember
I think Wayne is like THE incredibly wealthy guy in Gotham and Batman has stuff like custom made planes and tanks in his arsenal. So yes probably not a straight conclusion that the vigilante with seemingly infinite resources must be the same as the other guy with tons of money from your city, but at the very least the conclusion can be drawn that they are most likely connected. Obviously this wouldn’t work in Los Angeles where half of the world’s billionaires hang out.
Obviously this wouldn’t work in Los Angeles where half of the world’s billionaires hang out.
Gotham looks like a New York type “centre of the world” city, with extremely wealthy people living there
Depending on the era, Bruce himself was supposed to be seen as kind of worthless as a person. I think it made a lot more sense then, you’d never look at like Barron Trump and be like yeah, that guy’s really a relatively respected masked superhero.
The key of the disguise is exceptional lack of competency.
Also, i don’t expect a rich guy to fight for the people alone
But who really gets to see the planes, and the tanks? And confirms that he has diamond body armor instead of super powers.
Unless you are a super villain - which in Gotham virtually guarantees severe mental illness - at best you will see one of them moments before Batman irrevocably destroys your body. He might not kill you but you will be brain dead.
I mean sure you may not catch the low flying jetplane over your city and you may not get to see the heavy tank that levels the city center in action, but maybe journalists would report on them?
We know Gotham is corrupt to its core which would naturally include the media. I would think the exotic billionaire could control the media. I mean they do it now in real life. The richest individuals have no media presence.
Say something negative about a billionaire, and they could, if they wanted to, eliminate your entire company (See Gawker).
Bruce Wayne is rich enough to make “Batman is Bruce Wayne” look like “rich people go to a remote island to molest children”. Completely true but intentionally made to look as a conspiracy theory for decades by very rich individuals.
All that tanning you do in the middle of the night…
that’s bat-schmutz
He had a very late shift.
Batman covers his face and disguises his voice, and doesn’t often run across people that are in Bruce Wayne’s circle (and those who are, like Penguin, know his identity anyway). He’s also notoriously reclusive and not close with anyone other than Robin (whoever that may be) and Alfred.
Superman reveals more of his face by taking off the glasses and pushing his hair back, just acts with a bit more confidence, and Kent is just a reporter with lots of friends. The fact that those closest to him other than his human parents do not recognize him is a bit strange.
I think both are a bit absurd.
Sure Batman covers half of his face and disguises his voice. But, both Batman and Bruce Wayne regularly appear in newspapers. Bruce Wayne may be reclusive for a billionare, but he still regularly goes to high society / charity events and gets his picture taken. I don’t know if you could identify Batman by the similarlities fo their chins alone. But, they’re the same height, same weight, etc. too. Plus, why is this billionaire ridiculously jacked? Why does he frequently have injuries? And yeah, Batman disguises his voice, but he doesn’t put on what seems like a different natural voice. He doesn’t do an accent or something. He just adds a bit of a growl to it.
People are obsessed with superheroes as it is, and they’re fictional. Imagine how obsessed people would be with Batman if he were real. Take the obsession people have over celebrities and athletes and dial it way up. Even if a chin isn’t a lot to go on, people would be obsessing over his chin and lips and neck, looking for any identifying features.
Superman is even more ridiculous. It’s just glasses. Maybe his hair is a bit different, but his head and face are almost unchanged. And, AFAIK, it’s not even like his glasses have real lenses in them. If he did something like wear contacts with a strong prescription and glasses with an opposite but strong prescription so that the glasses completely distorted his eyes, that might do it. But, he’s basically just wearing frames.
And again, there’s the body. Why does the nerdy reporter have a body like he spends every spare moment in the gym, and yet he apparently doesn’t even play any sports? Why does Superman almost never save him, but is always saving his colleague at the Daily Planet? It isn’t like Batman where Clark Kent’s image is in the newspaper all the time. But, there are plenty of people who know Clark Kent well, and also spend a lot of time around Superman.
The one thing I can see going for Superman is that it’s not clear that he actually has a secret identity. Batman goes around with a mask, which hints that there’s something to see under that mask. Superman seems to have nothing to hide. People might assume that when he’s not out saving lives, he’s at home, or he’s recharging his powers somehow, or returning to his home planet, or something else. Why would this super-being have a day job?
But, surely any Superman fanatics who wanted to spot him in person, or wanted to know more would spend all their time hanging out at the Daily Planet building. If there’s one place you’re likely to find Superman in Metropolis it’s near the Daily Planet. So, while these superfans are staking out the Daily Planet, wouldn’t they notice this guy in a suit who has Superman’s build, Superman’s haircut, and most importantly, Superman’s face?
I have stories! I never recognize anyone.
A friend once got a haircut and it took me weeks to figure out who she was. I just thought she was a new person hanging out with someone there and wanted to be my friend because she kept talking to me.
Many years ago I looked right at my (now ex) partner at an airport when I was picking her up and kept on looking for her. We lived together at the time.
I ran into my lead singer at the store. He was wearing the same thing he always wears but had his hair pulled back. He stopped and talked to me and apparently I looked like I was trying to escape. He was telling the story at band practice when I had to admit I didn’t recognize him.
