This blog post contains no spoilers for Reflector, so feel free to read either before or after the story itself.
Reflector is my first superhero-themed story, and very quickly I ran up against issues I'd never considered in how costumed heroes would work in the modern world.
One of the early throw-away lines in the story referred to Reflector as a federalized hero and Hellcat as a Vigilante. This stemmed from the long-discussed issue among comics fans of how our justice system could prosecute criminals that were caught and left by heroes. My answer was that some heroes would have to be "deputized" to act in an official capacity. Taking this to its logical conclusion, Reflector and other powered heroes are federal Marshals. Their identities have been vetted by a government agency and they can submit video testimony in uniform that will stand up in court. Reflector takes this a step further and wears a body cam that he activates while acting in an official capacity.
By contrast, other heroes have chosen to remain vigilantes. They have no legal standing when it comes to apprehending criminals, but to them stopping the crime is good enough. Hellcat and Sleuth have taken this route because they values their privacy far too much to risk disclosing it to a government agency. At the time he signed up, Jake figured he had far less to lose.
Yes, the "registered vs unregistered" hero scenario was explored in Marvel's Civil War event. In retrospect it was an idea worth exploring but the timing and execution left something to be desired. In Reflector's world, vigilantism is a "don't ask/don't tell" situation. There are still more vigilantes than federalized heroes, so for the most part they are recognized as a useful function. As long as they don't cross a line into murder or unnecessary violence, they are mostly ignored by the law. Marvel's Punisher--a character I like quite a bit--would be targeted by federalized heroes for capture and prosecution in this world.
There's another problem that I struggled with internally but never explored in the pages because it was just another detail that would drag the pacing down. How can a hero maintain a secret identity in a world filled with cameras? It seems like every other business has security cameras, and practically every person on the street has a cell phone camera. In this environment, how can a hero react to an emergency by changing into costume and jumping into the fray? It wouldn't take much for a reporter to backtrack through all the videos posted to social media to find the one person who ducks into a bathroom and comes out a hero. For a well motivated supervillain I can only imagine it would be trivial.
This is something that might be worth exploring in a subsequent story, but in Reflector I purposefully hand-waved the whole dilemma. My current thinking is that Jake's "smart threads" clothing is advanced tech that not only allows him to change his look from civilian attire to uniformed hero, but also includes some sort of video blurring tech. This too is problematic because all someone would have to do is follow the guy who looks blurry on camera, so clearly I have some more consideration to do there.
I might just have to face the facts that in a camera-saturated world, hero secret identities would become a thing of the past. In Reflector I already alluded to the fact that the heroes Top Hat and Houndstooth had gone public with their identities. This is definitely a facet of the world worth further exploration.
Thanks for exploring Reflector's world with me. I hope you read the story, and if you liked it (or didn't) please vote and leave a comment.