Clark Kenting / Superman

Superman

When it comes to disguise, Superman is no slouch.

Superman is the Trope Namer, but his use of the trope has evolved over the years and picked up a number of nuances.

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• The earliest Superman comics portrayed Superman as more shadowy and mysterious (and morally ambiguous); as such, he's only ever seen very briefly as Superman. Then, as Superman started to interact more with the outside world, writers started to realize that people who interact with both Superman and Clark Kent on a regular basis might put two and two together (Lois Lane in particular). That couldn't happen, as the Anthropic Principle essentially requires Lois never to make the connection to preserve the Two-Person Love Triangle. Silver Age comics tried to get around this by giving him minor shapeshifting powers (or "super facial muscle control"), or at least having him move so quickly that nobody could get a good look at him.
• But at the same time, they were also moving Superman to the radio and the big screen, and producers discovered that if you had a really good actor, it was entirely possible — and believable — to make Superman and Clark Kent totally different people. Voice actor Bud Collyer surprised everyone by doing both Clark and Superman, both on the radio (The Adventures of Superman) and in cartoons (Superman Theatrical Cartoons and The New Adventures of Superman). The radio producers originally wanted different voice actors for Clark and Superman before Collyer proved it could be done. Christopher Reeve also portrayed Clark and Superman completely differently for Superman: The Movie and its sequels, and audiences had no trouble accepting the disguise (even the crew of the films were fooled!); this clip is a good example.
  • It's occasionally suggested that some people do know his secret identity but say nothing so that he won't push them away for their own safety - after all, he is invincible while they are not. In Batman: Hush, Batman suspects Perry White is too good a reporter not to know who Clark is, but doesn't say anything for this reason.
  • Discussed by Clark and Lois in Superman: Brainiac:
    Clark: I don't need X-Ray Vision to tell me when someone's hiding behind a disguise.
    Lois: Me either.
    Clark: Only if it's not right in front of your face.
    Lois: I would've figured it out. Eventually.
    Clark: You keep believing that.
  • In one '90s storyline, Jimmy Olsen thinks he's discovered Superman's secret identity, but backs out of revealing it on TV at the last minute. Cat Grant and another reporter dismiss the idea it was any of the three people he'd proposed in the lead-up.
    Cat: Clark's been photographed with Superman, and besides...
    Ralph: He's Clark Kent.
    Cat: Exactly.
    • Though in that storyline it's heavily implied that the person Jimmy believes to be Superman is not Clark, but one of the other suspects. Jimmy just asks Clark to go along as a suspect to fill in the numbers and create TV suspense.
• And, naturally, it's all been lampshaded before:
  • A retrospective on Superman's fiftieth birthday revealed that one fellow in Metropolis did catch on - Superman's drycleaner.
    Suffice it to say, I’ve never seen them come in here together.
  • A Justice League of America book had a parody of Spy Magazine's "Separated at Birth?' feature comparing Clark Kent and Superman.
  • One Silver Age Villain of the Week is a Kandorian criminal who uses a "face-changing machine" to resemble Superman. At one point, he tries to disguise himself as a civilian with a business suit, fedora, and glasses. Needless to say, Superman finds him quickly anyway.
  • The animated Superman: Doomsday subverts the trope; Lois knows full well that Clark is Superman, and she's annoyed with Clark for refusing to admit it to her.
  • In this clip from Superman: The Animated Series, Clark admits to being Superman to Lois, but claims he only does it to scoop stories from her. He even lowers his glasses!
    • An entire episode revolves around Clark being presumed dead due to holding evidence that would clear the name of a death row inmate, and Superman still has to find the real culprit in time without revealing his identity. The episode ends with the real culprit only figuring it out right before being executed. The Kents also discuss why he even needs a Secret Identity.
      Martha: Well, this is a fine mess.
      Jonathan: It's not like he's really dead, Martha. He just can't be Clark anymore.
      Superman: But I am Clark. I need to be Clark. I'd go crazy if I had to be Superman all the time!
