Secret identities are sort of a messy idea. The definition is apparently a "persona developed in order to keep the true identity secret," which, okay, is a workable definition until you start asking questions like, "If Clark Kent developed Superman to protect his loved ones, is Supes the secret identity?" And, "After Ralph Dibny told the world he was Elongated Man, does that make his secret identity just an identity? And does that mean it's okay for his foes to call him Ralph when he's in costume?" Because as bad as it is being taken down by a guy who goes by "Elongated Man," it's probably even worse being brought to justice by some guy named Ralph.

So I was going to talk about why certain heroes use certain identities, but the more I thought about it, the more I feel that the real question how a superhero finds a way to make his hero identity and his everyman identity (because sometimes it's hard to tell which is really the secret one) work in tandem with each other.

(I'd like to apologize in advance if this list takes a decidedly DC-centric bent; I'm afraid I'm not as much of a Marvel person as I'd like to be yet.)

Exhibit A: Where the Two Identities are Essentially the Same Person
Let's start with the obvious, and look at Clark Kent and Superman. Whereas the opposite may have once held true, since the '80's or so, it's been generally accepted that Superman is the mask and Clark the real person, to simplify it a bit. At the same time, they're both fundamentally the same person, body language and projected self-confidence aside. And as to why Clark Kent chose to be a reporter, some people explain it away as being the natural choice, because it's easy to write stories about yourself. (This also being the general explanation for Peter Parker's chosen profession as well.) I think that's selling Clark (and Peter) a bit short, though. I much prefer the explanation that states that in his quest for Truth, Justice, and the American Way, Clark/Superman feels the need to do more than just punch things. Off an on, Superman will mention the fact that he wants to be more than just a blunt instrument, and perhaps working in a more investigative field as Clark Kent helps him feel he's reached this balance between brawn and brains.

Other superheroes who fit the category of essentially being the same person both in and out of their tights include people like both Green Arrows (especially Oliver Queen, who might just be the worst out there at keeping his secret identity plausibly secret). Actually, a very high proportion of the costumed crime-fighting community can probably be lumped into this category, probably because it's easier to consistently write characters that are a little more consistent with themselves. But if we choose to ignore the man behind the curtain, so to speak, we could probably say it's because they all want to protect their friends and loved ones by putting on a mask, thereby preserving their own identity, which, nine times out of ten, they had long before they took up superheroics.

Exhibit B: Where the Secret Identity Isn't All That Secret, After All
As previously mentioned, Ralph Dibny could be said to be the poster boy for the Public Secret Identity, being the first Silver Age superhero to go public with his civilian identity. To take a step like this puts him firmly into the category of guys whose two identities are the same person, but now that that's literally true, it's near impossible to draw any sort of line between Elongated Man and Ralph, since everyone knows they're the same person anyway. Maybe this is the most dangerous way for a superhero to go on the secret identity path, but you have to admit, it takes real guts. Take John Stewart, for example, the Green Lantern who chooses not to wear a mask because he feels he doesn't have anything to hide. Plus we've got Tony Stark. And the only people who don't know he's Iron Man are pretty much either dead or . . . Actually, you might have to be dead not to know.

Exhibit C: Where the Secret Identity Isn't Actually Anything Like You
This is where Batman comes in. About the same time that the world decided that Clark is more real than Superman, they also decided that Batman was more real than Bruce Wayne, which is probably a good thing, because I don't trust Bruce Wayne, flaky playboy extraordinaire, to do a very convincing job at pretending to be Batman. Meanwhile, Batman, crafty genius that he is, can do a very good job at faking playboy billionaire. (Perhaps the only Batman and Bruce really have in common is the billionaire part. Bruce is very good at making sure Wayne Enterprises keeps making money in order to continue funding Batman's very expensive hobbies.) In this case, of course, Bruce is the mask adapted to keep those closest to Batman safe from his veritable legion of certifiable foes. This delineation gets a little messy, though, when you think about the fact that those closest to Batman mostly all know he's Bruce Wayne, but the Bruce Wayne that they know can be described more as "Batman when he's actually being nice to people and not trying to scare them half to death."

