Superman Through the Ages! Forum

Any chef can make a great fillet mignon, but it takes somebody special to do some absolutely amazing onion rings. Cary Bates does just that in this sample story, where he tells a fun story centered around Superman selling out to shill Radio Shack computers. The Jim Starlin and Dick Giordano art doesn't hurt, either.

I direct your attention to ACTION COMICS #509 (1980). Not the lead story - it had one of Bates's trademarks, a clean, correct mystery story involving a three-eyed ghost created by mental energy, that Superman has to use his wits to defeat.

No, I mean the second story: "The Computer that Saved Metropolis" starring the TRS-80 Radio Shack Computer Whiz Kids! It's basically a commercial for a Radio Shack computer. Superman's boasting of its INCREDIBLE POWER is kind of hilarious now in the year 2005. I'm not a computer type, but I'm betting I probably have more computing power in my electric toothbrush than this thing had all over their colossal mass. The full-page advertisement that precedes the story it is pretty awesome in its own right: it makes an amazing point about its "astonishing 12" video display," and makes a point that "You can also buy ready-made programs (called 'software')" (!)

Question: Are the TRS-80 Radio Shack Computer Whiz Kids considered canon? If so, I'll gladly write a supermanica entry about them. I know for instance, that the Hostess Cupcake Ads are obviously not considered to REALLY have happened (they're too demented even by the terrifyingly low standards of the 1970s, when Superman fought both Don Rickles and Mohammed Ali) however, some of the Marvel comics that were done under liscense ARE canon: the 70s GODZILLA comics are canon (Englehart even had a monster from it to guest-star in AVENGERS WEST COAST) as are the CONAN/KING KULL comics.

Ms. Margaret Wilson (the kids' teacher) may be the point where the canonity of this story can be judged. For instance, she clearly claims to "know" Superman somehow. Does anyone know if she has appeared elsewhere?

There was a discussion not long ago about the limits and powers of Superman's superintelligence. If this story IS canon, we get a very good sense of how powerful Superman's super-brain is: Superman states definitively that "When you're sitting behind a TRS-80, each of you has the potential to think and solve problems as fast as a Superman!" And later, the kids put their computers in a race against Superman, the result is "how about that! A tie! And they both came up with the same answer!" And most significantly: "See? The TRS-80 really DOES think as fast as Superman!" It is assumed Superman is working at full capacity when this happened, as Major Disaster's brain drain effect only works on the second problem. The more flattering explanation to Superman is that he WAS under the influence of the brain-drain and just didn't know it until the second problem.

The story also puts forth another very interesting theory about Superman: it is only Superman's superintelligence that allows him to judiciously use his other superpowers. Without his super-brain to calculate flight paths, for instance, his flight is wonky and he hits buildings. Without his Super-Brain to calculate force, he smashes through the floor of his own apartment when making landings.

The story is as follows: Major Disaster intends to create a series of natural disasters, however, Superman, who was at the time telling several kids the history of computers (which goes ON and ON for several pages) and explains the AMAZING FUNCTIONS of the NEW Radio Shack TRS-80. is struck by Brain Drain chemical by Major Disaster. Major Disaster however, strikes Superman with a brain drain chemical. Thus, in order to appropriately solve Disaster's Disasters, he has to rely on Shanna and Alec, the Radio Shack Whiz Kids, to calculate how to handle them.

For those of you with the issue, here's some commentary:

pg. 1, panel 1: Major Disaster may be evil, but he has good taste in antiques. That's one sweet pocketwatch. Interesting how he'd use it despite all the technical stuff he's got access to.

pg. 2, panel 2: WOW. I'm hot for teacher.

pg. 3, panel 1: Supermanica take note: this panel says that Superman is a computer expert.

pg. 5, panel 5: I think this may be a misprint. He may have said "Great, thunder!" instead of "GREAT THUNDER!"

pg. 8 panel 2: The only background detail that I know about Aberdeen and Shockley is that one of them hated black people.

pg. 11, panel 3: A nice break from Superman giving exposition on how his powers work - some kid did it for him.

pg. 13 panel 2: So THIS is what people did with computers before the invention of pornography and Space Invaders. Write programs that say "HELLO THERE, I AM YOUR NEW TRS-80 MICROCOMPUTER."

pg. 16 panel 1: This may possibly be Superman's most humiliating moment: getting OWNED by a ten year old. Who then laughs at him.

pg. 16, panel 4: Can you imagine Major Disaster going into Wal-Mart to buy that? "Make my giant television L-shaped, please!"

pg. 17, panel 1: Though it isn't stated, what we can speculate based on this panel is that Kryptonite is both odorless and tasteless, otherwise Superman would know what he just inhaled.

pg. 23, panels 1-3: Wow. Just...wow. When they say "Whiz Kids," they don't mess around - these ten year old kids are doing math problems I couldn't write out in college.