  • Smallville's episode "Homecoming" has a scene where Clark meets his future self and is taken aback by the glasses and slicked-back hair.
  • Lampshaded in this comic◊, where Superman finally reveals his identity to Lana and Lois — and dumps them both for being too dumb to see through the disguise.
  • Clark runs into a problem when he comes back from the dead (it's a long story) and has to explain why he had disappeared for so long. He and Lois brainstorm a lot of ideas before stumbling across the idea of having Clark be trapped under a fallen building for a month (which has actually happened, and other Metropolis citizens also were trapped for months, too) and Matrix shapeshifting herself to look like Superman and "rescuing" him in front of witnesses. But some of the weirder suggestions were wandering the country with Easy Amnesia, or alien abduction, to which Lois says:
    Lois: No offense, honey, but who would fall for such stupid stories?
    Clark: Um, you did, Lois. All the time.
  • In Blackest Night, Flash and Green Lantern are talking of how Lantern has only a small mask rather than a cowl like Flash.
    Green Lantern: Clark doesn't wear a mask.
    Flash: Clark slouches, drops his voice an octave, and wears suits two sizes too large.
  • Saturday Night Live poked fun at the trope by having Superman (played by big Superman fan Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson) being so bad at his disguise that you could see his Superman suit sticking out from under his regular clothes. His co-workers, all completely aware of his secret identity, say it's at least better than when his civilian identity was "Supe R. Man."
  • In the popular Elseworlds series Justice League: The Nail, Kal-El was found not by Jonathan and Martha Kent (whose car got a flat tire from running over a nail) but by an Amish family. After his adoptive parents were killed by the book's big villain, Kal took on the identity of Superman and joined the Justice League. In the sequel, "Another Nail", Kal is encouraged to take some time off. The Kents put together a disguise so he could blend in with the public. Their costume includes a false beard and mustache that make him look rather creepy. Lois Lane then helps Kal with his disguise, suggesting a "less is more" approach; glasses, loose-fitting clothes, and a slight stoop to the shoulders. The disguise is essentially the classic Clark Kent look, prompting Kal to say, "You don't seriously think this is going to fool anyone?"
  • When Superman revealed his identity in 2019, many wondered how they couldn't put it together. In a hilarious moment, Perry White relates that he now knows Clark missing deadlines was to keep up the act and he's happy that will no longer happen...then realizes Clark missing deadlines wasn't deliberate.
    Perry: Wait...I can't stand a blown deadline from a writer working at regular human speed...but superspeed?!
  • In one pre-Crisis story, Superman is to be featured on a postage stamp. He goes to great lengths to make sure that a side shot of him is chosen, rather than a full-face view, because if the stamp was postmarked in a town with a double-O in its name, the letters might land on his face in such a way that they resemble a pair of glasses, which might give away his secret identity. Presumably kids in the DC universe never doodle glasses and mustaches on newspaper photos, which might also be a bit of a clue.
  • MAD did several parodies:
    • In a strip by Don Martin, Clark replaces his glasses with contact lenses, causing a receptionist at the Daily Planet to suddenly realize he was Superman all along.
    • Clark is depicted as having Superman's muscles nearly bursting out of his suit, and his cape sticking out of the back a little, commenting on what a Paper-Thin Disguise it was.
    • The Captain Ersatz Superduperman eventually reveals to "Lois Pain" that he's really "Clark Bent", the pathetically servile little hunchback who looks and behaves almost exactly opposite of the obnoxiously self-confident muscleman Superduperman. Lois responds by walking over him and saying "Big deal. You're still a creep."
    • In Sergio Aragones' "A MAD Look at Batman" (done when the ABC show was white hot) there is a panel of Batman spray-painting "Superman is Clark Kent" on a fence. Possible a foreshadowing of the tense partnership between the two later.
