Kandor - the Bottled City

[Klar Ken T5477]

You know it - you love it...KANDOR!

Im curious as to the offical reason the yellow rays of the sun didnt penetrate the bottle (nor did it have an artifical sun) and earth's lesser gravity not affect the denizens of the Bottle City and turn them Super while inside.

It's not like they were situated on a really big chunk of Krypton that would simulate the heavier gravity.

Thoughts?

Theories?

Conjecture?

Decidely Canonical derision? :wink:

[Captain Kal]

According to the collector's edition Superman's Fortress of Solitude, tanks supply Kandor with an atmosphere exactly like Krypton's, and artificial gravity and an artificial red sun duplicate the heavy gravity and red solar conditions.

See pic.

http://superman.nu/a/Encyclopaedia/Fortress/images/bottle.GIF


According to stories involving Nor-Kan, some yellow sun rays do penetrate the bottle but the dominance of red solar energy inside the bottle negates their effect.  Nor-Kan devised a special ring that concentrated and amplified the few yellow sun rays inside the bottle to let the Kandorian wearing it to be super-powered.  The ring appeared in the first Nightwing & Flamebird storyline, IIRC.  Supergirl once used the ring inside the bottle in her own book.

It's like some red stars bathe Earth but the yellow sun overwhelms their influence in the outside world.

[NotSuper]

The first two choices are BOTH correct.

[Klar Ken T5477]

Thanks guys - that's what i thought.  You wouldnt believe the beaut of an arguement I had yesterday about this subject. :wink:

[llozymandias]

the "portion" of krypton that kandor was "on" was pretty big.  krypton's size was somewhere between 5xearth & jupiter.  that chunk of krypton went from the planet's surface to a portion of its core.  the "surface" area included more than just kandor.  it also included part of the scarlet jungle, among other things.   also kandor was the capital of a society thousands of years more advanced than 20th-21st century earth.  kandor as a city probably covered hundreds or thousands of square miles.

[Daybreaker]

As far as light goes, didn't red sun energy always seem to take precedence over yellow sun energy?  If Superman were out in the sun on Earth but someone pointed a red sun ray at him, he lost his powers despite the ongoing presence of yellow sun energy.

[Beyonder]

You know it - you love it...KANDOR!

Im curious as to the offical reason the yellow rays of the sun didnt penetrate the bottle (nor did it have an artifical sun) and earth's lesser gravity not affect the denizens of the Bottle City and turn them Super while inside.

It's not like they were situated on a really big chunk of Krypton that would simulate the heavier gravity.

Thoughts?

Theories?

Conjecture?

Decidely Canonical derision? :wink:

I voted for "Freedom of Choice". They choose to live to closely to the original conditions of their native planet. It would have been simplicity itself for them to fournish their Bottled City with a miniature Yellow (or even WHITE) Sun, but they simply didn't WANT to.

If they wanted to be god-like, they would be.

[Captain Kal]

Good point, Beyonder.  Your POV jibes with what the Pre Crisis Kandorians actually did when they were restored to full-size.  They chose a heavy gravity, red sun world.  They made the same choice in the imaginary tale of Superman-Red/Superman-Blue except the Supermen put the restored Krypton on a course that would take them back to their native Rao system.

It must be noted that Kandor was in Brainiac's possession for decades and they seemed not to have known how Earthly conditions would grant them super-powers, or at least it wasn't common knowledge.  Hence, their original bottle adaptations would logically be to duplicate the conditions on their native world.  Either that or Brainiac furnished the captured cities with the artificial gravity and suns which makes sense considering he also supplied them the atmosphere feed tanks.  After Superman rescued them, Beyonder's POV would hold sway as they chose to be normal folk, much as the Daxamites generally choose to be normal too instead of migrating to yellow sun systems.

Another aspect may be the Science Council of Kandor probably decided for the good of all, Kandorian and Terran, that a city of millions of super-people are a potential danger, so they'd deliberately keep the city in Kryptonian conditions to prevent either accidental or deliberate misuse of super-powers.

As a side note, it must be noted that in Waid's new Legion of Super-Heroes, we have three references to the Superman mythos.  In LSH #2, Dream Girl notices that the Naltorian cops have added Klurkor to their skill sets.  Klurkor is a Kryptonian martial art that the Pre Crisis Lois Lane learned in Kandor.  LSH #3 has Sun Boy telling Triplicate Girl a story about a Rokynite talking to a Naltorian.  Rokyn is the name of the world Kandor was/will be enlarged on.  Evidently, the BR Kandor -- which is now a Kryptonian city again -- will be enlarged sometime before the 31st century and it has had commerce with at least one world, Naltor, by the LSH's time.  Also, Sun Boy and Triplicate Girl were playing at the secret ID game and snipping hair is considered the technique for proving someone is Superman, so the legends of Superman/Clark/Lois may have been garbled by their time to include Lois trying to ferret out the secret ID that no one even suspected in the present day.