How does Superman shave or get a haircut?
(and don’t say he is from Crypton his hair doesn’t grow cause in the animated series when Louis visited alternate timelime I belive Sups had a goatee)
So really how does he do it, is this ever mentioned in any comics/tv/movies or is it one of those things just don’t worry about it, it is a comic book, the dude can fly and you’re worried about shaving ?
He uses his heat vision. Fact.
Every once in awhile, Lois Lane tries to cut it, and the scissors break. 
Like Lego said, he uses a piece of his spaceship to reflect his heat vision. A normal mirror would melt, I believe.
That was the old way, now he just uses reflectors made on earth that get ruined after he does it a couple of times. Same principle, of course.
Personally I’d like to see the story where he tries to learn how to trim the hairs at the back of his head and the various hats he has to wear to cover it up while learning. 
Right. The craft he came to earth in is durable enough to withstand his heat vision, although it wasn’t durable enough to survive impact in one piece; a few fragments broke off and he uses one that’s curved as a mirror to cut his beard and hair.
That’s now.
Then…in the early days (pre-Crisis on Infinite Earths) his hair didn’t grow unless he was under a red sun or under the influence of red kryptonite. On those occasions he’d either get it cut before returning to earth or, on at least one occasion he had Supergirl and Krypto combine their heat vision and that was enough to give him a shave and haircut and clip his fingernails.
photopat, I’m positive that the peice of the spaceship explanation was pre-Crisis. I don’t doubt that you read the second explanation as well pre-Crisis since at that point there was fifty years of contradictory information about Superman (in fact I vaguely recall such a thing myself but I can’t pin down the source), but Byrne’s Man of Steel revamp removed the peices of spaceship reflector and made them ordinary metal.
photopat, I’m positive that the peice of the spaceship explanation was pre-Crisis. I don’t doubt that you read the second explanation as well pre-Crisis since at that point there was fifty years of contradictory information about Superman (in fact I vaguely recall such a thing myself but I can’t pin down the source), but Byrne’s Man of Steel revamp removed the peices of spaceship reflector and made them ordinary metal.
Apologies for the double post; my attempt to check to see if my thought to be eaten post didn’t show my previous post.
Hope it was at least as entertaining the second time.
Just Some Guy It was Byrne, within a year of the “Man of Steel” series. I’m positive.
One of the big gimmicks of the Pre-Crisis Superman was that his hair/beard/fingernails didn’t grow.
They built entire stories around that. As a matter of fact, in one story it blew his secret identity.
Pete Ross’s son Jon was dying of some “lack of will to live” disease and the only thing that could save him was if Superman told Jon his secret ID. He did. Jon cried “Bullsh*t. Clark’s too much of a wimp. I don’t buy it.”
Superman spent the entire issue trying to convince Jon, and failing. Finally Jon said that he knew a way to settle the matter. Supes flew Jon to Clark’s apartment (334 Clinton St. #3D…I did that from memory. Why can’t I remember my mom’s birthday?) and Jon looked in Clark’s bathroom and was convinced: No shaving cream, no razor, no nail clippers.
The story was referenced for a decade plus afterwards and became the crux of a 4 part story arc.
Besides. I remember the panel. You saw Supe’s eyes glowing red and a little red spot on his cheek as he burned off the stubble. Pre-Crisis, you’d have seen the laser-beam look.
(Byrne has Clark turn on an electric razor so Lois isn’t fooled. When he comes out of the bathroom, she’s lifting one of his dumbbells and commenting how light it is.)
Fenris
I figured it was the Earth-2 version of the post!
Fenris
I guess Mom will be disappointed again this year. Clark lives at 344 Clinton, not 334.
Truth be told, I haven’t bought a Superman comic in a few years so I’m not sure if he still lives at that address (with Lois) or not, but that was his address through the eighties and early nineties.
Oops. He’s right. I’m wrong. I had conflated it with Disch’s 334
Fenris
I know they live at #1938, and I think it’s Schuster Street. And yes, I know for a fact Byrne established the shaving with a piece of the ship as a mirror. It was in the Man of Steel mini-series, in the issue where we first met the new Lex Luthor. Pre-Crisis he used two pieces of the glass (?) from the rocket in the glasses he wore as Clark, because regular glasses melted when he used his heat vision through them. Amazing that Pa Kent was able to find two pieces which fit perfectly into an old frame.
