As my GF and I were watching the Man of Steel trailer preceding Star Trek Into Darkness, it made me wonder how Superman shaves (did Jor-el toss a “super grooming kit” into the escape pod?). A quick Googling informed me that this was actually addressed in the comics (he burns it off by bouncing his heat-vision off a piece of glass from the ship).
However, this of course led to other questions about the everyday logistics of super-dom. Does Superman have to eat? Does his super stomach acid just obliterate all human food? If not, does Superman poop, and if so, is super-poop indestructible? If so, what does he do with it? Does it come out like a rocket? Does he have a super-toilet capable of containing and disposing of super-poop?
If we’re talking Silver Age Superman, I’m your man. No, while he can eat, he doesn’t have to. His stomach DOES have superacids, so he can (and has) eaten bullets, taken bites out of girders, and other crowd-pleasing tricks. As for superpoop: While never directly addressed, nobody’s ever complained about the smell around the Fortress of Solitude (though, of course, it IS on ice). And Krypto knows enough to poop in space.
Well, that was kryptonite, but it (along with all other kryptonite on Earth) had been converted to iron by the time Superman got the munchies. It was part of the 1971 “Kryptonite Nevermore!” arc which was a somewhat serious attempt to rein in some of the silver-age silliness, i.e. no longer would every common crook in the world be able to get his mitts on kryptonite, and Superman was weakened to where he was no longer able to juggle planets.
In some versions. In others his hair just doesn’t grow as long as he’s superpowered; I recall one comic where he lost his powers for a long time (by being stuck on a planet with a red sun) and before regaining them made sure to shave so he didn’t end up permanently shaggy.
And poop isn’t really the problem anyway - the last thing anyone needs is for Krypto to mark a fire hydrant by peeing on it, and the resulting stream of hypervelocity urine to slice everything downstream in half like a superpowered yellow laser beam.
If it’s Silver Age Superman, same way as he shaves: mirrors and heat vision. He also uses it on his fingernails and toenails. When RedK turned him into the SuperWildman of Borneo and he became rather hirsute, he had to get Supergirl and Krypto to add their heat visions to his to tackle the job.
Superman can pick up a raw egg without cracking it, as well as give Lois a hug. The muscles used for peeing aren’t the same ones, but with practice, you can teach yourself to “ease up” on the flow/pressure.
Going really far back, when Clark got drafted he failed the eye test because he read the chart in the next room by mistake. I remember one panel where the Army barber was trying to give him a crewcut and kept breaking his scissors.
They had to come up with a reason Superman wasn’t in the war. After all, what are tanks and missiles and U-boats to the Man of Steel? Eventually the writers gave the Nazis a magic item that pit any superpowered people in Germany under Hitler’s control, which gave them reason to stay at the home front. Meanwhile, over at Marvel (or what would later be Marvel), Captain America was fighting the good fight, and the Human Torch burned Hitler to death.
Thank Roy Thomas for that. His All-Star Squadron series (created in the 1980s, but set in and featuring characters from the 1940s) depicted Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan collaborating on a ritual involving the Spear of Destiny and the Holy Grail that would let any sufficiently powerful magic user (and those with no particular defense against magic) from approaching their territories, thus lampshading why Superman, Wonder Woman, Green Lantern (Alan Scott), the Spectre, Doctor Fate and Johnny Thunder, any one of which could dramatically affect the course of the war by themselves, didn’t.
One of the more modern explanations for SM’s powers is subconsciously controlled psionics. So, when he’s picking up a cargo ship out of the sea, his hands don’t just go right through it and the ship doesn’t break in two: he’s using ‘contact telekinesis.’ So, if he wants to shave or get a hair cut, he can will it to happen.
That’s why SM’s ability ranges from being able to be knocked back by a powerful bad guy’s punch to withstanding a renegade planet. He just wills it harder.
In this way, SM’s ability is similar to the willpower-powered Green Energy of the Green Lanterns. He wills himself to be gentle or strong or stupidly-overpowered strong… it’s just that the effects are centered around his body and what he touches.
It was a common problem for that time. I have a Doc Savage magazine from during the War, and it begins with the crew bugging the Army once again to be let in, and them being refused in order to hunt Nazi spies at home. Since they were all in WW I they might have been a bit long in the tooth anyway.
