Stories of the silver-age glasses varied slightly, but the typical elements include:
[list=#][li]The lenses were made from fragments of the ship’s transparent canopy which conveniently shattered, producing among other debris, four roughly circular pieces.[/li][li]These pieces are invulnerable, which raises the question of how they broke in the first place. The rocket ship’s “super-fuel” exploded after landing on Earth though luckily young Kal-El was thrown clear. Seems like Jor-El didn’t get his rocket design approved by the Kryptonian Underwriter’s Laboratory.[/li][li]The roughly circular pieces were enough to form two pairs of glasses, suitable for Clark Kent’s childhood and adult years. In some accounts, the frames are designed to hide the rough edges, while in others, Superboy used his thumbnail to smooth the edges (rightly, some people have questioned this, suggesting it should be as impossible as an Earthman using his thumbnail to smooth standard glass).[/li][/list]
Dammit, I knew I should’ve popped into this thread sooner. I’m usually the one to post the super-hypnotism bit. I have the issue somewhere where that explanation was foisted off on an unsuspecting public. I think I was maybe 11 when that came out and I called whatever the 11-year-old-in-the-80s equivalent of “bullshit” on it then.
I can go one better. In John Campbell’s The Black Star Passes our heros discover a substance they name “lux” which is made from photons! (Apparently if you push photons close enough together, they form a solid! Who knew?) Yep, solid light. Lux is 100% transparent and the hardest and densest substance known. There is a related version known as “relux” which is exactly the same except that it is 100% reflective. They are able to do all kinds of tricks with this stuff.
Worse, “glass houses” would become a real, viable possibility if arenak was for real.
The only problem is demolition. When a building has outlasted its usefulness, how do you knock it down when it’s 500 times harder and stronger than the hardest and strongest steel?
With cutting, that might make sense, but if you’re going to try and smash an arenak wall down, your wrecking ball will have to be going awfully fast no mater what it’s made out of. (Making the wrecking ball out of arenak merely keeps the ball from breaking when it does hit at such a high speed.) And when the wall you’re trying to smash down does finally break, I wouldn’t want to be within a mile of it – those arenak shrapnel shards are going to be going nearly as fast as the wrecking ball was.
FWIW, this is the explaination being given in the Superman: Birthright comics. In them Clark’s reading books on acting. Basically the reaction he’s going for is “You look like Superman, but you can’t be.”
WRT the not having to eat thing, wasn’t there a story set in the future where Superman was living in the sun to keep himself going, despite the somewhat obvious lack of food and drink?