I could swear this was discussed, but can't find it.  I must dream in Supermanica discussions.  Anyway, good question:  I would say there is a pretty good chance that it is a canonical story for the purposes of the project.  Unless there is some sort of editorial indication on the part of DC in that issue (ie, Special Advertising Feature), the story could be canon.  As to the TRS-80-like strength of Superman's computer brain, there is enough evidence of his brain being either faster or slower throughout the canon for me to safely qualify whatever this story says about it.



Hey, you are referring to perhaps 2 of my favourite Superman stories of all time!  We're talking quality stuff!  Kirby and Neal Adams at their peaks!

 

I'm fairly certain that these comics will never qualify as canonical for Supermanica entries!  (And don't forget the appearance of Red Ronin in the Avengers!)

Julian, if allowing an entry involving the Whiz Kids or their teacher is what it takes to get you to add more Supermanica entries, I say go for it! :D

WOW. This is my kind of forum!  :shock:





Nobody's a bigger fan of SUPERMAN'S PAL, JIMMY OLSEN than Yours Truly. It says something, though, that they've got a story with Don Rickles, yet the Hostess ads are "too far out." I mean, jeez, how weird do they have to be? (Anybody that's seen these slices of LSD know exactly "how weird.")

Speaking of Kirby, TELLE, a while ago we had a conversation about writer artists and I made a pretty darn bold statement, which was that without a writer to guide pacing, Kirby's art got "lazier and more simplified." You called me on this, and I wasn't certain what to say, as something like the complexity and business of art is a subjective choice. Perhaps one possible way of determining whether Kirby's art is "busier" come FOURTH WORLD is by panel count than when he was working with a writer.

FANTASTIC FOUR #52: 104 panels

MISTER MIRACLE #7: 88 panels

It might be said that I have "cherry picked" two comics to prove my point, however, both were selected fora reason (their panels not counted in advance): both have a visual fight scene (Mister Miracle going to Apokolips for dueling and the Fantastic Four having their first meeting with the Black Panther). Kirby's visual language was astonishing. However, without a writer to control his pacing, he indulged come MM #7 in FOUR splash pages (including one that stretched over two pages) as opposed to ONE in FF #52, as well as pages with four panels or less.

MR. MIRACLE also has THREE non-splash pages of four panels or less, whereas FF #52 had two, and it should be pointed out that the "four panel or less" pages in FF #52 established locations and concepts never before seen: the Techno-Jungle, and Wakanda, and thus needed space, whereas the four splash pages in MM #7 were: a person's head shouting something, a splash of Apokalips (a place seen before), Mr. Miracle and Oberon talking, and a cliffhanger panel of Mr. Miracle being attached to the Lump. Of these four, only one (the lump) was arguably "necessary."

Perhaps I'm working from the premise that brevity is better, and the less brevity, the less impressive the art is. And further, the function of art in a comic is to advanced the story and not for its own sake. Perhaps you don't share this belief. However, that's the criteria I judged Kirby by.



I wanted to do King Krypton, but somebody beat me to it.  :gloom:

Well, it does show that Bates is capable of both being a corporate shill and still entertain us eloquently at the same time, which is no mean feat.

I'd consider the Trash-80 ... er TRS-80 ads to be non-canon in the same sense as any of the other marketing ads DC put up to add to their revenue.  Regular books had more honesty in that they were only selling the books, for the most part, not counting the ads not in the stories.

C'mon, guys!  Going by Moore's Law, the Trash-80 was obsolete within 18 months to a few years after those stories were published anyway.  No friggin' way do we want to compare Superman's super-brain with a lowly computer from that era.  That's esp. after the likes of Hans Moravec have calculated that our regular human brains operate in the minimum teraflop range (compared with even a modern desktop PC in the 10 - 100 megaflop range), and Kurzweil has suggested our brains have a lot more processing capacity if we include intraneuronal processing capability.  We're only talking about normal brains here which are millions of times the power of said TRS-80.

