8 Superheroes Who Had Their Identities Exposed

1. Daredevil

Murdock Papers
Marvel Comics

Although no one knows who Daredevil really is in current Marvel continuity, the opposite was the case for over a decade.

During Brian Bendis' and Alex Maleev's revered stint on the Man Without Fear, they shook up the status quo in a way that could be described as irreversible. Well, not entirely, given the superhero genre isn't short of convoluted ways to retcon big character changes, but still, it lasted for a long time all the same.

Declaring himself to be the new Kingpin of Hell's Kitchen, Murdock spirals into a pit of darkness and gradually gets pushed to his limits. Then, in the Murdock Papers, Kingpin reveals to the Bugle and FBI who the Man Without Fear really is, and for once, Matt's blindness doesn't prove to be a stumbling block for people to accuse him of being a vigilante.

Afterwards, Murdock went to prison and even asked Iron Fist to impersonate Daredevil to prove his innocence. He was legally exonerated, but the world still believed he was the Man Without Fear, all the way up until the Purple Children wiped everyone's memory of the events surrounding Kingpin's testimony in 2015.

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Kingpin 01
Marvel Comics

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WhatCulture's very own resident movie guy, Ewan has been working in the content creation biz for over 10 years now, having started as a freelance contributor to WhatCulture Gaming all the way back in 2015. After graduating with a First-Class Honours in History from Northumbria University in 2017 (where he won a prize for a totally killer dissertation on the Watergate years), Ewan took on the role of Comics Editor at WhatCulture and quickly developed WhatCulture Comics into one of the biggest superhero-focused channels on YouTube. He followed this with a brief hiatus at Screen Rant in 2021, where he worked across the Gaming and Film sections as a writer and editor, before returning to WhatCulture as a Senior Content Producer / Presenter in 2023. He started his own podcast, We Love Dad Movies, in 2022, and has contributed several written pieces to the Eisner-nominated comics website Shelfdust as well. In his current role, Ewan incorporates his love of cinema, comic books, and history into written pieces and video essays for WhatCulture's Film & TV channel, as well as WhatCulture Gaming and WhatCulture Horror, with a particular focus on nineties-era Dad Movies, old school Westerns, and Golden Age Hollywood Noir. John Carpenter is his fave, and he thinks Batman Beyond should never have been cancelled. If that's your vibe, you'll probably like his stuff.