Says who?? From what I recall, it was “constructed out of a transparant alloy found only on Paradise Island” or some such.
How many transparent alloys that you can make every part of an airplane out of are there in the real world? How many transparent materials of any kind would make an airplane-like construction genuinely invisible and not, due to refraction and reflection, pretty darn visible, like a complicated glass or ice sculpture.
Just because it’s described just as “a transparent alloy” doesn’t mean the actual invisibility of it isn’t impossible.
Or we could just do “It would show up on radar” - “Says who??”
In their earliest stories, Reed Richards and Ben Grimm were WWII vets.
Speaking of the Fantastic Four, the reason they were exposed to cosmic rays (the source of their powers) was because they wanted to make the first manned flight into space before the Soviets did it. This origin story had already been superseded by reality by the time the premiere issue hit the stands - Yuri Gagarin became the first man in space while The Fantastic Four #1 was in production.
Two points on that - one is that some people are still screwed up, regardless of help/treatment currently available. Two, presuming we’re speaking of Bruce Wayne - he was actually much more emotionally healthy in the old days. Yes, he dressed up in Bat costume, but he was originally a well-rounded human being with friends and family and sense of humor and so forth. It was really post-Crisis before he was consistently …yeesh. Well, I think he was such a jerk in the late '90s and early '00s. Haven’t read much published after that. But at that point, whenever he showed up in other Bat Family comics, I pretty much wanted the other character to kick him to the curb as a very toxic family member/friend.
I thought we already knew that then? Some of the others mentioned seem the same to me - they were never actually believed to have scientific rationale (radioactive spider, etc.) but were just a “technobabble” excuse. That’s not what I’m looking for.
Thanks to those who mentioned Tony Stark’s transistor suit - did not think of that at all!
Excellent catch! That one works well, probably (haven’t actually read her original origin story). I guess now magic is used for it not being known about?
Yeah, and… we already have airplanes that don’t show up on radar. It’s pretty standard, nowadays. If we can assume that the Amazons have solved the really tough problem of making it invisible to 400-700 nm light, why can’t they have also solved the easy problem?
Alan Moore did this on purpose, with TOM STRONG: the first issues (a) hit the stands during the Clinton Administration, but (b) included a story-within-a-story flashback to a super-powered crimefighter facing his archenemy back in the 1920s.
That when-he-was-young-and-single-and-dark-haired tale was built around the villain using his futuristic discovery to wreak havoc – with the gag that, years later, when our hero is older and married and grey at the temples, he can already reflect on that and note that science eventually proved the substance in question didn’t exist. (The reply: “Mmm. Isn’t that odd? And yet we both know it existed back then. How can that be, I wonder? I’ve been meaning to write a paper on it, but I never have time.”)
Having been to the moon, we’re pretty sure there is no life there, Dick Tracy notwithstanding.
We’re coming up on knowing that there (probably) are no habitable planets in the Alpha Centauri A/B system, which will invalidate every story set on such planets. Sorry Adam Strange.
P.S. Although they’ve already retconned Edgar Rice Burrough’s Mars as being an “alternate dimension” Mars; maybe they’ll do the same for the Alpha Centauri system.
P.P.S. Has anyone in the DC universe ever traveled to the Alpha Centauri system other than by Zeta beam? Confirming or contradicting the existence of the civilization there?
We haven’t looked everywhere yet! Moon Valley is remote and secluded and hard to spot from above. There’s still hope! 
(More seriously, the discovery of water on the moon was startling, so some wonderful unexpected things can happen!)
I love the retcon a few years back when a couple people who knew Johnny Thunder commented that there was no such country as Bandarstan. And Johnny Quick mentioned that the idea that a mathematical formula literally gave him superpowers was ridiculous.
Technology has not quite caught up to The Six Million Dollar Man* yet, but they are working on it. It has moved from “wildly fantastic sci-fi” to “well, Hollywood exaggerates things a bit”.
*Yes, I know that the comic-book series was only a third- or fourth-derivative of the original idea, but Charleton was a respectable publisher, so I say it counts.
All I know is that if I ever get a prosthetic limb, I want it to have a sound chip that makes the “nenenene” sound.
The problem is you also move in slow motion.
A lot of the comic book superheroes with backgrounds rooted in real life events don’t really work well any more. The last Punisher title I picked up was in 2004 and Frank Castle was still a Vietnam veteran so had to be pushing at least 60 at the time.
On second thought this isn’t an example of an origin invalidated by technology.
Wasn’t it supposed to be right on the shadow line, so therefore neither too hot, nor too cold?
More TV than comics, but a lot of Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s storylines would have gone very differently a few years later after cell phones became more commonplace. And what a weird area for the Council of Watchers to skimp on!
Frank’s been killed and resurrected a few times since 'Nam, though, so who knows what his “physical” age is at this point?
Similarly, back in the late '70s/early 80s, Chris Claremont noticed that Magneto’s background as a Holocaust survivor meant he was getting a little long in the tooth for super villainy. So, he used the obvious solution to the dilemma: he had Magneto de-aged into a baby, then aged back up to an adult, but a younger adult than he had been.
This later helped him successfully defend himself in court against charges of him being a mass-murdering terrorist.
Comics!
Actually, no. Prior to Claremont’s first use of the character, his most recent appearance had been in Defenders #16, written by Len Wein. Magneto tried putting together a new band of Evil Mutants including Blob, Lorelei, and a new character, Alpha the Ultimate Mutant. (The X-Men were MIA at this point, so Xavier recruited the Defenders to help him.) Initially slow and infantile, Alpha evolved into one of those big-headed Advanced Beings who pop up every so often and he left Earth forever–but not before turning Magneto and the other Evil Mutants into infants.
Claremont added the Holocaust origin of Magneto several years later; when this Len Wein story appeared in 1974, Magneto’s age and origin were indeterminate.
Captain America was created in the 1940s thanks to a serum created by “Dr. Reinstein.” When Cap A was revived in the 1960s, he was now the product of the serum and V-Rays, apparently an attempt to make him more “hi-tech” for a more “enlightened” time.
On the odds of a Batman being created in reality:
