How to Choose a Secret Identity

The goodly people at Broken Frontier published my suggestions on how to choose a secret identity. It begins thusly:

One of the first tasks handed down to a new Hero is the construction of an alter ego. If you already have an Also Known As before you become super, and you’re satisfied with the alias of a mild-mannered junior high school biology teacher with a bad mustache (Mr. Wasner, I’m thinking of you), by all means go with that.

But some of us super-powered types were super BEFORE we had to think of a secret identity. We grew up super and kept our secret safe, revealing it only to our three best friends, parents, clergymen, random people we recognized from locking carts in the produce aisle, the old lady behind the counter at the drug store who glared at us because we used our powers to steal cigarettes, and every single girl we tried to get to second base with. But society forces us to claim an alter ego. The telephone bills have to go somewhere.

Read the rest of the essay in Broken Frontier.