I sit corrected.
On the great live action show Los Luchadores, the superheroes (Lobo Fuerte, Turbine and Maria Valentine) have no secret identities. But, being true luchadores, they never remove their masks.*
- except once at the mask repair shop.
An interesting case is the late 40’s Marvel (or Timely or whatever it was called then) star Venus. She fought crime, but also had a day job using the name Vicki Starr. As Vicki, she was perpetually trying to convince the people around her that she was the ancient goddess Venus and the glam super heroine…but nobody ever believed her!
Similarly, there was a very early issue of the Amazing Spider-Man in which Spidey is sick, and thus is easily defeated by Dr. Octopus. Holding the subdued hero in two of his arms, he removed his mask to reveal Peter Parker beneath it. No one believed that nebbishy bookworm photographer Peter could really be Spider-man, not J. Jonah, not Betty Brant, not Doc Ock. They all assumed that Peter had simply dressed up as Spidey as a stunt to get pics of Octopus, and that the “real” Spidey was somewhere else.
There’s a Superman story from the 80’s where an employee of Luthor’s figures out that Clark Kent and Superman are the same person, but Luthor scoffs at the idea because he can’t comprehend that how someone wouldn’t want to be Superman all the time.
I’ve been listening to some Superman radio serials from the 40s lately. Superman spends a lot of time as Clark Kent investigating bad guys. It is never explicitly said, but the implication I have taken from this is that, while Superman can stop a crime, Clark Kent’s reporting can act against the broader social ills the crimes are a symptom of.
During the Mike Grell run, the cop that had been working with GA turned up uninvited at Oliver’s home.
Oliver: How did you know who I was? 
Cop : It was supposed to be a secret? :rolleyes:
He stopped wearing the mask after that.
I’ve never read a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comic, except for the Usaji Yojimbo crossovers, nor seen the movies. Can someone explain why they wear masks?
Because they’re ninjas. Duh.
I recall an Elliot S! Maggin story with Luthor (the Silver Age Luthor, with fantastic super-science inventions and all that jazz) thinking about how trivial it woud be to uncover Superman’s “secret identity,” and how pointless. Luthor maintains several alternate identities himself, and if one were revealed he would just abandon it and use another.
His arrogance prevented him from ever considering that Superman might actuall have any emotional investment in another identity.
But before reaching that conclusion and breaking off the attempt, Lex actually narrows it down to a remarkably short list of dark-haired guys with broad shoulders who stand about six-foot-two: Superman, he swiftly reasons, is probably Joe Namath, Bruce Wayne, or that guy who works with the Daily Planet…
Also, in some cases the known friends and loved ones of the super identity are at least heavily overlapping the ones for the secret identity, so the bad guys know who to go after even if they don’t know the secret ID.
That actually made sense – his fighting was so impaired that he really did look like some ordinary schlub making a really stupid attempt to pass himself off as a superhero.
I don’t think that this is ever specifically mentioned in any of the episodes, but I always thought that a great explanation for no one ever recognizing Diana Prince as Wonder Woman would be Amazonian magic – let’s just say that Queen Hyppolyta cast a spell preventing any mortal human from ever “putting two and two together” in regards to Princess Diana’s secret identity.
[del]I think this was canon in the comics briefly, when Heinberg was writing the book. But it was Circe who did it IIRC.[/del]
No, wait, I’m remembering wrong. A co-worker figured it out when the next writer took over.
Of whom am I thinking? Oh, yeah, they tried that in Spider-Man of all things. Blech.
From an episode of Teen Titans:
Beast Boy: But what about my secret identity?
Raven: What secret identity? You’re green.
On the other hand, the other Titans apparently didn’t learn his real name until much later, which kept them from giving him grief over being named “Garfield”.
I don’t think he had a secret identity in the comics, either.
They don’t have hair to soak up or divert blood from wounds to the scalp/upper face, so they wear the masks to prevent blood from running into their eyes in the middle of a fight. (Okay, not really–I have no idea if they ever offered a reason beyond “Ninjas!”, but it at least sounds sort of plausible.)
In the comics, he had previously been a TV child star on a science-fiction show, in which he used his powers. So the whole world knew who he was.
He actually did for a while. In his early days with the Doom Patrol, he wore a purple mask that looked like a real face, so that people wouldn’t connect the green kid who hung out with them as civilians with the green kid who hung out with them as a hero, so they wouldn’t get in trouble for child endangerment.
Green Lantern : I’m not sure why any members of a police force should wish to conceal their identities, but it sounds a bit fascist to me.
For most GL’s the mask is just a part of the uniform and everybody knows who they are. IIRC I have an issue where Boudicca visits her mother, who has been telling everybody about her daughter the Green Lantern.
It seems to be just the Lanterns of Earth’s sector who have secret identities.
ETA
Except Guy of course.
He actually set up the Maria Stark Foundation (named after his mother) to fund the Avengers, so that his own financial vicissitudes wouldn’t affect the team.
He even created a “Randall Pierce” person who The Guy Hired to Play Iron Man all those years ago. Stark thought ahead about this stuff.
Yep. This was because Stan could wanted to try having superheroes with no secret identities, just to be different.
In addition to Franklin Storm, mentioned upthread, Ben’s paternal uncle Jake and his second wife Petunia live out in Arizona or somewhere. The big joke was that for years Ben made Aunt Petunia sound like a crazy old lady, and she turns out to be this young dish that Uncle Jake married late in life.
There really is an aunt Petunia? I always assumed she was just a figure of speech.
I think that, beyond the plot point, the meta-marketing trick is to allow the everyday average teen fan to imagine, “Yeah…I could do that. I could be Norbert Nobody during the school week and on weekends I could be Major Mayhem, the hero who spreads confusion amongst street gangs and organized crime. I’d have a shield like Captain America’s and a hammer like Thor’s and…”
—G!
But he’s nobody’s hero.
Saved a drowning child…
Cured a wasting disease…
. Geddy Lee (Rush)
. Nobody’s Hero
. Different Stages