Streaky was not a Kryptonian cat, but an Earth cat that gained superpowers from accidental exposure to an experimental Kryptonite antidote.
Meanwhile, Comet the Superhorse was neither Kryptonian nor a horse. He was originally a centaur named Biron who was enchanted into the form of an immortal flying stallion. His ambiguously delineated relationship with Supergirl was one of the more unnerving features of Silver Age comics. Comet was seriously messed up.
Heh. “ambiguously delineated relationship” that’s a nice way of putting it.
I believe that current continuity is, not only are Kryptonian’s “solar batteries” that preferentially soak up yellow sun rays, but that they’re even better at soaking up blue sun rays (fr’ex). And that red sun rays somehow drain their solar charge.
So Superman can fly willy-nilly across space, so long as he can hold his breath, and until he runs into red solar radiation (and is zapped back into “just some guy”). Seems to be the way all the alterna-Kryptonians work, too, since that red Sun-Eater apparently effected Superman Prime in the same way.
Well, most of those other alterna-Kryptonians aren’t living on New Earth (which is, what, Earth-1 or Earth-0 now?). New Earth has far more than its fair share of Kryptonians and Kryptonian knockoffs.
According to Byrne’s retcon, an alien religious figure called “the Cleric” visited Krypton a long time ago and started a religion based on peace and harmony and got a bunch of followers. This upset the Krypton government and the church of Rao, and a member of the government, who was also an ancestor of Superman (have you noticed that all the famous Kryptonians in the past were ancestors of Superman?) invented the Phantom Zone projector to zap all of the Cleric’s followers into the Phantom Zone, and also invented a device called the Eradicator which changed Kryptonians’ genes to kill any who went off planet.
#2 has never made sense to me. Apparantly if there is enough kryptonite, say a planet’s worth, is safe but just a litle piece is deadly.
The only thing I could think of to satisfy myself is that chunks of krypton combined with the radiation from a yellow sun becomes deadly. Since Krypton was under a red son everyone was fine.
But as noted above the idea of kryptonite was not really fully thought out before being used as a plot device.
I got the impression in the old days that whatever made Krypton explode also changed its remaining components into kryptonite. Certainly Kandor under a yellow sun was not dangerous.
When Krypton exploded, the energy transmuted its elements into kryptonite.
No one is quite sure where kryptonite fits on the periodic table, but it has some interesting properties. It is not subject to friction, which is why so many kryptonite meteors got through the atmosphere to Earth.
Given enough time, uranium will eventually decay into lead.
Given enough time, kryptonite will eventually decay into iron.
Pre-Crisis: kryponite radiation passes through an Earthling body harmlessly. A Kryptonian body has a denser molecular structure, which traps the radiation and poisons the Kryptonian.
Post Crisis: kryptonite radiation drives the yellow-sun radiation out of the cells of a Kryptonian’s body, rendering him powerless. Longer exposure will kill him. Eventually, it will affect even an Earthling. For a while, Lex Luthor wore a ring with a kryptonite gemstone. It eventually gave him cancer, and his hand had to be amputated. For a while, he wore a prosthenic hand.
Neither. It’s only referred to as New Earth by anyone who’d know the nomenclature and has felt the need to refer to it by name yet (the Monitors, Rip Hunter). It’s explicitly separate from Earth-1. So, if it is eventually given a number it’ll be 0 or 52. Or Prime. (Boy, would that give Superman Prime fits…)
IIRC, it was in a pre-Crisis Superboy story. Immediately after Kal-El was launched into space, a scientist friend of Jor-El’s came in with a last-minute plan. Jor-El had a rocket big enough to carry him and Lara, but unfortunately it didn’t have any life support. The scientist friend had been working on a method that amounted to being able to revive the dead provided they’d been preserved promptly with a special serum. He “killed” Jor-El and Lara and stuffed them into the escape rocket, along with a recorded message the rocket was intended to carry to Earth after Kal-El’s rocket. Years later, Superboy found them, but when he played the recorded message, it was Jor-El explaining that he had accidently exposed himself and Lara to a fatal dose of pre-Kryptonite radiation poisoning (evidently the same version that killed the Argo City dwellers), and that they would have died in a few months anyway. Superboy concluded there was no point in trying to revive them and let their ship float away into space as their tomb.
Yep, that’s the one I was thinking of, Lumpy.
I wanna see what Larry Niven writes about HIM! Could he kill someone by flinging his poo?
Yes. He could throw it with sufficient velocity that its softness would not matter. Hopefully he does this in a vacuum because doing it in an atmosphere would be even more explosive…
This, I actually have no problem with. Remember, Krypton’s gravity is much, much stronger than Earth’s. In Earth’s gravity, chemical-powered rockets to outer space are just barely doable, but in Krypton’s, they’d be all but impossible. So the Kryptonians were bound to their home planet until someone (namely, Jor-El) developed an antigravity device. But once you have antigravity, it’s a small step to FTL technology, so Jor-El was already building the prototypes by the time the planet exploded.
I think, too, that there’s evidence somewhere in the spaghetti of continuity that Jor-El’s experimental antigravity device was somehow connected to the cause of the planet’s explosion.
So, conceivably, in some canon, the explosion of Krypton actually INCREASED the planet’s population?
:dubious: :eek:
Well, it was a boom.
As others have pointed out, Earth has a surprisingly large number of former Kryptonians. And we’re just one small planet in a very big galaxy. Maybe the majority of Krypton’s population did evacuate before the big boom and we just happen to know about the small percentage of them that ended up on Earth.