I'm not nitpicking - all the stuff you just mentioned doesn't bother me. I was just wondering about the fading. I thought maybe there was something in the comics to explain it, like a symbiote suit or something (obviously not a symbiote suit but some canon explanation). I seem to remember in some old comic the reason nobody put two and two together and made the obvious connection between Clark and Superman was that he was doing some kind of mental projection trick to make them see a nerd instead of a buff guy in glasses, thought it might be something like that.