

So here’s a dumb Puzzle Fighter story. When I was 18, many years ago now, my girlfriend at the time, my best friend and his girlfriend at the time went camping near a little lakeside resort town.
It was the last day of our trip, we’d been extremely frugal and so we all still had some spending money left. The girls wanted to go clothes shopping, my buddy and I weren’t as interested in that but we’re trying to be cool so we tagged along. Except, on a covered section of boardwalk we passed a 2-player Super Puzzle Fighter 2 Turbo machine. The girls just left us behind, laughing that the boardwalk was a straight line and we could catch up.
3 hours later, we were both broke and my buddy had to borrow gas money from his girlfriend to get us home. The girls had ducked into a little café and also lost track of time. That was a 50 cent machine and we must have put over 50 bucks a piece into it. We just stood there, getting better and better in perfect lockstep, trading wins and getting more competitive for an entire afternoon, oblivious to the whole world.
That was a great trip. God, nostalgia like that makes me feel old.
Do we mean an actual job, or can it be a cover? Terry McGuinness of Batman Beyond, to the outside world apparently had a job as a PSW for an elderly rich guy.
If we have to stick to actual “I need to do this job to pay the bills” - I believe Squirrel Girl was a nanny for Jessica Jones and Luke Cage and was like, actually doing that job for much needed cash. Nanny is a pretty normal job.
But in both those cases, the fact that their employers were superheroes might ruin the “day job” thing. So, I’ll go with Frank Castle as my actual answer. Now, Frank doesn’t always have a job of any kind. Frank and stability don’t mix. But when he is working, usually between killing sprees, he works normal blue collar jobs. Construction in the Netflix show. He worked the line in a Meat Packing Plant for a while in the comics. Hilariously, he worked as an overnight security guard for awhile, which is a great set up for the unluckiest burglar who ever lived.
Lastly, I want to throw out one VERY strange example in my favourite superhero - Moon Knight. Moonie has something similar to Dissociative Identity Disorder. Maybe. Look, when an Ancient Egyptian Moon God of Vengeance sets up shop in your head, it’s complicated. But the point is, Marc Spector’s job was soldier, but blood money wasn’t usually how Moon Knight paid for all his toys. Billionaire Stephen Grant, another one of Marc’s personalities bank rolled everything, seduced beautiful women and was genuinely useless at everything else. Does it count as having a day job, if you literally become an entirely different person to go work in the financial sector?