  • Superman: Secret Identity, an Elseworld story set in the real world where a man named after the fictional Clark Kent gets similar powers, takes great pains to avert this. When out saving people, Clark makes sure to never let anyone see his face. He wears the Superman costume to make the witness accounts all the more ridiculous and unbelievable. Halfway through the series, he does take to wearing fake glasses in his civilian identity, but only because he was temporarily captured and doesn't want whoever did it recognizing him while passing him on the street (and he gets a lot of jokes about it at work). He's not trying to prevent people who know him personally from recognizing him, he's trying to prevent people who saw him unconscious and imprisoned from recognizing him if he has the bad luck to bump into them on the street. When he does meet people face-to-face in costume, he uses makeup and forms to alter his features enough to be unrecognizable and burns his fingerprints off of anything he handles in front of them. Despite all this, Agent Malloy still figures out his real identity - though it's implied to have taken a while, and by that point, their professional relationship worked out for him - and he respects Clark's privacy enough to keep his secret.
  • This text conversation from Texts from Superheroes between Lex Luthor and Metallo suggests that at least some members of his Rogues Gallery are aware of his secret identity, but keep it to themselves because there's no point in attacking him through it as he's still invulnerable, and all the time he spends keeping up said secret identity is time not spent thwarting them.
  • Discussed in Superman: Secret Origin. Lois, after analyzing Clark thoroughly, quickly realizes that this mild-mannered reporter may simply be putting on an act. The bad suit, the slouching, the meek persona, the fumbling around, the large glasses that obstruct his face. She then flat-out asks him, "You want to be underestimated, don't you?"
  • Superman: American Alien discusses this and even points out the obvious: sometimes Clark Kent will have to take off his glasses. Clark's answer as to how he maintains the disguise is that most people just tell him that he looks like Superman.
  • In the TV series Justice League Action, Plastic Man points out how ridiculous his civilian disguise is.
  Plastic Man: How'd she [Lois Lane] find out?
  Superman: She's a reporter. Instinct.
  Plastic Man: Or your terrible disguise. I mean, it's just glasses.
  Superman: I can still drop you.
• Lex Luthor in particular never realizing it is usually justified as having his head so far up his own ass that Clark could probably walk right up to him and change clothes and he still wouldn't get it. While some of the specifics of the explanation vary from story to story (i.e. he thinks Superman wouldn't have a secret identity because that would mean getting out of the spotlight, or he thinks that Supes probably maintains multiple identities for convenience instead of living out a singular civilian identity full-time), the gist of it is that he's convinced himself that whoever Superman is he couldn't possibly be Clark Kent (since Lex projects himself on Superman and he'd never do that), and his ego is such that he ignores all evidence to the contrary because that'd mean admitting he was wrong.
• But sometimes, it’s lampshaded so hard or ineptly that it’s a wonder nobody ever figured it out:
  • Lois & Clark liked to mine the resemblance for jokes without the characters really behaving realistically. Lois tries to describe Superman to a sketch artist only to create a dead ringer for Clark, but she never makes the connection. Superman is thrown to Earth naked by an asteroid he’s trying to divert from the planet by force, and once he gets a pair of glasses (in a contrived way), everyone thinks they’ve found Clark instead of the now-absent Superman. It tried to explain things with shapeshifters and Alternate Universe counterparts, making things weirder, although Dean Cain generally did a good job making Superman and Clark distinct.
  • A Silver Age comic has Clark scouted to play Superman in a movie. Everyone on set notices the resemblance, but nobody suspects anything. A full summary is available here.
  • The "Clark Kent plays Superman in a movie" plotline was also used in a Golden Age newspaper strip arc. The disguise there is probably helped by the fact that the cast and crew includes a couple of stunt doubles that also greatly resemble both Clark Kent and Superman in the art style. The real mind-boggling part is Lois half-dismissing the resemblance.
• And different Superman stories might have their own constraints:
  • Smallville
    • The show is defined by its "No Tights, No Flights" rule, so strictly speaking, there’s no "Superman" identity. In the appropriately-named "Identity", Jimmy Olsen accidentally catches Clark saving him and Lois on camera, but Clark is moving too quickly to be seen clearly. Chloe encourages him to adopt a superhero identity, the "Red-Blue Blur", as that’s all anyone could see. Clark uses this strategy to protect his identity. By "Masquerade", he has also adopted his "bespectacled wimp" persona.