Now, if we were to suggest that Superman's idling brain were just keeping pace with the sheer speed of a computer's electrical impulses, then that hasn't really changed in all these years.  But intellect is more than just speed but memory capacity, complexity, creativity, deduction, induction, etc.  We're not even counting emotional intelligence nor subconscious physical reflex control (which turns out to be about a million times more complex than conscious thought).

No, on the basis of corporate shilling and the laughability of Superman being limited to a Stone Age equivalent computer, I'd vote no to including this in the Supermanica.

But I do agree it was a fun, if laughable, read even back in the day.  Seriously, those were such simple formulas the kids could input that you might as well have used a pocket calculator for them.  The real advantage of a TRS-80 would be in programming elaborate processes which just wasn't possible for that kind of story.  Can you imagine Superman waiting an hour while the kids keyed-in a modest program?

As a young boy growing up in Sweden in the 1970s, the only American comic books I could find were Superman and DC Comics Presents. I only knew the Flash, Wonder Woman, Green Lantern, et al. from those bizarre Hostess Twinkies ads, which I used to read with rather disturbing fervour, as if trying to decipher intertestamentary scrolls.

"Rich devil's foodcake!", the villains used to extoll as  they were dragged away to justice. I used to wonder what these snacks must taste like, and imagined them to be immeasurably delicious. To this day, I have never had one; if they still exist, they probably taste like chemical dumps.

They're sugary food of the gods

diabetuous!

You bet.  Aside from their appearances in other giveaways, Shanna, Alec and Ms. Wilson appear in SUPERMAN #358, in a story that makes direct reference back to "The Computers That..."



Aside from #358, the map of Smallville in NEW ADVENTURES OF SUPERBOY #22 indicates that she grew up living at 611 Oak Street in Smallville, across the street from Joey Silver.

And those Twinkie ads aren't completely out of continuity, at least not at Marvel.  Icemaster, one of the Crimson Cowl's Masters of Evil in THUNDERBOLTS #25 (now who wrote that?) debuted in a Twinkie ad...

kdb

At last the most epic of all super tales can be read on-line, behold the spender that is.. The Computers That Saved Metropolis!

http://www.techknight.com/gallery/jlsoft




They sure did:

Superman No. 358
April 1981
Cover: Superman vs. Cron; Bruce (Superman) Wayne vignette //Ross Andru / Dick Giordano (signed)
Story: “Father Nature’s Folly” (17 pages)
Editor: Julius Schwartz
Writer: Cary Bates
Penciller: Curt Swan
Inker: Frank Chiaramonte
Letterer: Ben Oda
Colorist: Adrienne Roy
Feature Character: Superman (last appearance in DC COMICS PRESENTS #32; next appears in ACTION COMICS #518)
Other characters: Margaret Wilson, Alec, Shanna, and their classmates (last appearance in ACTION COMICS #509; next appear in SUPERMAN IN “VICTORY BY COMPUTER” #1)
Intro: Nutra (“Mother Nature”; only appearance)
Villain: Cron (first and only appearance)
Synopsis: When a blackout hits the classroom in which Clark Kent is lecturing to students, he regales them with the story of Superman’s battle against Cron, an alien who attempted to destroy “Mother Nature”.

OK, I'll grant that the characters have appeared in canon elsewhere.  I stand corrected on that score.

OTOH, I'm firm in my stance that the TRS-80 ad isn't specifically in canon.  Superman himself appears in his own books yet that isn't a reason to accept an ad campaign for Radio Shack as canon.  Since I'm pretty sure the terms of the licensing for that ad didn't include letting DC continue to use the Radio Shack name nor any of its trademarks like TRS-80, the kids couldn't be referred to as those whiz kids again.

Since we're still talking about it, I'll add some stuff I left out before, believe it or not.

Not only did the Trash-80 go obsolete like anything else in the IT world, but it wasn't even the top of the line for PCs back then.  Radio Shack merchandise was notorious for costing top dollar but delivering mediocre product.  You were generally better off spending your money elsewhere where you'd get more for your money and it would be more reliable too.  I'm not the guy who nicknamed it the Trash-80 as that monicker had been floating around when that computer was current.  Are we to believe that our hero's super-brain is equivalent not only to a lowly, obsolete desktop PC, but to one that wasn't even the best of its kind in its heyday?

