LogFAQs > #914833208

Zeus posted...

More importantly, they live in a universe where they're wanted vigilantes worried about being exposed... and yet fucking nobody wears a mask or other headgear to obscure the face. If I was going hero or villain, the first thing I'd do is get a mask.

I'd grant you that, but that's more a problem with Hollywood than anything that we're ever going to see fixed in our lifetimes. Hollywood can't even put Peter Parker in a mask or Iron Man in a helmet without coming up with ways to keep showing their faces. If you're going to hire a famous actor, you want to show their face.

Though - and I was actually thinking about this myself not too long ago in a different context - the X-Men almost NEVER hide their real identities in the comics. The original team did (most of them wore masks, Iceman always covered his face with ice, etc), but once you get to the "All-New, All-Different" era, pretty much the only person on the entire team who wears a mask is Wolverine (and later Shadowcat - though she almost never wears it anymore, and Wolverine doesn't wear his half the time either). Sure, Colossus turns into metal and Nightcrawler had a hologram generator that could make him look like a normal human (that he used for all of like four issues before he decided he was just going to be himself, because "mutant pride"), but almost all of them are constantly showing their faces. In public. Often on camera.

Nor does it really help that, in spite of the fact that they have codenames, they're just as likely to use someone's real name as they are their codename while in the middle of a pitched battle with enemies who can easily hear them. People call Shadowcat "Kitty" constantly, they'll call Nightcrawler "Kurt" (though arguably any hope of hiding his identity is pretty much shot regardless), people tend to call Iceman "Bobby" more than they do Iceman, etc. The New Mutants are actually worse about this than the X-Men are (they almost NEVER use their codenames), though to their credit at least some of New Mutants bother wearing masks as part of their costumes.

It gets worse when you're talking about people like Bishop (who has a blatant face tattoo) or Cable (with a glowing cybernetic eye), though to their credit they're also the characters least likely to ever appear anywhere in public EXCEPT when on missions. But all the other X-Men and New Mutants basically just hang out in town just down the road from their school without hiding their identities in any way.

In other words, even in the past when technology was limited it should have taken most villains about 20 minutes to find out where the X-Men lived (and that's without even getting into the fact that the X-Men are led by "Professor X", a bald man in a wheelchair, who looks suspiciously like Professor Xavier, the bald man in a wheelchair who runs that school for "special" students). In the era of cell phone cameras and Internet searches, pretty much everyone on Earth should know exactly who they are and where to find them.


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