    • Oliver Queen dresses up like Robin Hood for a party in "Wither". Then in the next episode, "Arrow", the Green Arrow (Oliver in disguise) steals a necklace at a party. Lois, of course, doesn't see a connection.
  • Man of Steel deconstructed and reconstructed the trope. Clark goes through a number of different disguises and identities, including copious facial hair, slouching, many a hat, and different names. In a couple of scenes with Lois, Clark is actually walking around in the background but is not part of the conversation and is so inconspicuous viewers themselves may not catch it at first, suggesting a Beneath Notice approach. All this doesn’t prevent Lois from figuring out his secret, via use of investigative journalism she tracked him down by his heroic deeds directly, which took his exact appearance out of the equation. By the time Clark starts working at the Daily Planet and adopting the classic Clark Kent glasses-and-bad-suit disguise, he’s keeping it a secret from everyone except Lois, who won’t tell anyone anyway. It's also possible other Planet employees figure it out, but keep it quiet out of gratitude for saving the Earth.
  • In Batman's "No Man's Land" arc, Superman comes to visit Gotham, once as Superman, and again as Clark Kent. While Clark - whom nobody recognises as Clark anyway - he gets in a fight and is punched in the face. The attempt is as effective as can be expected, but he remembers to double over and feign that it hurts. His attacker, on the other hand, is left wringing his fist and complaining that the man has a 'jaw like steel'.
  • Kerry Callen's Super Antics #2 plays with this by having a mother in a supermarket panic when her child is replaced by a complete stranger while she had her back turned (he grabbed a pair of reading glasses and put them on) with Superman using his X-Ray vision to solve the mystery and then flicking the glasses off of the child's face.
• Since the 1970s, the Clark Kent disguise has solidified as working for a number of reasons, most of which you can’t really see on a comic page, as described in a number of different Superman works, some of them psychological:
  • Superman generally uses utterly different body language, mannerisms, and tone of voice as Clark Kent. Acquaintances might notice that Clark kind of looks like Superman, but they would never believe they were actually the same guy. All-Star Superman runs with this to great effect; he even once pulls off “Superman disguised as Clark”.
  • Some comics claimed that as Clark Kent, Superman would unconsciously use a mild form of super-hypnosis with his glasses to make him look like a different person. Once, Clark is changing into his costume when Lana Lang finds him and confused why Clark has a Superman shirt on. Clark gets a Daily Planet artist to do a drawing of him that shows Clark looked at least ten years older and much weaker. He shows it to Lana who compliments the artist as "that's you to a T!" This explanation would be dropped when it turned out to raise more questions than it answered.
  • Several works suggest that his costume stood out so much that people tended to ignore his face and focus on the costume, like the big letter S. Superman: Birthright proposed that his eyes were a striking, "unearthly" shade of blue and the Clark Kent glasses blurred them significantly. And Lois & Clark cheekily suggested that people were more drawn to Superman’s tight shorts. It also helps that he’s of average height and build with no distinctive facial features, so even if anybody did look at his face, there was nothing very memorable about him anyway.
  • The early part of John Byrne's run outright states that Superman vibrates his face at super-speed when on-camera, making his face too blurry to make out the details even for high-speed cameras.
    • In issue #2 of that run, a computer easily deduces Superman is Clark Kent. Luthor, however, refuses to believe that a being as powerful as Superman would ever allow himself to pretend to be some normal person, and fires Amanda McCoy, the programmer.
  • Most Post-Crisis comics suggest that nobody even knows Superman has a civilian Secret Identity to begin with (as opposed to in the Silver Age, when everyone assumed he did). People just accept that Superman is an alien named Kal-El who escaped his planet’s destruction and lives in his Fortress of Solitude. And since he doesn’t wear a mask, nobody suspects he has anything to hide (Batman even gave him kudos for that one).