I’m positive you’re wrong on this but I cannot find Man of Steel #4 for the exact quote (I’ve got the other five issues handy; it’s the one with Lex Luthor standing on the left hand side of the cover). The scene mentions expressly that he uses each reflector a handful of times before they’re ruined and he must throw them out (which he does with the one he’s using in that issue). Besides, it was a plot point in that series that the ship was taken so Superman could hardly use it to get a shaving mirror.
When I was Just Some Lad besides being a potential member of the Legion of Substitute Heroes I had the same question and got the rocket reflector answer and that was definitely pre-Crisis. The question then is where that answer comes from. Was it used in the radio show perhaps? Or maybe in one of the cartoon incarnations? Or even on the television series?
I don’t recall where I heard the rocket reflector thing originally, but I do recall that Byrne made the reflector have an earth bound source since I noticed the change when I first read Man of Steel. Recall that he stripped a lot of the Krypton factor from the character so putting some in for something as mundane as shaving wouldn’t fit with the revamp anyway.
Hmmm, it’s bugging me but I can’t find my copies of the Man of Steel miniseries. I’m pretty sure the curved piece of metal was a component from the rocket.
On reflection, it never made much sense that objects like glass and cloth from Krypton would be invulnerable on Earth. After all, a chunk of steel is a chunk of steel, no matter what kind of solar radiation is splashing across it. I can imagine, though, that the material in the rocket is some kind of ultrafuturisticky nano-tech material which could conceivably be assembled on Earth, given a few thousand years of industrial and technological advances.
Bryan Larry Niven(?) IIRC had a nifty article (NOT “Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex”) where he theorized that Krypton wasn’t a planet, it was a cooled brown dwarf and everything on Krypton was made of degenerate matter, which is why it was invulnerable, so it wasn’t steel, it was “degenerate steel”, it wasn’t glass, it was “degenerate glass”.
I don’t remember how he worked the “yellow solar radiation” thing in. It had something to do with why the degenerate matter didn’t explode when brought into an earth-like gravity, but he theorized (if it WAS Niven…) that Kryptonite gave off something like neutrinos: humans were transparent to whatever it was emitting, but Kryptonians, with their super-dense bodies, were opaque.
Just Some Guy: Sorry, you’re misrembering. I just dug up MAN OF STEEL #4. The exact quote “Using a curved, reflective piece of metal from the rocket Ma and Pa Kent found me in, I direct a slender beam of my “heat vision” and carefully shear off my exposed whiskers.” Which of course begs the question: why didn’t Lois smell the distinct stench of burning hair?
Also, the rocket wan’t stolen 'till Superman #1. MAN OF STEEL #6 has the idiotic “Duh, Krypton Sux!” scene with Superman and Jor-El’s recording. Remember? So the rocket couldn’t have been stolen yet.
Like I said, the shaving thing wouldn’t make sense in a pre-Crisis context. I can only remember a half-dozen times where his beard grew: normally through being stuck in a red-sun environment (“Prisoner of the Red Sun!”), but occasionally through an experiment gone wrong or a time-travel mishap (where he aged the interveneing years) Plus one famous red kryptonite story where it took the combined heat-vision of Supergirl and Krypto to remove 'em. In all cases I can find, either whatever caused the beard growth was reversed (the faulty time-travel mechanism) or he made a point of shaving before leaving the red-sun environment.
Fenris
“<quote>Which of course begs the question: why didn’t Lois smell the distinct stench of burning hair?</quote>”
Degenerate hair doesn’t stink?
Any chance of a basic explanation of the difference between pre-crisis and post, and what on earth “crisis” is anyway, and how all that relates to the superman I thought I already knew all about from watching Superman II?
Any chance of a basic explanation of the difference between pre-crisis and post, and what on earth “crisis” is anyway, and how all that relates to the superman I thought I already knew all about from watching Superman II?