Reality is stretched further when Sup rescues someone and they ride on his back. Trying to hold on for any length of time would be difficult.
[Powdered Toast Man] Quick man! Cling tenaciously to my buttocks! [/Powdered Toast Man]
They’ve tried to reboot. None of them have manage to really stick. Well, they’ve managed to bring in many new continuity screwing versions of Kryptonians, but they haven’t managed to decide on a new origin.
FTR I hate Byrne with the passion of a 1000 red suns, but I love his Superman origin, and consider it the best of all the various versions. Certainly his version of Krypton and it’s history is the most interesting and least cheestastic. For the life of me why Smallville has latched onto the various design elements of the Superman movie (everything is made of ice, spinning rings and giant heads for interrogating).
Originally it was just leaping…
I always thought of it more like ‘tuning’ frequency/wavelength from the visible to x-ray, etc. This implies he could have ‘microwave vision’, ‘radio vision’, etc. Similar to the way we can only keep things of a particular distance in focus and have to change focus to see something at a different distance sharply.
Of course Byrne changed that too, although his explanation was somewhat vague…
That’s been said a couple of times in this thread, and while it’s true, it’s also worth pointing out that that changed very quickly. By the time of the Max/Dave Fleischer cartoons (1941) Superman could fly. All the changing vectors and magical propulsion of Superman today.
You, sir, are a True Physicist.
Quibble: Silver Age. Golden Age didn’t care about silly “But…wait…why…?” type questions. Golden Age fans would have been boggled by the idea of something like the Marvel Universe handbook.
Lookit The Whizzer’s origin. He got mongoose blood in a transfusion. That’s it. Not radioactive mongoose blood or alien space-mongoose blood. Just mongoose blood. And now he can run so fast he can run on water. How? Doesn’t matter. Mongoose blood let him run super-fast. Let’s move on.
This wouldn’t fly today.
But would it leap? Or at least run really fast? 
If origins made sense, the 50s would be filled with thousands of Japanese Hulks from Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The only “But doesn’t Superman…?” question I ever saw dealt with was “Why doesn’t Superman join the Army in WWII and kick Nazi butt?”, and it was dealt with in a remarkably lame way.
Clark Kent accidentally used his X-ray vision on the eye chart, and read the one in the next room. Thus he was rejected as 4-F.:rolleyes:
At some point, one just has to accept that comics occur in a different universe. That’s why (IMO) it is a mistake to have “real” events or people in a comic - once you accept that one person or event is affected by the laws of the universe, you start asking why they all aren’t. And the more super the hero, the harder it is to justify.
Captain America can fight in WWII because he is only one guy, despite the Super-Soldier formula. So it makes sense that his entry into the war didn’t decisively tip the balance and cause it to be over at once.
But somebody who can lift mountains and fly and has heat vision? Hey, it’s December 8, 1941 - how come we aren’t done by now?
Regards,
Shodan
On a related note. Is his X-ray vision really X-ray vision? Wouldn’t this require an X-ray source. Maybe you could make the argument that he simply has extremely sensitive detectors capable of using background x-rays, but since his vision can’t penetrate lead, then the background radiation from lead wouldn’t be enough to see. In that case, you could actually stand in front of a slab of lead, and Superman couldn’t see through you.
His eyes ARE the X-ray source. His heat vision is also his x-ray vision focused - essentially an x-ray laser.
In order for his eyes to be the x-ray source, the background would need to reflect. I’m not certain how well x-rays reflect.
Does Supermans vision cause cancer?
Yes. But then it instantly cures it!
Experiments involving treadmills, one would hope.
Nope–it was at first (There’s a notable story that was reprinted all the time. Superman’s exposed to Red K and his “x-ray vision” starts burning things) but by the '70s heat vision was from “infra-red” radiation (although he could still use x-rays like a laser if he wanted)
I thought “X-ray vision” just meant he could see thru things, not that there was any X-radiation involved.
If it were real X-rays, it would have to be gamma radiation. And his X-ray vision can penetrate substances other than lead, even if they are denser than lead. I don’t remember any specific stories where Superman can see thru osmium, but still…
Ultra-Boy, mentioned earlier in the thread, can see thru lead with his Penetra-Vision (also vaguely dirty-sounding, at least if you are twelve years old*). So there must be at least two forms of projected and reflected energy involved here. Ultra-Boy’s Flash Vision can also melt lead, which Superboy cannot, so apparently his form of energy can be concentrated to produce heat of the “normal” sort. Superboy’s heat vision is different - it must rely on some chemical, molecular, or atomic process in the subject of his heat vision to generate heat, since that reaction (whatever it is) doesn’t occur in lead.
Regards,
Shodan
*Which I am, emotionally speaking. See above regarding X-ray vision and Lois Lane.
suddenly feels guilty for buying x-ray specs as a lad, and noticing all the breast cancer around today
That was a pretty common problem during the war years. I have a Doc Savage magazine from then which begins with the crew getting rejected by the War Department yet again, being told that they should spend their timing catching spies. That they met during WW I and would thus be a little beyond draft age isn’t mentioned.
This was waaaaay inconsistant. There are probably as many stories where he (as boy or man) melts a convenient lead pipe and the melted lead covers the nearby kryptonite as not.
Hell, depending on which story you read, Green K* either was or was not as invulnerable as Superman (including un-meltable) or was just a normal rock
*Not Red K. That was always just “normal” strength
The “retconned” answer, circa 1979 was that Hitler got his hands on 3 artifacts. The Spear of Destiny, the crown of thorns and…something else…it wasn’t the grail. The nails, maybe?
He gave Mussolini and Tojo each one of the artifacts and any time any (inconsistancy notice!) Superman (who’s especially vulnerable to magic or magical-based character (or sometimes “super-powered character”) went into Axis occupied territory, the artifacts would make them change sides. This includes The Spectre (which didn’t stand up to a lot of thought–yeah, God’s own Angel Of Vengeance can be controlled by the spear that stabbed Christ? Wha?) but at least it was an attempt to deal with the issue. Later stories added that Hitler was also protected by some guy who had the power to turn ANY (including Dr. Fate or the Spectre’s) power off. Plus Hitler had a pretty good-sized squad of super-types himself.
There was one story somewhere (again, “Mr. & Mrs. Superman”?) where someone (Lois?) asked Superman about the “X-Ray Vision” story and Superman said “Yeah, the War Dept just made that up 'cause really, we didn’t want to let the world know that Hitler had his hands on the Spear of Destiny” and it explained why I wasn’t fighting.
The Spectre was just a superpowerful ghost until Ostrander’s series in the 1990’s.