  • Superman: Earth One implies that Superman and Clark use different accents, with Superman affecting an East Coast accent as if he were from Metropolis (assuming it is on the East Coast), and Clark using his natural Midwestern accent he picked up growing up in Kansas.
  • In The Supergirl from Krypton (2004), Clark explains to his cousin the importance of a secret identity, and Kara asks how a pair of glasses can fool everybody. Then she sees a Superman statue and realizes that nobody recognizes her cousin because they see him as a quasi-mythical bigger-than-life figure.
    Kara: This is how they see you.
    Clark: I guess... It's very flattering, but I don't really think about it.
    Kara: You're their champion. Bigger than life. No wonder the eyeglasses work — Nobody would look for you dressed like them!
• Several incarnations of Supergirl have tried her hand at Clark Kenting. In order from bad to better:
  • Post-Flashpoint Kara didn't use any extras prior to Supergirl (Rebirth) (but only half-heartedly attempted to have a secret identity in one story).
  • Pre-Flashpoint and Supergirl: Cosmic Adventures in the 8th Grade Kara versions followed her cousin's example by using glasses.
  • For most of her Pre-Crisis life, Kara used a brown wig to hide her blonde hair.
  • In The Supergirl From Krypton (1959), Clark buys a brown wig, a blouse and a long skirt to create his cousin's secret identity.
    Superman: There! That wig of pigtails makes you look like a different girl entirely who was born on Earth!
  • The animated Supergirl of the DC Animated Universe uses both wig and glasses.
  • Supergirl (Rebirth) Kara wears loose clothes, glasses, dyes her hair brown and braids it into a ponytail, and behaves like a insecure, quiet, geeky girl (as opposite to her hot-blooded, fiery and determined real self).
    Director Chase: "Kara Danvers" is a tool for you to walk amongst the people you protect.
• Kon-El, the Post-Crisis version of Superboy, is probably the worst offender of them all. He changes his clothes, but makes no attempt to cover his face or change his mannerisms in any way. As a result, trained government officials can easily pick him out of a crowd or recognize him after bumping into him. That said, it should be noted that Kon doesn't have much of a Secret Identity to begin with, given that the government is aware of his existence already.
• Rebirth's Superboy, Jonathan Samuel Kent, is also a terrible offender. Aside from wearing a baseball cap and fake glasses, Jon makes no attempt to alter his voice or mannerisms or even change what jeans he's wearing in his uniform. This is only further compounded by his status as a Bad Liar who can't come up with a good excuse for all the things he's doing. This issue gets lampshaded heavily by Beast Boy.
  Starfire: [The Teen Titans are in the Kent apartment] That "S" on your chest means that you're a big advantage.
  Jon: "S"? What "S"? I'm just a normal kid... that Robin happens to know...
  Beast Boy: We know who you are. Your Secret Identity is more obvious than mine. And I'm green!
• If you know somebody who wears glasses all the time, you'll see how much they really do change a face when occasionally removed, to the point you may not recognize them in the street when they are leaping buildings with a single bound.
  • Superman has been known to be in the same place as Clark Kent. Especially in the Silver Age, he could find all sorts of lookalikes to stand in for him, from his Kandorian cousin to a film actor to robots in his likeness—even Batman on occasion. Post-Crisis stories would have shapeshifters do the work for them.
  • One development suggests that nobody really knows who Clark Kent is anyway. Unlike the wealthy, famous playboy Bruce Wayne who's always in the public eye for acquiring injuries from parasailing holidays and skiing and mountaineering, Clark Kent is pretty much a nobody—a name on a newspaper byline. If you don't know who Clark Kent is, you can't connect him to Superman in the first place. In New 52, Clark Kent turns down a TV job because his face would become too well known. If anybody worked it out, it would be his friends—but they believe they know him well and think of him as a meek, slightly cowardly Everyman who never does anything remarkable.