This is an ongoing problem in my life. I probably have a dozen of these stories that I can remember off the top of my head and a hundred more that I could dig out. I wouldn’t even want to guess how many people have talked to me that I don’t realize I knew them. Clark Kent taking off his glasses and suddenly becoming unrecognizable is totally reasonable to me. Dude could look me in the eyes, take off his glasses, and it would be like a whole new person appeared.
That’s prosopagnosia. We have hardware in the brain, wired to recognize faces — which is probably why pareidolia, aka ‘Jesus on a toast’, is a thing. Only, for some people this chunk doesn’t work as it should.
I myself have poor memory for faces if I don’t hang out with a person for a while. This presented challenges when I worked from home, but occasionally showed up at the office and was greeted by people with whom I only communicated through chat and saw on minuscule userpics.
It’s an awful thing but also amusing in its own way. When I used to go out with my ex I always had to memorize what he was wearing. One time we were at the grocery store and I forgot what shirt he was dressed in. I went off to get something from another aisle and when I came back he was gone. Eventually he physically grabbed me while I was walking past and found it very funny to tell me that he been laughing while watching me walk right past him about 5 times in a growing panic because I couldn’t find him.
Does Clark win awards in some renditions? When I was growing up he was a Typesetter. He corrected typos and grammar for a living, on an actual typewriter.
Heh, me too. I was like, isn’t Lois Lane the award winning journalist and Clark Kent is somewhere between her gopher and mentee? But then there’s lots of different stories by lots of different authors. I guess maybe they originally thought Clark Kent was as far from Superman as you could get, being less than a woman. Dame.
That’s the most forties thing I’ve heard about Superman.
(Only, that’s not a typesetter. Seems rather to be an editor. A typesetter put letters in a printing press, or did page layout with computers in early digital era before WYSIWYG. The profession is probably obsolete now.)
I thought Lois Lane was the true star reporter. Clark is just the dependable workhouse, showing up every day (probably so he can see the crimes he stops).
No. He’s amazing reporter. While he delivered awesome investigative work, he’s most tecognized for his human-intrest feature stories. He have great compasion that spawn great insights, and he’s master of words. He win Pulitzer twice, and launched a movement for change once or twice. By all account he’s one-in-a-generstion superstar reporter. And Lois is better.
Okay, name three of his articles.
- Why the World needs Superman
- Why the World needs to write Superman a paycheck
- Ladies, please stop trying, it will literally cut you in half.
Eh, I agree with the idea for Superman, but it’s a little different for Batman. Someone who watches Batman use his advanced gadgets and hi-tech vehicles can at least surmise that he has access to a lot of money.
In a world where alien bugs and wizards give powers to children and its commong knowledge there is people living under the sea with way more advanced tech than anybody else, i dont think people can really separate if the gadgets are alien, magic or billionare tech.
OK. But you don’t go: “How could Wonder Women afford invisible high-tech jet? She must be the owner of fortune 500 company”. That because you know things. You have more information and assume it’s general knowledge. People are just as likely to see batman as gadget-men, as magic-men or demon or mutant. Or alien. Superman have army of robots and he’s poor. A lot of weird things in this world.
Also, you wouldn’t assume that a rich guy in a corrupted city is going to save people lives without expecting anything in exchange
To be fair to the citizens of these worlds, their buildings are collapsing and being rebuilt all the time. Property is worthless in their world, and rent is practically zero.
The cost of living is low. They probably see a rich guy and think he’s some new-money type cashing in on some new product before sinking into obscurity. Money means nothing to the people of these worlds, because it can all be taken away and replaced so quickly.
I bet rich guys come and go so fast in their world that no one blinks if they see a hobo with a crown
It’s the opposite, but yes. You wouldn’t see Clark Kent and thing “oh that dude is definitely Superman” and you wouldn’t see Kylie Jenner and think “I’ll bet she’s that masked crime fighter.”
Comic book nerd here.
Clark does not mingle much with ordinary people outside his parents and people who he works with. And obviously his parent know who he is and most of his close colleagues have figured it out at somepoint.
Also he acts completelly differend. The big guy at the work with bad posture and messy hair, who you have seen having hard time moving his desk at the office does not go straight to “Hey that dude must be the superman”
Also depending of the story he uses contact lenses, or his classes change the colour of his eyes. Again depending from the story from disting blue or disting green to something more normal. Newer stories have also added his glasses to have mindcontroll powers from Kryptonian tech.
If Jennergirl’s disguise was just a mask, and she wore spandex while fighting crime, I think people would connect the dots pretty quickly.
Hmmmm, I sort of think we’re all a little too familiar with the shape of Kylie Jenner, unless for the first time in her life she wore something that wasn’t skintight. Which superheroine suits usually are. But if it were bulky enough, maybe.No, I’m stupid, I was thinking of Kim Kardashian, not Kylie. Go ahead and fight crime in mystery, Kylie.
Here’s your tshirt:
Well I am female, but I don’t really care what shape bodies are. And I try to avoid anything about the Kardashians entirely. But Kylie was on Graham Norton the other week, (in a transparent dress described as “a doily and a condom”) and I wanted to see the others on the show. And at the Met Gala she made sure she’d be recognized even in a full-face mask.Okay I take the whole thing back, going back to edit previous comment. That was Kim, not Kylie. Apologies Kylie, I know literally nothing about you.