How about the fact that the best supercomputers of today can barely perform facial recognition and are nowhere near passing the Turing test for artificial intelligence?  Yet, that hyped-up Trash-80 ad would have us believe that that lowly PC could 'think like Superman'?  That was a really misleading part of that story/advertisement.  I'm surprised no one called it outright misrepresentation back then.

Superman had built the most advanced computer on Earth, his own Supercomputer.  That alone lets us qualify him as a computer expert.  We don't need that lame TRS-80 ad to qualify this for him.

It is at least to the extent that Superman did indeed pay a surprise visit to that class, as shown in that story.  Whether events played out precisely as shown?  Open question.

But enough stupid and impractical stuff has happened in canonical stories over the years that I don't see why the Radio Shack giveaways should be ruled out on those grounds, particularly when they're well-written and drawn.  Two of those giveaways are by Bates, one's drawn by Starlin, two by Swan.

Alec and Shanna and Ms. Wilson are cross-company stars, too, appearing in Radio Shack ads published by Archie as well:

http://www.atarimagazines.com/whizkids/showpage.php?issue=computertrap&page=3

At least a couple of these are written by Paul Kupperberg, who wrote their one non-Bates DC appearance, and at least one is drawn by Carmine Infantino!

The kids and their teacher got around -- Metro City, Coastal City -- a fair hike from Oak Street, in Smallville!

kdb

Agreed re: stupid things appearing in canon over the years not ruling the Radio Shack story out -- if it's well-written.

That's my problem with it.  It requires too much suspension of disbelief for me.  Superman's been shown to be superior to the best Earth mainframe computers throughout his incarnations.  I cannot accept that the lowly TRS-80 is his equal.  In that, I don't consider it well-written.

Billy Anders with his pet lynx (believe it or not, I did not get that 'lynx = links' pun when I first read that) made more sense and it still was hokey having Superman rely on a kid to store his super-strength like that.  At least that didn't violate any known real world principles since they could make that up from whole cloth.

The TRS-80 and PCs in general are very well-known to be the lower end of computer processing power, not even including the obsolescence of time.  It just doesn't track.

I'm not forcing anyone to agree with me.  Just don't expect me to agree on this without a really darn good reason.

I'm confident that there are plenty of things just as illogical in many, many stories that are unequivocally canon, which is my main point.

kdb

I have a copy of this story somewhere, and thought it was pretty goofy as well... though from what I recall, the stuff they were asking him to compute on their TRS-80s weren't exactly high-end stuff that'd tax his super-brain to its limit (say, fighting Luthor). So I guess I (sort of) bought some cheapo early 80's brand of home PC serving Superman as a glorified calculator to help him fight a threat that wasn't Luthor-level (Major Disaster).

Re: canonical: Hmm... the several He-Man ads---er, "stories", written in the early 80's are apparently considered canonical, though I'd imagine the fact that Eternia was in a seperate dimension (?) from Earth-1 probably helped...

Wonder if that "Superman meets the Quik Bunny" story can be considered in current continuity as well, then (since IIRC it came out in '87, after "Crisis"/"Man of Steel")... ;-)

It's a little known fact that the Quik Bunny grew up on Roosevelt Ave. in Smallville, right next door to "Bash" Bashford.

kdb

Yeah, I see your point, Captain Kal. For some reason, I got the idea in my head that an eighties computer's calculating power was pretty impressive.

Then again, there's nothing in this story that shows that Superman's brain IS as powerful as the TRS-80, just lots of kids saying that this is the case. Dialogue is not the same as comparison. For instance, in LEGION OF SUPER-HEROES, it has been established in dialogue over and over that Mon-El is mightier than Superboy because he is several years older and taller, however I have difficulty pointing to a moment where such a statement is PROVED (and do I ever want to find a moment like that; would hush up those "Superboy can beat Mon-El" crumbs in the other forum but good!  :D ) .

The fact Superman is able to calculate numbers as fast as a computer does not mean that his brain is as powerful as a low-end computer from 1980.

However, there are some occasions of so-called Stone Age computers being valuable to mankind, why if John Titor is to be believed, at least one, the IBM 5100 is the most important computer in the history of civilization!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Titor

If I remember right, the TRS-80s in the story were used to tell Superman how much heat he had to output through his heat vision in order to achieve a given effect, his brain having been temporarily addled so that he couldn't gauge this himself.