    • Speaking of Bruce Wayne, he's actually done some Clark Kenting of his own by filling in for Clark when the situation called for it. It makes sense since they know each other's secret identities, Bruce/Batman is a master of disguise, knows how to mimic body language, they resemble each other slightly, and have very similar builds. In one story set during the Bronze Age, Bruce was filling in for Clark when Superman was off-planet and Bruce was stunned by how much work went into being a reporter. A bullying co-worker at the Daily Planet, who enjoyed pranking Clark, decided to have some fun and tripped Bruce when he was walking down a hallway. Bruce proceeded to kick the guy's ass, because they were alone and beating someone up with (relatively) mundane martial arts skills isn't going to blow Clark's cover as a super-strong alien, and it's not like the guy is ever going to come to the conclusion that Clark Kent is Batman. Plus, who would ever believe him?
    • This is in contrast to Lois & Clark, where by Season 3 Clark was the Daily Planet’s star reporter with posters of him all over the city, while still nobody makes a connection. Also in direct contrast with the 1970s Action Comics, where Clark becomes the anchor of WGBS News after the station owner (Morgan Edge) buys the Daily Planet and transfers him.
  • The villains naturally have an incentive to try to see who Superman really is, but again, if nobody really knows who Clark Kent is, they'll never make the connection between the two. Another idea, which displays their sheer arrogance, is that they can't grasp why the invincible Man of Steel would hide himself as a weak loser. Aside from the aforementioned Byrne story, All-Star Superman also has a scene where Clark interviews Luthor in prison, and Luthor never suspects that he’s talking to his arch-nemesis, even as Clark is surreptitiously using his powers to control a nearby riot.
    Luthor: Can you imagine a better world, Kent? That's all I've ever asked. In a world without Superman, the unattainable Lois Lane might have noticed good old Clark, pining away in the corner.
    Kent: You keep talking about me, but I'm here to interview you.
    Luthor: I'm just saying. A strapping farm boy with brains, integrity, no discernible style of his own... You're a prize catch for a cynical city girl!
    Kent: Why haven't you filed an appeal?
    Luthor: But with him around, you're a parody of a man. A dullard, a cripple.
  • In Elliot S! Maggin's novels Last Son of Krypton and Miracle Monday, it's established that Luthor maintains multiple false identities as scientists, doctors, even artists, to finance and facilitate his schemes. According to the second novel, the reason Luthor doesn't expend much effort to expose Superman's identity (in Pre-Crisis days, it was common knowledge that he had one) is that he assumes Superman probably does the same thing, and that exposing any one of his identities would be nothing more than a temporary inconvenience to the Man of Steel and therefore not worth the bother.
• The tie-in comics for Young Justice (2010) had Clark successfully pull this off on his own clone— but not his clone's girlfriend. When he attempts to develop a relationship with Conner as Clark, not Superman, Miss Martian telepathically informs him that she knows damn well who he is, because she recognizes Conner's face underneath the glasses and hat. Conner, however, does not, because despite being physically sixteen he's only about a year old, and he doesn't keep mirrors around.
  • Word of God from Young Justice showrunner Greg Weisman says that Superman's Clark Kenting is helped by most of the public not even realizing Superman has a secret identity, since it's common knowledge that he's a refugee from Krypton and that his name is Kal-El. And the fact that Clark Kent is a newspaper reporter, not a TV reporter. It's unknown how long Clark managed to fool Lois in this universe (if at all), since by the time she makes her first onscreen appearance, in Season Three, they're already married and have had Jonathan and Lois is, of course, fully aware that her husband is Superman.
• Teri Hatcher, appearing on Saturday Night Live during the run of Lois & Clark, got the opportunity to mock this during her opening monologue. She starts by telling the audience about the teasing she gets for playing the clueless Lois Lane, but explains that it's just part of the show and nobody is really that dumb. Then Will Ferrell comes on and asks if he can make an announcement. He puts on a pair of reading glasses... and Teri starts panicking, asking "Oh my God, who are you?! Where's Will?!" Teri would later pull the same joke when she appeared as a guest panelist on QI.
