Question for the comic book know-it-alls amongst us (Fenris, Fiver, I’m looking your way ):
According to the Superman canon:
How many light years away from Earth is (was, actually) Kripton?
How fast was baby Kal-El traveling towards Earth in his rocket ship?
How many Earth years did it take him to make the voyage?
What I’m getting at is, assuming a several thousand year trip, when Kal-El departed Earth civilization had not begun. Without advance knowledge about how things were going to turn out over here, how did Jor-El knew he was not sending his kid to a swamp or a place populated by a primitive species (if any)? Was it wishful thinking or an educated guess built upon well-reasoned scientific criteria? Did they actually deal with this?
If there’re differing pre and post-crisis explanations for this, shoot them both.
If this has done before, please excuse my inept search skills.
And while we’re at it, is there any explanation as to how Kal-El amassed his knowledge pertaining Earth?
IIRC, pre-Crisis there was some sort of “space warp” between Krypton and Earth, which shortened the journey considerably. The warp was also used as an explanation as to why so much kryptonite turned up on Earth.
Post-Crisis I have a recollection of Jor-El and Lara discussing the idea of sending baby Kal-El to Earth which included a look through some sort of remote viewer which showed 20th Century humans (whom Lara dismissed as “savages” and Jor-El expected Kal-El would one day come to rule). The ship was equipped with faster-than-light drive so the journey didn’t take long relatively (ha!) speaking.
Originally, the speed of light was not a barrier to Kryptonian superscience. Jor-L was able to see things on Earth without any time delay and could send his son’s space ship to Earth without the speed of light being a barrier.
Remember, this was when Doc Smith was king of science fiction.
There have been several (OK, dozens) of stories about Krypton over 60+ years, no two of which probably match up completely.
But I can’t think of a single example in which Jor-El didn’t have real-time telescopic (later video) understanding of contemporary Earth.
Krypton is wherever the particular writer wanted to place it: in our galaxy, in another galaxy, whatever big scientific word they thought would sound impressive. Or impressive without science. In the once definitive, “The Origin of Superman” (either 1948 or 1949), Krypton is placed “in the outer reaches of trackless space!” What more do you need to know?
There might have been one or two stories in which the baby Kal-El grew a bit during the voyage, but mostly he was gone there, arrived here: no real duration. Even in the “Origin,” it says “time passed,” but the baby taken out of the capsule looked exactly the same as the baby put into it.
You can’t assume any real-world science in this. A) It’s a comic book. B) The writers didn’t know any more about science than the readers. C) Real-world science would have gotten in the way of the story. D) Hey, Krypton had an advanced civilization, didn’t they?
However, in both Pre-Crisis and Post-Crisis continuity, the light from Krypton’s explosion reaches Earth when Superman is an adult; ~20-30 years. And I believe that in the current continuity it was explicitly stated that Krypton was in a red dwarf system about 30 light-years from Earth.
I disagree, Lumpy. In pre-Crisis continuity, pieces of Kryptonite reached earth when Clark was a teenager (or even as a baby)… and even if Kal-el’s li’l rocket was sent at super-light speeds, one can’t imagine that the bits of the exploding planet were propelled at super-light rates.
The post-Crisis continuity (IIRC) has only one tiny piece of Kryptonite on earth, that got attached to Kal-el’s rocket.
The current SMALLVILLE TV series is back to the pre-Crisis presence of lots of kryptonite on earth.
What everyone else said: It changes regularly depending on who’s writing it.
However, for about 10-15 years, they actually managed to keep a more-or-less coherent answer. In the '70s and '80s: Krypton circled Antares…especially in stories by Elliot S! Maggin and Cary Bates*.
From the Weisinger years and kept through the Crisis (with exceptions of course) Jor-El’s rocket had “an experimental space-warp device” which left a permanant hole in space (which is why there’s so much Kryptonite on Earth–it flew through the space-warp and didn’t have to travel in “normal” space to get here.) Kal-El’s journey took three days (at least in the Weisinger years). There was even a map showing the journey of Kal-El’s ship.
I even remember a story from the late '70s where the author screwed --they had the light from Krypton’s explosion reach Earth…but (IIRC) still left it Antares. Antares is 500+ light-years away. Superman’s been on Earth for 28 years. And anyway the light of the explosion was brighter than the sun. (Keep in mind this was within a year or so of the (in)famous “Magic-hypno glasses that keep people from figuring out that Clark is Superman” story, so it’s not recognized as one of the great eras in Superman history. On the other hand, it’s what got 12(?) year old Fenris hooked, so they musta done something right!
Dex, I believe you’re mistaken on this point. Because of the “space warp”, pieces of Kryptonite landed on Earth at the same time as Kal-El (remember, in the Weisinger days, Clark found the first piece the stuff he’d ever encountered in the silt at the bottom of a stream when he was about age 8. )
The “space warp” explaination also allowed Kryptonite to go back in time (don’t ask me how. :: shrug :: That’s what they said.) IIRC, Superboy encountered the stuff when trying to stop some famous historical incident, I don’t remember which one (Lincoln’s assassination maybe?) and Superman encountered it several times while fighting Atlas or Sampson or Hercules.
In a post-Crisis miniseries, Word of Smallville, Superman reflects that “fifty years ago”, when his foster parents were young adults, his own rocket ship was about “halfway” to Earth. Assuming the rocket was moving at near lightspeed (causing the fetus Kal-El in his gestation pod to age very slowly due to time dilation) and it landed on Earth thirty years ago, the rocket trip took some forty years, suggesting Krypton was about forty light-years away, and the light from the explosion should have arrived shortly before the rocket did.
