(Masks, postscript)

Just a quick note to thank mystery reader "David Still" for writing this:

Talking about identity and alter-egos, you should try me sometimes.
-David

And, after a little bit of apprehension (I assumed at first it was just some guy hitting on me), I did. If you haven't done so already, you can try him, too, at davidstill.org. You'll probably figure out what's going on right away, and maybe you'll love it as much as I did.

Reminds me a little of "Karen Eliot" and "Monty Cantsin," two other identities that were up for grabs back in the 1980s courtesy of the Neoists. Before them, both Abbie Hoffman and the Diggers used the name of notorious mad bomber "George Metesky" as an alias. (In tracking down the links above, I stumbled across an interesting collection of even more pseudonyms or "nyms" worth checking out.)

In the world of the comics, I'm pretty sure that The Dark Knight Returns, Kingdom Come, and No Man's Land (or at least one or two of them) include a scenario in which lots of everyday people take up the bat logo; they "become" the Batman just as anyone can now "become" David Still. (The "real" David, if there is such a person, is pretty damn cute, or at least the man whose pictures are used to represent him on the site is, at least to me.) Of course, in the real world with its proliferation of internet screen names, it's hard for more than one person to claim a single identity--as the 59 other Batfans before me are no doubt well aware.