Written By : John Hawkins
December 27, 2012

My latest Townhall column is called, 5 Reasons You Would Never Want To Be A Superhero In The Real World. Here’s an excerpt from the column.

No wonder every kid grows up wanting to be a super-hero. The comic books make it sound awesome; Your life is exciting, you’re important, you’re famous and being a hero is part of the description of what you do on a regular basis! It’s like being a celebrity-astronaut-Seal who can lift a car over his head. Who wouldn’t want to do that? Well, maybe YOU wouldn’t once you realized that in practice, it would be about as much fun as being Mark Sanchez’s quarterback coach.

1) It Would Be Impossible to Hide Your Secret Identity.

Most comics only make a cursory attempt to explain how super-heroes could hide their identity. Superman just wore glasses. Glasses on, Clark Kent. Glasses off, “Hello, Superman!” Batman wore a mask and disguised his voice, but he was obviously an incredibly wealthy, athletic man with access to advanced technology who lived near Gotham. If you asked the Bat Computer to tell you how many people fit that description, the only answer would be, “Bruce Wayne.” Peter Parker was a photographer who, completely coincidentally, was selling pictures of Spider-Man to the Daily Bugleevery week. Like no one could figure that out.

It doesn’t exactly take Stephen Hawking to crack the mystery of those secret identities and the real world is much more sophisticated. You’d have every intelligence agency on the planet trying to figure out your identity, gossip mags offering to pay millions for evidence, statistics junkies mapping every place you’d ever been, tens of thousands of bloggers and journalists trying to figure out who you are and tens of millions of Internet junkies on fan sites spending hours every day trying to piece together who you are when they’re not writing erotic fan fiction imagining you being seduced by the evil lizard queen of mars. Eventually, someone would snap a picture of your coming out of your lair with their cell phone, some long forgotten cousin would remember you picking up a jeep when you were five or someone would figure out who you were from the DNA on a can of Coke you drank while you were visiting orphans. Then, you’d have super-villains showing up at your house, people kidnapping everyone you ever said, “Hello,” to in public and even worse….

Once again, you can read it all here.

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