At the moment I'm hard pressed to think of another superhero who does what Batman does to the extent he does it, but on a totally different note, Billy Batson is absolutely nothing like Captain Marvel, in that he's a kid and Captain Marvel is the man he becomes, making Billy's life pretty much my childhood dream. (Although I guess I didn't want to spontaneously turn into a man.) In this case, however, he's a completely different person physically when he's a superhero than when he's a kid. And in terms of superheroes whose super identity is the guise, I can't help but always want to bring up the Blue Raja from Mystery Men (who was not, as far as I can tell, part of the original Mystery Men from the Flaming Carrot comics), because he adopts a British accent while in costume, despite being American-And I'm sure for a fact that there are less ridiculous examples out there, but I love Hank Azaria.

Exhibit D: When You Become a Superhero First and Get the Identity Later
It's the Superclan that has the best track record of doing this, I feel. For someone whose home planet is supposed to have been destroyed, Superman sure ends up with a lot of wayward Kryptonians who turn up on Earth, being all flashy and super, and have to retroactively have civilian identities created for them. Power Girl (Kara Zor-L) created Karen Starr, Supergirl (Kara Zor-El) became Kara Kent, Nightwing (Lor-Zod, not Dick Grayson) acquired the name Chris Kent, and the latest guy to become an honorary Kent, Mon-El, took up the name Jonathan Kent in last month's Superman. At this rate, Clark Kent has a ridiculous number of surprise cousins, all orchestrated on paper in order for their pre-existing superheroics to continue.

More interestingly, though, is John Jones, secret identity of J'onn J'onzz, secret identity of the Martian Manhunter. Because he can shapeshift, he's able to pose as John Jones, a human detective, which doesn't seem like so much of a break from his usual line of work, but doing this is probably mostly a case of having somewhere to blend in and get out of the Manhunter costume. (And who can blame him? It's an awkward costume.)

I don't want to blanket-statement here, but I can help but feel that they're mostly right when they explain the necessity of keeping a secret identity as a safeguard against total insanity. After all, nobody can be super all the time. (Even if Batman would really like to try.) Sometimes you just need to be the girl who spends her lunch break balancing her checkbook. Or the guy who plays Scrabble in the park. Besides, there's always gotta be more to a person than their job. Just because you're a Green Lantern doesn't mean you can't also be an artist or architect, and just because you're Black Canary doesn't mean you can't do a stint as a florist. So while the invention of the "secret identity" is an interesting side effect of the superhero genre, it's pretty much unavoidable.

Besides, Zorro and the Scarlet Pimpernel did it far before these guys, and it worked for them.

Admittedly, the solicitation text doesn't really reveal a lot about the new Batman. Take the advertising copy for Batman #687:

This 40-page issue explores the final moments of the Battle for the Cowl as the new Batman learns that winning the Cowl comes at a high price! Witness the new Batman taking to the streets of Gotham City for the first time! Putting a new man inside the Bat-suit was the easy part – now the fun begins! Guest-starring Superman and Wonder Woman, this issue is a must-read for any Batman fan.

Similarly, the solicit for new series Batman: Streets of Gotham doesn't help much:

As a new Batman rises on the streets of Gotham City, the heroes, villains and citizens take notice. How will the police feel about this new Batman, and can he control the crime in Gotham the way the old Batman did?

If nothing else, the solicitation for a second new series - All Star Superman's Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely's Batman and Robin - tells us about their mode of transport and promises answers:

The new Dynamic Duo hit the streets with a bang in their new flying Batmobile as they face off against an assemblage of villains called the Circus of Strange. They also tackle their first mission investigating a child who's been abducted by the mysterious Domino Killer. But will everything go smoothly? And who exactly are the new Batman and Robin? The newest era of The Dark Knight begins here!

(Honestly, anyone who doesn't get a little bit excited or amused by "their new flying Batmobile" is a little bit dead inside.)

If you want a real clue who the new Batman and Robin are, however, it's better to just talk to Morrison himself, whose hints are just a little bit too easy:

I don't want to give away who they are just yet with [writer-artist] Tony [Daniel] still doing "Battle for the Cowl." But what we've got is a more light-hearted, more spontaneous Batman and a real bad-ass, violent Robin. So I think people are going to enjoy it. It's a very different dynamic between the two characters... It's the classic buddy thing. It's the original partnership. And it's always worked. And I think it's going to work in even more interesting ways in this book. Their personalities are very, very different. So where we saw Batman before in a leadership role, a mentor role, this shows Robin as having some big ideas of his own. It's the sparks that fly between the characters in this incarnation that makes it very interesting. It's a real fresh kind of feel.

