Colleagues at the Daily Planet were reportedly stunned as Kent arrived for work bereft of his cunning disguise and trying to hide his features behind a newspaper. ‘It was suddenly obvious,’ stated fellow reporter Lois Lane, ‘I looked up from my morning coffee and there was Superman, doing the crossword at Clark’s desk!’ I don’t know why the citizens of Metropolis hadn’t noticed before to be honest.’

Superman’s arch-nemesis Lex Luthor has also expressed surprise at the revelation but believes that, in hindsight, the clues were there. ‘I thought it was a bit odd last week when, during a battle against my henchmen, he suddenly stopped blasting us with his heat ray and started blinking rapidly, muttering ‘It’s either fallen out or the bloody thing’s melted again.’ Next minute he’s on his hands and knees yelling ‘nobody move or you’ll step on it’.’

Kent’s exposure as Superman is the latest in a rash of superhero unmaskings, following hot on the heels of revelations regarding the caped crusader Batman. Billionaire playboy, industrialist, and philanthropist Bruce Wayne was named as Gotham City’s dark knight after a receipt for the Batmobile’s MOT and a bill for the Artexing of the Bat-cave’s ceiling were found in the bins behind Wayne’s Gotham City mansion. Ironically the discovery was made by reporter Clerk Kent, who was writing an article on the importance of shredding documents as a way of avoiding identity theft in the wake of the government’s new superhuman DNA database and ID card scheme. This article is still available on the Daily Planet website, complete with upside-down pictures by photographer Peter Parker.

jp1885 (thanks to Genghis and Mary Evans)