A friend and I were talking about our mutual former habit of reading comic with the 10,396th episode of Marvel vs. DC - Why the other sucks? As a side bit he mentioned a factoid about Superman that I had never heard before and I wanted to run it by the Dopers.
Basically, according to my friend, it’s the combination of kryptonite radiation and yellow sun energy that’s toxic to kryptonians. Purge the yellow solar energy from the big blue boy scout and he could juggle kryptonite all day long (or at least to the limit of his non-supercharged stamina) without ill effects.
He supports this by saying that if all kryptonite came from Krypton and kryptonite was harmful to non-powered kryptonians then how could the inhabitants of Krypton survive until their planet exploded?
This sounds bogus to me and I’m aware of no reference (canon or non-canon) that supports this but it’s probably been twenty years since I picked up a Superman book. I can’t begin to guess how the character might have changed in that time.
I’m not a Superman expert, especially in the original comics. (I’ve followed a few of the television franchises over the years.)
Your friend’s theory seems plausible, but the supporting argument doesn’t hold water unless a majority of the surface rock on Krypton is indeed what’s known as ‘Kryptonite.’ It could have been a substance naturally found only in isolated regions that the Kryptonians tended to avoid.
I was under the impression that kryptonite didn’t exist, as such, until after the destruction of the planet. Whatever the nature of the cataclysm, it transformed inoccuous mineral matter from Krypton into several varieties of radioactive kryptonite.
I always understood Kryptonite to be from around the core (or actually the core) of the planet, or at least a uranium type substance found at places on the surface.
In Pre-Crisis it wasn’t harmful to humans, but Post-Crisis it was after a long enough exposure time. Luthor lost his hand to it.
There has been some recent stuff that’s sounds like your friend’s theory; basically that krytonite screws up the whole sun absorption process and forces that energy out through his skin. Whether or not that becomes cannon I don’t know, but personally I think it’s a stupid idea.
For me, it’s radiation that kills Kryptonians and can make humans really sick.
I wonder what it’s like to be a superhero
I wonder where I’d go if I could fly around downtown
From some other planet I get this funky high from a yellow sun
Boy, I bet my friends will all be stunned
They’re stunned . . .
I stopped reading DC not long after the John Byrne Superman reboot, Man of Steel. In the first issue of that series, I believe that they confirm this. I got rid of my books years ago so I can’t prove this. Even if they did say this at the time, it may easily have been retconned away. As I recall, Byrne stuff tended to get rewritten or just chucked on a regular basis due to his habit of taking over a character, screwing it up for a couple of years and then leaving.
In an issue of Judge Dredd, a Superman-like character showed up in Mega City One and started catching criminals, Golden Age-style. Unfortunately, some of the criminals didn’t survive things like hitting an invulnerable superman standing in the way of their car or having I-beams bent around them as a restraint.
Dredd shot him with a bullet made of the equivalent of kryptonite. Turns out the Justice Department keeps samples of exploded planets from all over the galaxy for just such an emergency! Especially effective since superman typically won’t dodge a puny thing like a bullet and instead face the gunman with flexed pects and a grin.
By the way: since the kryptonite rocks that landed on earth didn’t cause an extinction event like the ones that killed the dinosaurs, they must have been travelling at far below light speed. Which begs the question: just how long ago did Krypton explode? It must have been hundreds of thousands or millions of years ago.
The facts have been retconned all over the place. I believe the current situation is that, at some point en route to Earth the Kryptonian debris passed through an energy field of some type that transmuted it into “kryptonite”. The radiation from the kryptonite harmfully replaces the solar energy that kryptonians absorb. They get more benefits from absorbing yellow solar energy than from red solar energy (and yet more from blue solar energy).
This would imply that kryptonite would still be harmful to kryptonians under a red sun… although maybe not as harmful. Also, that Krypton itself was not comprised of harmful kryptonite (which was the case, at one point in Silver Age continuity IIRC).
There is an edge case in that kryptonians from other universes (e.g., Power Girl, Superboy Prime) may or may not be affected by kryptonite from the main DC universe.
Not just his hand - the cancer from the kryptonite exposure killed him shortly before the Death of Superman arc. (He came back in a clone body claiming to be his own illegitimate son. Then he died again when the clone body deteriorated. Then he made a deal with Neron, and came back young, healthy, and himself again.)