A light-hearted Batman? A bad-ass violent Robin? That sounds ridiculously like Dick "Nightwing" Grayson is taking over as Batman (a hunch accidentally confirmed by one of DC's writers in his blog - thanks, Rajiv!), with Damien, Bruce Wayne's slightly psychopathic son, taking on the Robin guise. But if you're wondering where that leaves Bruce Wayne and Tim Drake, the former Batman and current Robin, then I'd suggest that new series Red Robin may be the place to look:

Someone believes that Bruce Wayne may still be alive…and that someone is Red Robin. But who is wearing the Red Robin costume, and why is he traveling the globe looking for a dead man? Whoever he is, he's not alone in his search!

Never mind the flying Batmobile, this may be the series to follow for science fiction thrills. After all, we know that Bruce Wayne is alive, and trapped in the past... and Morrison himself admits that "We're not really entertaining the notion that Bruce won't be back at some time. This isn't like 'Captain America' with the Winter Soldier story and Cap's really gone." Open the sci-fi closet, Alfred. Strange times may be ahead.

DC Comics in June [DC Comics]

Manhattan - formerly Jon Osterman - is the only member of the Watchmen cast with superpowers; all of the others are, in their ways, mostly regular people in ridiculous outfits who fight crime with the help of technology and training... Batman, to all intents and purposes. Nite Owl is the most direct Batman-analog (complete with Batmobile-analog, the Owlship... although you can blame that one on Nite Owl's more direct inspiration the Blue Beetle), but both Rorschach and Ozymandias split well-known Batman traits between them (Rorschach gets the detective skills and obsessiveness, while Ozymandias is given the intelligence and faultless strategic-planning, as well as an element of the Bruce Wayne lifestyle); in comparison, Silk Spectre and the Comedian are more generic character types (Spectre in particular; Watchmen is a curiously male story) that owe less to superhero history and more to general popular culture archetypes.

That Manhattan becomes more than human is an important part of Watchmen; in plot terms, it alters the balance of power politically, allowing for America to become the particular dystopia that it is by the time the story takes place, but it also allowed Moore and Gibbons to step outside of the story to an extent and explore less immediate themes and more inventive storytelling techniques through the character's eyes. Manhattan's inhuman perspective also acts as an important counterpoint to the all-too-human failings of the other characters which drive the story. In many ways (and, perhaps ironically considering the emotional detachment of the character), Manhattan is the heart of Watchmen.

[Access Hollywood]

The Dark Knight is very clearly a film of two halves, as the cliche goes. The first half is impressive, if flawed: Foregoing the flash of an Iron Man or Incredible Hulk in favor of direction and visuals that seem more influenced by movies like Michael Clayton and Heat, it's successful in spite of the men in the funny outfits fighting over who can try to save the day. In fact, for the first half of the movie, it's as if everyone involved is kind of embarrassed about Batman's involvement... which makes sense, considering Bale's performance when he's wearing the costume, all near-parodic husky whispers and threatening pouting (He's better as Bruce Wayne, thankfully). The movie comes to life more when we're watching Aaron Eckhart's Harvey Dent and Gary Oldman's Jim Gordon as the last two good men in Gotham trying to deal with the chaos caused by the Joker's appearance in the criminal underworld than watching Batman stiffly fight dogs and men in clown masks.

Not that there aren't good action set pieces - the climactic chase through Gotham where the Joker is both trying to kill Harvey Dent and simultaneously just piss off Batman is wonderful, over-the-top enough to be spectacular but realistic enough to be thrillingly believable, edge of the seat, viewing. A shame, then, that it happens less than halfway into the movie itself.

That's the main problem with The Dark Knight. We can put up with bad dialogue, accidentally homoerotic scenes of male bonding (The scenes of Harvey and Bruce falling for each other are unintentionally hilarious) and unimpressive second-fiddle villains as long as we have a story that actually worked. Instead, we get a movie that wraps up all of its themes with a literally explosive climax about ninety minutes in, and then forgets to stop. When Maggie Gyllenhall's Rachel Dawes - Katie Holmes' character from Batman Begins - gets killed as the result of the Joker's schemes at the same time that he escapes from the Gotham City police station and causes the accident that turns Dent into Two-Face, we're given a strong emotional end to all of the movie's character arcs - The (already cynical) idealism of the heroes has been shown as naive, Dent has compromised his morals for the woman he loves, and Batman has realized that he can't save everyone. It's a downer of an ending, but it is an ending... something that the moviemakers seem to have either missed, or else felt compelled to ignore in order to give the audience some kind of closure that is completely unnecessary.

