She said, “You’re Thor? I’m tho thore I can hardly pith!”
from the DC version of Thor, when he appeared in Sandman.
I think it’s this.
Thassit! Thank you very kindly! A pleasure to re-read it after all these years!
With some it depends on the writer. According to some interpretations, the grim Darknight Detective is the true personality, and carefree playboy Bruce Wayne is the mask.
The Spirit. His regular identity of Denny Colt is legally dead.
Mandrake the Magician and Zatanna have only one identity.
The Fantastic Four also don’t conceal their identities.
Doctor Strange didn’t really conceal his identity for quite a while, only to eventually wind up getting a “Stephen Sanders” secret identity.
As others have said, you have it backwards. Bruce Wayne is a cover. Batman is the real guy.
The same can be said for several Silver Age Justice League members—Wonder Woman, Green Arrow, Aquaman, the Martian Manhunter, Hawkman, Hawkwoman, Red Tornado, Zatanna.
That has actually gone back and forth in the comics, movies, and TV over the years.
Sometimes Clark Kent is the mask, sometimes Superman. In the 1990’s TV show Lois and Clark (Clark is the person) it was summed up as “Clark is who I am, Superman is what I do”. Other times, it goes the other way.
I’ve also seem presentations where the reason Clark/Kal loves being a reporter for the Daily Planet is that it’s an area where being Superman doesn’t give him that much advantage - in order to be a great reporter he has to use skills that have nothing to do with his superpowers. (Of course, this treatment has varied over the decades and can be debated)
But the bit about his friends calling him Clark and not Kal is an important point. Arguably, his best friend is Batman/Bruce Wayne in most stories where both are present, to the point that Superman has entrusted Batman with the means to stop him should he ever go rogue. And Bruce/Bats calls his Kryptonian friend “Clark”.
When dealing with Kryptonians (because, despite being “The Last Son of Krypton” there are a few other Kryptonians flying around) Superman uses Kal-El, not in the least because a number of those folks actually knew Jor-El and they might even be speaking in Kryptonian. But that seems to be the only situation he consistently uses that name.
Obligatory Kill Bill link.
First of all, that’s fairly common among first- and second-generation immigrants - you have one name in the “new” culture, and another name in the “old”.
Second of all, Batman may call Superman “Clark”, but doesn’t Supes call him “Bruce”? Has Batman ever said, “Don’t call me Bruce Wayne - I’m Batman”?
Yes, if you are going to contend that Clark is the “real” person because his friends call him that, then you have to deal with the fact that Batman’s personal friends call him Bruce, not Batman (or in Alfred’s case, Master Wayne).
Very true. Back in the 50s, George Reeves played Clark Kent as a cool, confident guy with a sense of humor. Sometimes an episode would end with Clark making a sly quip. It wasn’t unreasonable to think that Clark was the real guy and Superman was a role he played.
When I was reading comic books in the 60s, Superman was clearly the true identity; Clark was a bland, nondescript, fade-into-the-woodwork guy with little or no personality. Although that made him a less interesting character, I think that’s a better disguise than making him a nervous, bumbling nerd, as Christopher Reeve played him. The ultimate disguise is to be unnoticed and unmemorable.
Of course, Dr. Strange has the advantage that his real, legal name sounds like a superhero name.
And in the MCU, real names being public knowledge seems to be the norm, not the exception.
But sometimes it just doesn’t stick. How many time has Daredevil been outed?
These two incarnations are how I’m most familiar with Superman, and the basis of my assertion in the OP. In each of these cases, Clark seems more like a put-on character than a fully realized person.
If you think about it, though, it’s inherent in the concept of Superman that he wants to be Clark Kent. If he didn’t want a human identity, he wouldn’t need one. He could just live in his crystalline fortress, and go around in tights all the time, and if he ever needed anything from the human economy that he wasn’t given in gratitude, he could compress some coal to diamonds to pay for it. He’s Clark Kent because he wants to just be an ordinary guy. Of course, he’s not ordinary, and in some versions he’s bad at faking being ordinary, but that’s still what he wants.
Alfred calls him “Master Bruce”
https://pics.me.me/what-master-bruce-youll-like-a-giant-bat-and-haunt-55370247.png
Usually.
Depends on the incarnation. He also calls him Master Wayne.
And I do love how they lampshade and play with that fact in the MCU.
Also to a large extent in the MTVU - Jessica Jones, for example, and while Luke Cage is an alias, it’s an alias the man uses all the time, not just as a superhero. Daredevil is an exception, but Matt has some significant reasons to actually hide his identity (not the least being the fact he’d be disbarred upon public discovery he’s a vigilante). Agents of Shield doesn’t seem big on the use of a “superhero name”, either.
In the MCU and MTVU? Not at all. Well, Kingpin figured it out, but didn’t broadcast it for whatever reasons. In the comics is a different matter entirely.
But… back to Clark and Bruce. Of course Clark would call Bruce Wayne “Bruce” - Bruce doesn’t have any other name. Clark does, however. His name at birth was Kal-El, his adopted name is Clark Kent. As already noted, having one name for the old culture and a different one for the new is fairly common among immigrants in the US. Who uses which name can vary, and why. Family, for example, often uses the “old culture” name (Kal-El doesn’t have a lot of family left, though I think Kara Jor-El has called him Kal on occasion), when speaking the old language (in Clark’s case, Kryptonian), moving in the old culture (again, among Kryptonians using Kal-El), but when moving in the new culture using the “new culture” name (Clark Kent).