One version (I don’t know whether it’s been retconned out of existence or even re-retconned back in at the moment) is that a significant amount of debris from Krypton was caught up in the drive field of little Kal-El’s ship and dragged to the general vicinity of Earth.
Wormhole. Although, since the birthing matrix didn’t activate until he landed on Earth, I suppose Jor-El could have developed some sort of stasis something or other that kept Kal in baby form for however long.
And the whole Lex II thing did, unfortunately, happen. I can’t remember other specific cases of kryptonite poisoning off hand, but I’m positive there have been some.
I remember a 1971 reboot (has it been 40 years already? Le sigh) in which an explosion transformed all Kryptonite into iron, thereby rendering it harmless to Superman. For some inexplicable reason, it retained its glowing green color, though. In one scene, a crook held out a piece of the now harmless Kryptonite out at Superman, thinking he could make Superman back away. However Supes reaches out, grabs the K from the bad guy and says, “Looks good. Mind if I try some?” Superman then proceeds to eat the Kryptonite in front of the astonished bad guy. Superman then belches, says “It could use some salt,” and takes the bad guy into custody.
Of course the editors intended for Kryptonite to again become so rare that the average criminal couldn’t lay his hands on it. It could still be synthesized by a criminal genius such as Luthor and additional pieces could fall to earth and not be rendered harmless.
IIRC, way back when, kryptonite was formed by the explosion of Krypton. The city of Argo was torn loose from the planet and survived under its dome, but the ground had turned into kryptonite, so they had to cover it with lead. They spent a few years like that, until meteors pierced the lead, causing everybody to die except Kara Zor-El, who was sent to Earth by her father, Jor-El’s brother. Yellow sun radiation had nothing to do with it. The various forms and colors of kryptonite were caused by pieces travelling through various interstellar clouds of stuff.
I stopped reading in the Silver Age, and that is my recollection also. Kandor had no issue with kryptonite, as it was removed from Kryton before the explosion.
And during the John Byrne reboot (which I liked, by the way) Our Superman confronted 3 villians that had escaped from the phantom zone on an alternate Earth.
He was not affected by the alternate Earth’s kryptonite.
Pre-Crisis, under a red sun, all Kryptonite stopped being radioactive. So a non-powered Superman could juggle any flavor of the stuff for hours…except for one kind (Anti-Kryptonite which stays radioactive and which harms Kryptonians under a red sun. See: Argo City)
There are exceptions, but as a general thing, that was the rule.
Nope…anti-kryptonite stays radioactive after the fact.
Partially correct. That’s how red and white were created. Jewel (there were only 2 pieces in existance) came from a specially carved part of the Jewel Mountains. Gold K is just some element on Krypton that becomes Gold K–Luthor once used some nuclear device (a bomb? a ray?–it was nuclear/atomic in any case) to turn some Green K to Gold K. But no-one else does.
Kryptonite-X just does to normal humans what Green K does to kryptonains. I have no idea how it was created.
X-Kryptonite was caused when Supergirl dumped some chemicals on Green K to try to make it non-radioactive. It gave Streaky the Super-Cat his powers.
Blue K is what happens when you put Green K under a Bizarro-Ray
There were a bunch of other one-shot kryptonites too.
I don’t recall that specific explanation, but I suspect Kryptonite is strange matter, and subject to strange logic.
Not specifically Kryptonite related, but as an example of how complex this subject is, Superman was once stuck on a planet orbitting a yellow sun, but the bad guys had suspended a big red filter between the sun and the planet so that Supes was powerless under the influence of red light. Seems illogical to us mortals, but they wouldn’t have lied about something like that.
Color Kid (from the Legion of Substitute Heroes) once turned a ring of green kryptonite placed around the Earth, blue. Thus rendering it harmless to Superboy. “Strange” sounds about right.
Also, although the Byrne reboot did away with most of the other forms of Kryptonite, they’ve since crept back into canon. I don’t think the jewel or X kryptonites have reappeared (nor pink kryptonite, fortunately), but silver kryptonite showed up in Superman/Batman… after being introduced by Smallville.