Everything that follows the death of Rachel betrays the tone and intent of what came before. Batman goes from flawed hero to a man who - thanks to his new cell-phone-tapping sonar technology - can now see through walls, hear every conversation in the city, single-handedly defeat a SWAT team and the Joker and his henchmen all at the same time. Dent goes from a nuanced but fucked-up character to one-dimensional one-schtick murderer out for revenge at any cost. As the plotlines pile-up on each other - and there are three subplots in particular that serve no purpose whatsoever, although I guess that Chris Nolan got a trip to Hong Kong with one of them. The movie devolves into crass melodrama, something that is made all the more obvious by the end of the movie, where a small blond child tells his daddy (and the audience) that despite everything, Batman has done nothing wrong. The boy's daddy - Oldman's Jim Gordon, at this point finally the police commissioner - gives a long and sprawling monologue about the fact that Batman isn't a hero, he's more than a hero, he's a "silent guardian" and Gotham City's "dark knight."

The end of the movie in particular is, despite the intent of the creators, far too neat and tidy: The bad guys are either dead or captured, Batman makes a noble sacrifice for the good of his city, and everyone else pretty much goes on about their business in exactly the same way as they had at the start of the movie. It's a lazy and, considering the unsettling nature of the first half of the film, frustratingly safe way to finish.

There is one area, however, where all of the hype is earned: Heath Ledger's performance as the Joker really is everything people have been saying. Nervous, edgy, uncertain, he's magnetic everytime he's on-screen, and by far the best thing about the movie. For the first time outside of the comics - and perhaps just the first time anywhere - the Joker actually is scary and disturbing, fucking with everyone's heads just for the hell of it. Even when his character gets reduced to near-generic expositionary villain at the end of the movie, Ledger's performance really sells it. I don't know if that means that it's Oscar-worthy, as people have been saying, but it's stunning, stunning work.

The best way to enjoy The Dark Knight may really be to just leave once you've seen Aaron Eckhart lying in the hospital bed, half of his face, covered in gauze, weeping; it's not just that it doesn't get any better than that, but that it gets much, much worse. Stick around at your own risk.

Rogen has been writing the script with Evan Goldberg (Superbad). The movie is based on the radio serial and the later Green Hornet TV series and will have Hornet's Asain manservant Kato. But even Rogen's jokes about getting Kato to say cocksucker fall flat on my ears.

I think perhaps even Rogen may know that this movie is really just an excuse for him and his buddies to get high and run around in superhero outfits:

"To us, it was just this funny notion that, when you say Green Hornet to someone, the first thing they say is, 'Hey, Bruce Lee played Kato in that show.' We really wanted to make this hero-sidekick movie. ... For years we'd really been trying to write a movie that was kind of about a hero and his sidekick. When we heard the Green Hornet movie was up for grabs, we thought that could be the perfect way to do this story, because he is the only hero whose sidekick is more known than he is. We thought it would be a good way to tell this relationship story and just do a big crazy action movie."

Sorry Seth, the Green Hornet is a terrible superhero — who wants to watch a movie about a better than average crime-fighter or poor man's Bruce Wayne? Didn't we learn our lesson from Mystery Men? Do we really need/want another bumbling Hancock? Pick something else to parody or keep making moves about weed. That seems to be working. Leave the fat superhero jokes to comedy hacks. I fear this could be the beginning of the end for Rogen.

[Sci-Fi]

Famous names: Frank Miller, Lynn Varley

Crunchy goodness: 4

Spinoffs/Sequels/Copycats: Miller returned to the well over a decade later, for the critically panned Batman: The Dark Knight Strikes Back. He also expanded on his Bat-aesthestic in Batman: Year One and most recently All-Star Batman And Robin The Boy Wonder.

Elevator pitch: Holy Mad Max, Batman!

Stunt casting: A TV host who looks suspiciously like David Letterman interviews the Joker on live TV — until the Joker takes it upon himself to murder the whole studio audience.

Design breakthrough: Art in The Dark Knight completely changed the way the Batman comic looked, taking it from campy, colorful bang-pow into dark, gritty 1990s noir-realism. Everything from the gloomy cityscapes to the talking-head television commentators had a profound influence on a whole generation of writers.

Summary of The Dark Knight Returns Storyline