In the wild Silver Age of DC Comics, Superman creates specific rooms in his Fortress of Solitude, each a celebration of one of his friends. He makes a Lois Lane room, a Jimmy Olsen room, and … a Clark Kent room? Yes, at one point, Superman was so paranoid about keeping his secret identity safe that even in his private Fortress of Solitude, he carried on the charade that Superman and Clark Kent were entirely separate people.
This makes a certain amount of sense because the most famous secret identity of all does, in a way, seem like a separate character from Superman. In Superman II, Christopher Reeve’s Clark gives up his powers to live as a human, and we see Clark Kent physically separate from the body of Superman. Ditto Superman III, in which Clark has to fight a cruel and aggressive version of Superman. The psychological implications seem fairly clear and somewhat obvious: Superman is the fantasy many of us have about ourselves, while Clark is the reality. As comic legend and Phantom Tollbooth illustrator Jules Feiffer put it so wonderfully in 1965, “Superman’s fake identity was our real one, that’s why we loved him so.”
