The Avengers are Earth’s Mightiest Heroes, and they’ve become the world’s greatest defenders and experts for any and all types of threats. They’ve battled everything from street-level villains to interdimensional monstrosities, and they’re always Earth’s first line of defense. However, not even the Avengers can work around the clock. They all have their own lives outside of the team, and some of them even have lives outside of hero work. Marvel heroes generally have never been the biggest proponents of secret identities, with a few exceptions like Spider-Man and Daredevil. Most of them have had their real identities as public knowledge for years.
Marvel has mostly done away with secret identity shenanigans with the majority of their heroes, but I say that a ton of them could benefit from taking a walk in the average person’s shoes once again. Today, we’re taking a look at five Avengers who definitely stand to gain something from having a private life they can slip away to. However, some heroes are much better off with their identities out in the open, and so we’ll also look at two Marvel heroes who should never go back to having secret identities. Without further ado, let’s dive right into it.
In the early years, the knowledge of who and what the Hulk was tended to be kept top secret. Nowadays, everyone knows that Banner transforms into the Green Behemoth when he loses control, but there are definitely still stories to explore from the perspective of Hulk being a boogeyman that nobody can explain. Modern Hulk stories tend to lack a major aspect of what makes the character so great: Bruce Banner. All too often, Banner is sidelined for the Jade Giant, or he has nothing to do other than wander and offer exposition to the audience and side characters.
Giving Bruce a secret identity where people don’t know about the Hulk gives him the chance to explore what it’s like to live a relatively normal life. Banner is almost always on the run or trying to find a safe haven, but if he’s able to actually rest without the threat of someone chasing him, then he can plant roots and live. Bringing Banner’s personal life and the small aspects of day-to-day life could ground Hulk stories again in a very fresh way.
The Hulk’s number-one sparring partner is another character who could benefit from a human identity. Thor has experimented with secret identities a couple of times, and, technically speaking, he’s just a mortal man right now. Thor has tried trading places with the mortal Donald Blake, pretending to be a normal man as Sigurd Jarlson the first time, and even once fused with a normal man, Eric Masterson. Needless to say, Thor has no shortage of human identities to call his own, but I still say that he could benefit from making it long-term.
Thor having a human identity can help him connect with the people he wants to protect. He’s a god of Asgard, yes, but he’s also born of Midgard, and walking among the people there is the best way to understand how it works and how best to save it. Thor should live in Asgard and deal with godly threats, but a significant portion of his rogues gallery also operates exclusively on Earth and deals with mortal problems. Thor tapping into that section of his mythos, which has gone largely underrepresented in recent years, is a great way to freshen up his comics.
The Sentry is one of the most powerful and dangerous heroes on the planet. His superheroic persona is an incredible warrior for peace, but all of his good actions must be balanced out by the Void’s vile actions. They exist in a constant tug of war, pulling against each other and trying to enforce their own reality on the world, but somewhere in the middle of both of them is Bob, and he often goes overlooked. Bob Reynolds is a man with the powers of a god, and his best stories tackle the emotional, spiritual weight of the nature of his powers. Yet, as his newest series has shown, Bob also needs to reflect deeply human emotions.
Bob has always been used to reflect deeply human realities in a superhuman way, but his stories could truly be elevated by letting him go through life as a normal man, as well. Bob struggling and thriving in mundane situations can help inform the superhuman activities he always finds himself in even more. Heck, he was made as a Superman pastiche, and Superman’s best stories focus on the most human elements of him and his civilian life. Giving Bob the same opportunities opens the door to incredible stories that are begging to be told.
Wanda Maximoff is the Sorcerer Supreme, a title that she only claimed after a lifetime of struggle, love, and everything in between. She’s always been either on the run or fighting for her right to live, so she’s almost never had the chance to slow down and appreciate normal life, no matter how much she wanted to. Wanda yearned for a normal life and family more than anything else for decades, and now that she is Marvel’s number one magical authority, now is the best time to give her a way to try that lifestyle out.
Wanda wants to truly improve the world and leave it a better place than she found it, and the best way to connect her to it is to give her a secret identity. Letting Wanda live a normal life would give her the chance to relax that she’s always wanted and ground her interdimensional battles against concepts and cosmic beings that she goes on every month. Wanda is a hero who is getting lost in her own mythos, but if she had a life that anchored her to the normal, everyday person, then she could fly as high as she wanted, knowing she would always return to a place like home.
On the topic of Scarlet Witch and her own secret identity, let’s talk about her estranged ex-husband, Vision. The synthesized Avenger has always been an outsider trying to understand humanity. He’s experienced life without emotions, married life alongside Wanda, and even the traditional suburban life with his own synthesized family. Yet, through all of the multitudes of ways that Vision has tried to experience what it’s like to be human, he’s seldom taken the plunge to act like a normal human.
Giving Vision a new identity that lets him pose as a normal man is the best way to give him a brand-new direction in life. He’s long since come to accept his artificial status and wants to instead focus on raising his daughter, but giving him the opportunity to connect with humanity in a new way is something that can deepen that belief even more. Vision has never lived with the idea of protecting a secret identity or having a normal job and lifestyle, but giving him those can take him in a brand-new direction that is ripe with potential stories.
Steve Rogers has to keep his identity public because his best stories all stem from the single best retcon in Marvel: Steve emerging from the ice. So much of Steve’s emotional core revolves around being a man out of time and waking up in a world where he’s become a symbol. Captain America was remembered as the ideal hero, representing everything that someone should strive to be. He was courageous, inspiring, and kind to a fault. That idolization of Captain America is what drives all of Steve’s biggest emotional moments and what makes his public identity necessary.
Captain America has to be known as a war hero and legend, so when Steve reemerges as a very human man, he’s forced to grapple with that pressure from all sides. Steve and Captain America need to be tightly wound together, to the point where nobody in the modern day can tell them apart, which amps up the pressure even more and makes Steve’s identity being public a necessity. Steve simply works better with his identity as public knowledge, which is also true for the final Avenger on our list.
Tony Stark being Iron Man isn’t just common knowledge; it was a cultural phenomenon. The Marvel Cinematic Universe cemented the idea of Tony living openly as Iron Man with a massive revelation in his first movie, but the comics proved that Tony works best publicly long before that. Originally, the story was that Iron Man was Tony’s bodyguard, but Tony operating as the Invincible Iron Man works way better and opens up far more storytelling avenues than shoehorning in a reason to trade places with himself.
Tony is the type of person who wants to push towards the future by any means necessary. Revealing that he’s Iron Man lets him operate honestly about what he’s capable of, freeing him to truly focus on what’s important to him: saving the world by developing the correct technology. True, he could still do this with a secret identity, but telling the world he’s Iron Man cuts out the middleman that forced him to hide what he was spending the majority of his time working on. It streamlined his stories in the best way and truly works better for Iron Man.
Which hero would you love to see create a new secret identity? Leave a comment in the comment section below and join the conversation on the ComicBook Forums!
