What was going on there was writers getting sloppy—which started early!—and investing the characters with knowledge they, the writers, had, but which logically would not really be shared.

It’s all too common. People know of the existence of the Fortress of Solitude and the Batcave. They know about the time limit on Green Lantern’s power ring—and the ring’s yellow weakness! They know about Wonder Woman losing her powers if bound by a man. They know about Jimmy Olsen’s signal watch (kind of defeating its purpose) and that Lois Lane is “Superman’s girlfriend”.

There’s less of this at Marvel. Of course everyone knows Spider-Man has a secret identity. He wears a mask! But that’s not the same as a maskless character telling everyone he spends time being somebody else. And remember, the only way people could know that about Superman is if he TOLD them.

They’d also have no reason to assume he needed down time.

That was a typical example of editorial dotting all the lower case Js. There was no real reason for Jimmy to make such a comment, since everyone in the room already knew it, but something like “footnote syndrome” demanded a notation.

The annoying aspect for me—still years away from actually working on Superman’s titles—was that it reinforced the popular fan misconception that Superman had a special vulnerability to magic, not the same vulnerability EVERYTHING has.

We might even imagine Superman announcing that he was giving up his double identity in order to stop the slaughter.