According to the current DC “mythos”, will Superman physically become an old man? Will his organs and systems begin to fail from age, like a human’s would? Or does his invulnerability include disease resistance from both pathogens and age-related conditions unrelated to bacteria or virus infections?
As long as he’s profitable, no. Why should he?
It depends on which incarnation of Superman we’re talking about. In the recent Kingdom Come special Supes had aged but he was still a bad ass. In Eighty Page Giant #1, or perhaps it was #2, or #3, they showed Superman in the future as a really old man. He was so old that none of his superpowers worked. In The Dark Knight Returns, Superman was older but he was still quite a powerhouse and still had the ability to defeat entire navies at sea.
Since in most versions of the future he does age I have to assume that he is mortal and will eventually die.
Marc
It’s doubtful that he would. Although I can’t really cite evidence from the current continuity as to his aging process, other Superman stories set in the far future or involving long periods of time might lend clues.
1.Fairly recently, he spent something on the scale of 1000 years in another dimension fighting a battle with Wonder Woman…although injured (?) in the process, he did not seem to be suffering from the ravages of time (he was then returned to his own time and place, as if nothing had happened)
2.DC One Million shows a long descent of super-offspring, with Big Blue himself returning still-young from exile in the sun (although being so close to his power source may have affected things)
3.Kingdom Come, where he is aged, but not suffering for it.
4.Some (perhaps elseworlds?) story in the post-apocalyptic future where he has hid himself in a cave, is revived by a gang of children, and wages a heavily-armed battle against some weird Oedipal-complex duo. Very old, and de-powered due to lack of sunlight, but healthy otherwise.
That’s what I know. But really, the editors will never let him age much, they’ll just restart the continuity somehow.
Add to that the “Elseworlds” (and therefore not in official continuity) work Superman and Batman: Generations, which depicts Superman at various stages of his life. In the last bit, he’s alive (but obviously very aged) in 2919.
As caveman says, though, DC isn’t ever going to depict Superman in-continuity any older than 35 or so, and probably less than that (I dunno how old he’s supposed to be currently). They almost declared Kingdom Come to be canon, but they decided against it.
Most of the pre- and post-“Crisis” stories show that Superman does age, but at a much slower rate than humans. Whether this is a property of his Kryptonian heritage or a side-effect of his superpowers has never been explained. The John Byrne “Generations” story explicitly states that Superman ages about a year for every century that passes.
Keep in mind those stories are not true canon; Superman (and the whole gang at the Daily Planet) never aged during the entire 50 years before the Crisis on Infinite Earths.
Of course, assuming the Big Red S is still being published in 20 to 50 years, I suspect that DC Comics will just hit the Reset button again and start from the beginning.
Most of the stories depicting a future Superman show him as “matured”- stockier and with a touch of grey at the temples, but not really aged. My WAG is that if only his genes were involved he would eventually grow old, but his super-energy keeps his body regenerated.
I’ve always considered the radiation of the yellow sun to be Superman’s proverbial “Tree of Life” and the powers it grants allow him to overcome any genetic predisposition to aging. I would think that if this ideology were canon, they would explain that Superman only ages when he’s not being exposed to the radiation of the yellow sun, and that this aging is quickly reversed upon reintroduction of exposure, and that aging is only retained if he passes a certain ‘point’ of aging. So say there’s aging markers, and if he gets to 50% of a marker, that 50% is removed upon reintroduction, but if he gets 100% past it and starts working against a new one, any reconstruction can only move back to 0% aging against the new marker. Am I making sense?
Of course, they’ve also explained (via genetic testing by Cadmus after “The Death of Superman”) that the Kryptonian genetic code is so complicated and “advanced” that instead of being a double helix like ours, it was instead composed of so many intertwining helixes that it was a solid cylinder of genetic information. I hesitate to think of how much of that genetic information is retrovirally derived considering the vast majority of ours is unused.
–Tim
Wow, reply for very old post but… I asked myself the same question today. Homer makes allot of sense. Assuming Superman can’t die, it would have to be something like the battery + genetics concept. That the reason he aged from infant to adulthood on earth is because, his body had to fully mature and adapt for the storing of solar energy. Until this occurred, the immortality wasn’t a factor. Once he fully matured, the battery effect could keep him at a relative age indefinitely. To compare it to something, although badly, think HIGHLANDER. As long as he receives enough energy on a periodic or continual basis, he will always revert to his moment of full maturation. For a human, that would be around age 25. However, since Superman’s genetics are so complex it could be assumed that his fully matured self begins at any age between ours and lets say 50?
Long explanation short: Once he reaches maturity, he is basically a recharging battery with regenerative casing. Given this, Superman will never die from natural causes.
That was Batman (courtesy of the Lazarus Pit he plundered from Ra’s al-Ghul). Superman, by contrast, has a The Older I Get The Slower I Age effect going on in that one.
I guess the question is answered. Superman is a zombie!
He, like all superheroes, age at the speed of plot.
Yep. This one’s too old to leave open.
If anyone wants to start a new one, Cafe Society would be more appropriate.
samclem, Moderator.