  • While Cain isn't quite the master of dual roles that Reeve was, he still did a fairly good job of making Clark and Superman two very different characters. Clark is cheeky, casual, and aggressive when he has to be. Superman is stiff and authoritative.
  • In terms of the secret identity even being an issue, Lex Luthor's realization that Superman has a secret identity and "walks among us" is a key turning point for Luthor's antagonism toward Superman partway through Lois and Clark's first season.
  • In another episode, Lois gets Supes' powers and dons a costume as "Ultrawoman". Just before facing Jimmy and the Chief, she panics: "They'll recognize me." "No they won't," Clark calmly assures her — and they don't!
    Lois: How can they not know? They see me every single day! How can they not look past a simple mask and see...(notices Clark smirking at her with an "oh, really?" expression)
  • In another famous scene in Lois and Clark, Tempus, a man from the future, comes back in time and tells Lois that she's famous... for being "the most galactically stupid woman who ever lived", demonstrating by putting on and taking off a pair of glasses over and over saying "I'm Clark Kent! No, I'm Superman!" Turn that light down, would you?
  • The assassin Deathstroke (no, not the one from Teen Titans; this guy had magnetic powers) donned a pair of glasses when he and his wife socialized with Lois and Clark in their civilian identities and neither he nor Superman recognized each-other, despite having given the Man of Steel a serious beating earlier, which proves even Superman can be fooled by a pair of specs.
  • Some episodes indicated that Clark did a lot to maintain his cover offscreen, for instance, even though the lenses in his glasses are fake, he regularly visits an optometrist (presumably deliberately messing up his test results to obtain a prescription he doesn't need), just in case anyone wondered why a man who wears glasses never gets a checkup.
    • Season one also went out of their way to show Clark rarely, if ever without his glasses even when relaxing alone at home. With a couple of episodes expressly showing that the first thing he does when he wakes up is put them on, and the last thing before going to sleep is taking them off. Clark maintains the ironclad illusion of myopia by developing the real habits of glasses-wearers. And that was before he even came up with the idea of Superman.
  • A few people have noticed how much Superman looks like Clark Kent without glasses. They're either dying in Superman's arms or, in the case of Lois, waved it off as being under the influence of a Love Potion and idealizing the object of her affection (Clark) as looking like Superman.
    • At one point, when Clark is about to be outed as Superman, Jimmy Olsen comments "I always thought that Clark looked a lot like Superman, but I never thought he was Superman." To which Perry White replies "I've been told I look a lot like Elvis, but I've never been to the White House."
    • With the love potion, Superman pretended to be influenced by it when he had had it applied to him in his disguise, so Lois did have a situation where Superman and Clark seemed to react to the potion differently, making potion reaction a theoretical difference. Why this does not cause an unrelenting investigative reporter like Lois Lane to want to know why Clark can resist something that overcomes even Superman probably raises more questions than it answers.
  • Summarized in a scene in the Lois & Clark pilot that had Clark wearing the suit for the first time in front of his parents, who then express concern about him being recognized when he switches dress and identity.
    Clark: I don't think they will, Mom, because it won't be me. (demonstrates by taking his glasses on and off, while his parents look on skeptically)
    Dean Cain: (on the commentary track) And if you don't believe that, just don't watch the show.
• In the Arrowverse Crisis on Infinite Earths (2019), even after Lex Luthor has got hold of the Book of Destiny and discovered other universes where Clark Kent is Superman, he still refuses to believe this could possibly be true in his universe, because his Clark "can't see past the end of his glasses".
• Superman & Lois: In the Pilot Episode, Clark and Lois decide to reveal to their teenage sons Jonathan and Jordan that Clark is Superman. Their sons say they have seen Superman before and Clark is nothing like him. Clark calmly removes his glasses, and they do a Jaw Drop as they finally see the resemblance. Clark further proves it by picking up their truck and rising into the air. To be fair, they don't say they've seen Superman up close; they could be referring to footage of his heroics on TV. (As a for instance, one of the boys was playing Injustice 2 earlier, and the Superman there bears no resemblance at all to Tyler Hoechlin.)

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