In any case, this mini-series suggested the trip from Krypton to Earth took quite some time. Of course, once you postulate faster-than-light travel, or the rocket ship having some kind of suspsended animation device, all bets are off.
Ahem, that would be the World of Smallville, of course. It was published along with World of Krypton and World of Metropolis, each giving detailed backstories of the Superman supporting cast.
In the (arguably) first post-Crisis Superman comic book, Issue 1 of the Man of Steel miniseries, Jor-El is watching a Kansas farmhand on his viewer (and he even knows the word “Kansas”, suggesting his research has gone into some detail). The farmhand is working with a pitchfork with no technology apparant, and I suppose that image could have come from just about any time circa 1880-1940, more-or-less. It’s not necesarily a “real-time” image. In any case, even if Jor-El could see images in realtime, that doesn’t mean he knew how to move a rocket at FTL.
On a related note regarding the post-crisis Kryptonite chunk stuck to Kal’s rocket; when the Kents extract the newborn Kal from the pod, they spend at least a minute debating what to do, and all the while baby Kal is less than ten feet from the Kryptonite. Logically, the child should have died or at least shown symptoms, much as the teenage Clark did when Jonathan Kent brought him back to the rocket for the first time, later in the Man of Steel miniseries.
Depends on whether you mean Golden Age, Silver Age, or Post-Crisis. As I recall, during the Crisis, they retconned Fenris’ age to 8, and during the Golden Age, his age was never made explicit, but it was hinted that he was actually hundreds of years old.
I think it was implied in DC One Million that Krypton exploded in 1937 (when Action Comics#1 was first published) and that baby Kal-El was in suspended animation for most of the time- and space-warping ride. I don’t think that’s been adheed to, though.
Perhaps, just as post-Crisis Kal-El didn’t immediately develop powers, he didn’t immediately suffer from exposure to kryptonite. Perhaps the kryptonite had to be exposed to a yellow sun for a while, like Kal-El did.
To further confuse the issue, in the very early days, Krypton orbited our own sun. Superman’s powers came merely from the fact that Earth has a lower gravitational field than Krypton had. When his leaping great distance became flying and he could see through solid objects – except for lead – the folks at DC had to move Krypton to a star with a red sun.
Do you have a specific reference for that? The earliest origins I can lay my hands on - 1939’s Superman #1 and the 1942 Superman novel - both just refer to Krypton as a planet without locating it anywhere in particular. By the 1948 origin, the space ship had to go through interstellar space to reach Earth. So do you have a comic in mind that puts Krypton in our solar system? I don’t remember that ever.
I’m relying on memory here, big brother (which is always a very bad thing – check out some of my previous posts), as my collection is long gone. But I do remember a reprint of a Superboy story where the lad of steel is being sued because the rocket that brought him from Krypton caused someone’s house to burn down. To prove the truth, a replica space ship is built and Superboy flies it to the spot where Krypton was and throws it back to Earth, something that would be impossible in the “Krypton had a red sun” era. This struck me as odd until some time later I read about Krypton being in the Solar System. I would have got this back in the 70s when DC was printing the especially large comics with two new stories and loads of reprints – at least with Detective Comics, now that I think of it, I don’t remember Superman coming that way. So, anyway, my point – finally – is no, I’m sorry I don’t have a cite, but I’d stake what little reputation I have on that. Next time I’m in a BBB (big box bookstore) I’ll see what I can find in the comic collections.
As I said, every writer found a new way to do something stupid, er, something different with Krypton, so it’s certainly possible.
But I found what appears to be the definitive origin reprinted in Les Daniels’ Superman: The Golden Age: the very beginning of the Superman newspaper comic strip, published on Jan. 19, 1939, but written the previous year. And by Siegel and Shuster themselves.
The second day’s strip has Lora talking to Jor-L (yep, those spellings):
Definitive, right? Well, it would be except for what happens the next day, when the caption reads:
Do I think it’s possible that sf buff Siegel wouldn’t know the difference between interplanetary travel and interstellar travel? All I can say is: a man who could have a planet “glow itself to eternity” is capable of anything! :eek:
Well, post-crisis it is established that Clark wasn’t instantly powered-up upon his arrival on Earth (one story establishes that he broke his arm at the age of four, and his invulnerability and other powers developed gradually as he grew to adulthood). However, in the first issue of Man of Steel, it’s clear that the green radiation was killing Kryptonians in large numbers even before the planet itself disintegrated. Kal-El was protected from the radiaton while in his gestation chamber, but he should have suffered at least a little when removed by the Kents.
The premise of Kryptonite not affecting unpowered Kryptonians was a repeatedly used pre-crisis plot device, typically when a story involved Superman losing his powers, pretending to still have them, being confronted by crooks with Kryptonite, being unaffected, defeating the crooks through wit or normal human strength, then getting his powers back. It became complicated in 1959 when Supergirl was introduced, with her back story consisting of her family being among a group of survivors on a huge chunk of Krypton, the former Argo City, that survived the breakup of the planet. The survivors held on for about 15 years, using thick layers of lead to shield themselves from the irradiated bedrock. When a meteor shower began to destroy that shield, dooming them all, scientist Zor-El (brother of Jor) hastily designed a rocket to save his adolescent daughter. Why he didn’t spend the previous decade building rockets so all the Argonians could escape remains unclear. Retroactively, the concept of “anti-kryptonite” was created, being a variant that affected all Kryptonians, whether they had super-powers or not.
In any case, all this was supposedly done away with with the Byrne retcon, so Kryptonite was deadly to Kryptonians, period. The infant should have been affected, but it’s a minor pot hole and I mention it only for the sake of nitpickery.
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