That kind of calculation wouldn't take a lot of computing power. A hand-held calculator would probably suffice.

But, IMO, it's a dumb idea nevertheless. Telling Superman how many joules of energy he should output is like telling a baseball player to swing his bat at a certain number of meters per second. In all likelihood, the batter only knows how fast his swing feels; he has no idea what the numerical speed of his bat is. Supey is likewise unlikely to know the precise amount of energy he's putting out, especially with part of his brain not working.

Kurt, of course, has a point, in that comics have gotten away with sillier things. But those things weren't done in an attempt to get kids to buy a product.

Well, just buy the comic itself... :wink:

Since this thread is still alive ...

First, kudos to Julian for yet another rousing topic that's got us all talking. Even the esteemed Mr. Busiek has seen fit to contribute to this one -- and this one doesn't even have his name on it. heh heh

Now, I also suspect sillier things have been accepted in the superbooks in the past.  Aside from them not being outright marketing efforts to hawk products like the TRS-80, I'd like someone to reference one that absolutely had to be accepted as canon instead of swiftly forgotten as a World Class Bad Idea.

You know what I mean.  Things like the Hulk being strangled by a snake are best forgotten.  How about the artist ignoring Kurt's intention to have a BAKG hurt Thor so only a regular gun gave the Thunder god a head wound?  How about Ka-Zar beating Thanos?  How about the idea that Superman subconsciously uses his super-hypnosis through some special property of his glasses to maintain his secret identity?  All of these have been ignored as World Class Bad Ideas that are best forgotten in the canon.

So, can anyone give an example of something that isn't a 'World Class Bad Idea' that we're forced to accept in the superbooks?  If so, then I'll accept that the TRS-80 tale can be considered in canon.

That wasn't me, and I'm not so sure the artist ignored anything.

That happened in an issue of BLACK PANTHER written by Christopher Priest.  He'd checked with me to see which Avenger he could shoot in the head -- he had in mind the old bullet-creases-the-skull bit.  I told him that rather than resort to cliche, he could shoot Thor smack in the head and the bullet would break the skin and bounce off the bone underneath.  So that's what he said he was going to do, and that's what the artist wound up drawing.

I saw the script, and I don't recall it mentioning a Big-Ass Kirby Gun.  I don't remember it ever coming up until after Thor fans were pigpiling on Priest for daring to suggest that Thor's skin might not be bulletproof, despite such being implied or outright stated by Stan, Len, Walt and others.

I also don't think that scene's been ignored as a dumb idea, either.  As far as I'm concerned, it's canon.

kdb

I stand doubly corrected, Kurt.

My source was the old Alvaro's boards where they made these claims.  I'm just glad you're here to set the record straight.

On some forums *coughsuperherochat, the comic edgecough*, even a creator doing what you just did wouldn't hold any water with some die-hard trolls.

I do know some other creators have had Thor weather a veritable rainstorm of bullets without harm at all.  So, at least some creators have ignored your story and the previous references. (But my friend Jonathanos has given me the oodles of references you used for declaring Thor was intended to be bullet-vulnerable and it's mighty convincing).

Still, my original question stands: Can anyone give an example of something illogical in the supermythos that we're forced to have to accept that isn't a World Class Bad Idea?

Well, the thing about really bad ideas is, they only become really bad ideas if they are ignored. So, there becomes a sort of circular reasoning: what sort of ideas are ignored? Really bad ones. How do we know they are really bad? Because they're ignored.

I, for one, would rather that people just sort of "forget" the NEW WARRIORS story that had Namorita shown to be a clone of Namora instead of her daughter. The "Speed Force," an idea "that was there all along" is one idea that didn't just "wither away" as it ought. Yet both ideas are continued over and over again by other writers.

While I liked the miniseries itself (especially the incredible Mignola art), one idea that was - thankfully - forgotten was the idea introduced in COSMIC ODYSSEY that the anti-life equation is actually a big giant space monster, resembling a Godzilla-sized version of the tar blob thing that killed Tasha Yar.

One ignored Superman idea is that his X-Ray Vision caused plants to grow. As Morbo from Futurama was fond of saying: "X-RAY VISION DOES NOT WORK THAT WAY!"

