Sure, if you want to get all real world about it, but when you're 5 years old reading that stuff, insurance premiums and due process (check out http://www.worldfamouscomics.com/law/archives.shtml for some real world analysis of comic book law, it's awesome. I wish I could find his article on a GA comic where someone was found "guilty in the first degree of murder") and other boring adult stuff doesn't enter into it.
These guys are fun, too, for those who haven't seen it. I got busy and haven't checked them in a few weeks, but that's me, not them.
http://lawandthemultiverse.com/How, exactly, do cosmic rays "mutate" an individual? How exactly does Spider-Man leaving a bunch of dudes strung up in a web lead to them being tried and convicted of bank robbery? How can Superman pass as Clark with just glasses? Why didn't Superman or Captain Marvel just fly over to Germany during WWII and end the war in an afternoon? etc. At some point you either accept the conventions of the (I hesitate to call it a) genre, or you don't. But everyone's "line in the sand" is different I suppose.
I suppose, but to me it's less a matter of being picky about the story and refusing to assume that the comic world might differ from the real world. Things like a secret headquarters, to me, says the wrong things about the heroes. Luthor needs a hideout; Superman shouldn't.
And Superman passes as Clark because Lois has spent decades hiding the secret in plain sight by acting like a shrew who "knows" they're the same person even though she loves one and hates the other.
Or everybody knows and they just humor him. I mean, are YOU going to be the one to tell Superman that his disguise is stupid?
On the flip side, why do people ascribe homosexual (and, technically in this case, pedophilic) motivations to a man whose parents were murdered in front of his very eyes, whose very childhood ended that night when he devoted every waking moment to preparing to fight criminals, taking in an orphan boy whose parents were also murdered in front of his very eyes? Does nobody see that he wants to ensure that Dick had a father-surrogate? (Granted, they were sometimes shown in the same bed .... but I chalk it up to ultra-compressed storytelling ... )
The same reasons Frank Miller needed to rewrite Batman (over and over) as a disturbed, ultra-violent thug who's starred in the comics ever since. There's a large faction of readers and writers who, unconstrained by the Comics Code, can't conceive of an actual good person who sees the need to work outside an impotent or corrupt law. So they find (or create) fault to make anyone opposing crime who isn't on the government payroll a nut.
Remember the '80s, when Batman became brain-damaged, Superman cheated at football, Green Lantern became an alcoholic, and Hawkman became a murderer? Or was Hawkworld the '90s? I forget, but you get the idea.
On a positive note about comics, does anyone know the altitude requirement for sustaining a geosynchronous orbit? I bet a bunch of people do who were reading comics in the 1970s...
Raised on those comics, I won an argument over it with a friend who was both, at various times, an astrophysicist and atmospheric physicist. He was a hundred miles high, just so you know.
