One reason I like the Fantastic Four is that they accept the inevitable: in the real world, amateur superheroes with secret identities just could not work.

Real superheroes would have to turn pro, just like top athletes

In a world full of supervillains, the amateurs would soon be killed. And the cost of maintaining even a basic super equipment means that a regular job is just not practical. So if superheroes were real, they would all become professionals, much as regular sportsmen become professionals.

Secret identities? Forget it.

Supervillains would make it their top priority to uncover secret identities so they could pick off the good guys (or their loved ones) when at their weakest. And if the supervillains don’t find you, the paparazzi will. Those guys don’t give up! Can you really cover all your tracks and never make any mistakes?

But the hero needs rest, you say? A secret identity is no way to relax: you have to lie to your loved ones and put them in danger. The only way to get real peace and rest (and security for loved ones) is to go professional, and let a professional management company deal with the security issues. With so much power and money at stake, superhero security would be an industry all of its own, probably employing other superheroes.

Real superheroes would be political whether they liked it or not

If superheroes were real, regular politics would become irrelevant. Who cares about the size of your army if one bulletproof super-fast guy can locate and kill the other side’s leaders? Who cares about the inflation rate if a superhero can make a visit to an alien planet and bring back the secret to fabulous wealth? Who cares about medical bills if another superhero has superintelligence and can find cures for every known illness? Regular politics will consist of just filling in the gaps.

But what of those who tried not to take power? I don't think they would have much choice. A superhero would attract people who wanted their protection. If they were popular, they would soon be a sizable voting block in the hero's city who would swing any vote they wanted. If they were unpopular, they would need to set up some kind of mutant state just for their own peace. Unpopular supertypes in their own state are instantly political, and arouse political fear among their neighbors.

What of heroes who tried hard to deliberately not get involved? That would mean allowing decisions that they strongly believed to be wrong, yet they have the power to change. But let’s say that nine tenths of heroes managed to avoid politics. If just a tenth of all heroes attracted (or grabbed) power, that makes them far more politically active than most people, and far, far more significant in what they can do. So the whole group will be tarred with the same brush. it only takes a minority to change public perceptions of a whole group.

Could superheroes be controlled by normal people?

In the comics, many heroes are only marginally superior, for example they may be excellent martial artists, or be as strong a several men, but in these cases ten ordinary men could defeat each hero. So the normal people could pass laws to control heroes if they wished.

There are three problems with this claim. First, among humans, marginal superiority is all you need. The sportsman who is ten percent better than others will gain a huge following. The politician who is ten percent more skillful than anyone else will tend to win the elections. Marginal superiority makes all the difference.

Second, people like winners. The smart heroes would use their powers to win public opinion. People like heroes, they like celebrities. The smart hero would not hit his opponents, he would save old ladies and kittens and appear on talk shows.

Third, some superpowers are mental. A single hero with double normal intelligence could organize the others in such a way that ordinary folks would not even know what was happening.

Would superheroes really fight crime?

In the real world, heroes need to live and pay the rent, so they expect to be paid. Teachers, firemen, etc. are paid for their efforts; they don't set out to "save" mankind per se. They expect a financial reward. “Professor Randall Dowling” also questions whether altruism would be so common:

The Lone Ranger never existed because anyone with a lost silver mine wouldn't put on a mask and ride down the line fixing everybody's problems, using just enough silver to pay his living expenses and to have silver bullets fashioned from the mother lode. He'd have cashed in, moved back east, married a lovely woman, and enjoyed his life as much as anyone can, and if he'd done anything else, he'd have been locked up as insane.

Likewise, a Spider-Man would've appeared on the old Ed Sullivan Show, as did the Beatles, in 1964, two tears after Spidey made his debut. His guilt is silly, if not pathological in intensity. He couldn't have known the future and he wouldn't have necessarily changed anything had he nabbed the burglar. The clown could've been out on bail the next day and still robbed the Parker household. Or another killer might have nailed Aunt May. Who knows. In any case, he caught the guy so why spend the rest of your existence risking life, limb and sanity bringing in "bad guys" who had nothing whatever to do with Uncle Ben's death. This is pathological guilt, symptomatic of deeper psychic problems. ...

Of course, finding that you were different from everyone else might be more than enough to bring on these pathological problems.

Regarding Spiderman, it should be noted that he did try to make a living in wrestling and TV, but it was impossible because Jameson’s newspaper turned the public against him. Dowling replies that there are more ways to make money than just entertainment or photography: if Spiderman had any sense he could try construction, the military, the circus, or a hundred other jobs where people with extra muscle can make above average wages. And given his obvious skill at designing web shooters, he could simply be a top scientist or engineer.

Even if superheroes were not professional heroes, they would be very well paid.

Do superheroes prefer violence to other solutions?

Superheroes tend to be violent, but this probably says more about their readers than any real life tendencies. In real life, if you live among highly skilled killers you soon learn to be extra polite and to avoid arguments, otherwise you end up dead.

The same principal applies on a larger scale as well. And if you really want to save the world, you soon learn that careful planning is more effective than all-out war. A single superhero war could be the end of all civilization, so would be avoided at all costs. Superheroes would thus be diplomats, and battles would be mainly threats, because each side has too much to lose. And if one side was genuinely more powerful, this is even more reason for the other side to prefer diplomacy to war.

A final reason to avoid violence is because of the uncertainty it causes. As noted below, regular society simply cannot function if there is a real danger of a major war every year. This might also have implications for mental health of the normals caught in between, though perhaps they would adapt, just as prey animals in the jungle.

Marvel Time is impossible in the real world

“Marvel Time” means compressing the past forty years into around ten years. Apart from the other problems outlined on this web site Marvel Time would render normal life impossible. As “Typemaster of Qward” said on the Wizard comic boards,

“If all the crap that has happened in the Marvel universe took place in a matter of years there would be no sense of normalcy among the rest of the world. Civilians wouldn't even bother with jobs or even living for that matter if wars and alien invasions threatened them every few weeks or months.”

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