In the Marvel Universe it’s fairly well established that the Fantastic Four and the Ufoes received their powers from being exposed to “cosmic rays”. So my question is: Why isn’t everybody and his cousin trying to expose themselves to cosmic rays to gain super powers?
Ten thousand SDMB points will be deducted from your account if you say “it’s just a comic.”
A few thoughts:
How many people in the Marvel Universe know that the FF got their powers from cosmic rays?
Of those, how many can afford to take advantage of that knowledge by building a spaceship, etc?
Finally, how many want to end up like Ben Grimm? Unless there’s some way to control the effects, that might be a pretty big disincentive.
Because there’s a chance you’ll gain the ability to become invisible, and there’s a chance you’ll become a horrible rock monster, i’d guess.
Beyond that, it’s not as though your average joe in the MU has access to cosmic rays, let alone knows the correct kind of cosmic rays - it’s not a very specific story. I mean, we’re ourselves bombarded with cosmic rays of numerous types all the time.
IIRC, “the cosmic rays” in question were a galactic storm - sort of like a hurricane of cosmic level proportion - that swept near Earth’s orbit just as Reed Richard’s crew were taking their spaceflight. It’s supposedly hard to predict when a storm would be approaching Earth though, and they’re rare occurances.
In fact, I think the ‘cosmic ray storm’ was later retconned to be somehow connected with Galactus’s first arrival on Earth. As he approached Earth, his aura of vast cosmic energy radiated through this area of the galaxy — or something like that.
Bottom line is, you just can’t predict when the next wave with the necessary level of cosmic rays to turn you into a superhuman will sweep past Earth.
They have. The Red Ghost, trying to get to the moon ahead of the Fantastic Four, built a rocket out of transparent material so they’d get more cosmic rays. He and his three trained apes (I swear I’m not making this up) wound up with powers similar to the FF.
Almost everyone shown exposed to gamma rays in the Marvel U gets powers, too, but people don’t run out and expose themselves to them, either (and it’s much easier, to do so, too).
Even ignoring that most people CAN’T get access to cosmic rays, gamma bombs, or whatever, there’s the fact that, even those who’ve gotten the powers don’t always get unalloyed powers, some of them get powers paired with horrible mutations.
Ben Grimm - Rocky hide, ugly as sin. Still not to bad.
The U-Foes - it nearly KILLED them - and that was just the actual effects of their powers when they failed to get control of them immediately.
Bruce Banner - great superpowers…creation of a second personality that’s sometimes evil, sometimes semi-mindless, sometimes hates the original you, and comes out under ever changing circumstances (sometimes at night, sometimes when your emotions get overwhelming, sometimes you just go away and the secondary personality is the only one, etc).
Abomination - ugly as sin.
The Leader - big, ugly brain…not a bad tradeoff, all told, still, not something everyone would want. Besides, he seemed a non-evil enough sort of dude beforehand, so perhaps his criminal tendencies are gamma-induced.
This is assuming, of course, you get a strictly comic-book result, rather than the real world result of a slow, painful death.
Any easily replicated, or common, way of gaining superpowers in the Marvel U has a tendency to create bad side effects in some, many, or most individuals.
Super Soldier Serum only worked properly on Captain America…other subjects suffered physical and mental problems.
Mutations can be harmful as often as they are beneficial - and simply being a mutant is problematic to begin with.
Goblin Serum almost always induced insanity.
Even power-suits have backfired spectacularly at times! (Iron Man: Hypervelocity is a good example of this.)
It’s too much of a crap-shoot, even for people with access to the means.
Still, I’d expect that the next time there was going to be a big burst of cosmic radiation, there’d be a veritable tourist beach of people all lined up for the big show, with some hope of getting superpowers.
And all sorts of wackjobs trying to create such things in home laboratories.
Whoops. Little Timmy got a burst of gamma radiation from his crazy old neighbor’s home experiments into cosmic rays and became…Diaper BOY!!!
On the other hand, if I had a life threatening illness, I wouldn’t mind some of those drawbacks if it meant I could continue to live.
For example, if I had horrible burns covering my body and was going to die from them, suddenly the choice of ugly, rocky orange skin doesn’t seem too bad.
Interesting question.
It’s a combination of a few things, I think. First, even with knowledge, you still need access, and it’s just not that easy to get yourself into Earth orbit in an unshielded craft. Second, I believe it’s been established that some people who are exposed to mutagenic rays of various kinds just get cancer. (This happened to Rick Jones in the '80’s, IIRC, before a second dose of gamma rays made him Hulk out for a while.) Third, comics just don’t work that way.
–Cliffy
The government tried to get Reed to help them recreate the ship that they used during a similar storm two or three years back, to try and create some ‘super soliders’ or something like that, but Reed sabotaged the project. Didn’t they say in that story that it wasn’t just any old cosmic rays that would work–but that they had to recreate a whole bunch of other different variables that were present during the original flight?
This is true. Rick Jones exposes himself to gamma rays expecting to receive great powers. Instead he got terminal cancer (the Beyonder cured him).
Glorian and his father expose themselves to rays from a bomb (might have been gamma, might have been standard nuke, I don’t recall) they get terminal cancer. Though, the Shaper Of Worlds cured Glorian.
The goblin serum tends to explode, and make you insane. A non exploding version has been made. It does not cause insanity but it doesn’t grant superhuman powers either.
A villain in Ghost Rider 2099 took the view that everybody should have super powers and came out with a designer drug called White Heat that was cheap and reliably granted the same powers to everybody. I only have the first issue of that story and don’t know what happened.
In a story a few years ago, a school bully saw the radioactive spider bite Peter Parker and witnessed Peter first use his powers. The bully, Carl King if I recall, went back to the exhibit to get himself bitten. He found the spider deceased, so he ate it. Instead of gaining powers like Peter’s, he found himself transformed into a horde of spiders.
I thought that only people with a latent X-gene could gain powers by exposure to radiation. Hence, the FF, Bruce Banner and Spiderman are “mutates” rather than “mutants”.
Depending on who you ask, the entire population of earth may have latent X genes. IIRC According to Kirby the Celestials tampered with our proto human ancestors and every living human has a latent X gene.
Not quite.
There seems be more than one gene that causes super-powers. The x-gene is what mutant detectors pick up. Persons possessing it generally develops super-powers–or at least strange physical traits–at puberty whether the are exposed to radiation or not. Sometimes persons with the x-gene seem not to have powers until exposed to a catalyst, but that may be because some powers are very subtle. Take Doug Ramsey, for instance; absent an x-gene detector, no one would ever have thought him a mutant.
Peter Parker, Reed Richards, the Storms, Bruce Baner, & others have a different gene which, while it would never have given them powers alone, reacted to radiation by empowering them. They don’t show up on mutant detectors.
My point is that, even in-universe, the distinction between mutant and mutate is fairly arbitrary. I’d say it’s mostly political. And furthermore I’d lay a large part of the blame for the poor politics at the feet of Charles Xavier, who stupidly popularlized the “Homo superior” name for persons with the x-gene.