It appears that John Byrne's DOOM PATROL, after twelve issues, appears to be suffering the same fate: in the category of unpleasant reboots everyone would rather forget (see also: the mirthless 1987 SHAZAM! Post-Crisis reboot). It's easier to pretend the Byrne PATROL "never happened" than the original PATROL "never happened."

The Weisenger writers proposed at least THREE different explanations for the destruction of Krypton, all of them ignored by writers who for whatever reason wanted to leave the reason for Krypton's destruction vague: one was that Krypton's core was made of uranium and the planet exploded as a gigantic fission bomb. Another was that Krypton was destroyed accidentally by an earth astronomer during his observation of the planet, who confesses to Superman his crime years later. The third one was the preferred Schwartz explanation, that it was the result of kryptonquakes and Krypton slipping on its orbit.

Though Superman's superbrain can do much better than be the match for a lousy computer from 1980. I mentioned the possibility that Superman was affected by Major Disaster's krypton-gas disaster and just didn't know it; that's why his big, impressive Superbrain was slowed down to TRS-80 levels for that problem.



When I read that issue of BLACK PANTHER at the time, I didn't quite buy it. There was a time in the 1980s when Thor had been shorn of his invulnerability, requiring him to use a (very classy) suit of Asgardian armor, but I was under the impression that at some point in the interim (after Simonson's run, I kinda stopped reading Avengers until Busiek/Perez came on) that Thor regained his invulnerability.

Where was it stated (or suggested) that Thor's skin was not bulletproof?

The closest I can come to is that issue where Thor goes to Viet Nam (issue number forthcoming), and he was nervous that if something could cause the hundreds of shells to explode, it was likely that he himself would not survive it. Worrying about taking hundreds of exploding shells, however, is not quite the same as being nervous about bullets.

It's strange to imagine Thor not being bulletproof. On the other hand, it makes his actions, such as using his hammer to block bullets - make more sense.



Piloting and flying involves more than just muscle memory like sports or driving; real life pilots have to learn oodles of math in order to turn at specific speeds. It's easy to imagine that Superman, deprived of his super-brain, would be at a disadvantage when flying.

Also, Superman needs to make judicious use of his powers - if he just blasted his heat vision at the flood, he might have made it so hot that instead of just evaporating water, he would have melted the asphault, cars, and buildings. (It's assumed though, that Superman can tell how hot he's making his heat vision, the same way you or I can guess how fast we are going in a car without looking at the speedometer).

The thing is, I don't think of things that way.  You mentioned the Hulk and the snake, but I don't assume that because that was dumb the story didn't happen.  I assume it happened, and either (a) we'll simply never bring it up again, and/or (b) there was some other explanation we weren't privy to.  One of the Watcher's alien pets farted, and the energy-ripple from that event weakened gamma particles throughout the Solar System for five minutes.

I don't have a problem with a story where a couple of kids with a computer wind up helping Superman out.  If pressed, I'll figure that the TRS-80, in a DCU that's been doing cool science for years and years, is a better machine than it was on Earth-Prime.  Big deal.

But heck, I'll throw out a candidate:  When Jimmy Olsen helped a powerless Superman fake his powers by holding him out the window on a glass pole, making it look like he could fly.  First off, glass poles are not invisible.  Second, where did Jimmy get one long enough and strong enough?  Third, a powreless Superman can't just rest on his abdomen on a glass pole in flying position; he's not strong enough.  Fourth, Superman's on the long part of the pole, with the fulcrum being the windowsill and Jimmy holding the short part -- that means Jimmy's superstrong, since the leverage is going the wrong way.

It's not even the only dumb part of the story (but ...what, did Jimmy wave him back and forth?  How did he get out there?), but it's no held up as a piece of illogic taking that story out of continuity.

kdb

"Invulnerability" isn't one of Thor's powers.  He's tough and durable, but aside from about three panels in all of Thor's history, he's never been shown to be bulletproof, and those panels directly contradict better material.



Many, many times, from Thor fleeing from guns in an early issue to Thor being knocked unconscious by a mortar shell that didn't even hit him, to Thor stating flat-out that if a bunch of soldiers fired on him, it'd kill him, to Thor defending himself against "deadly spears" (made by hand out of available materials in the jungle) to other Asgardians being operated on, to automatic weapons being treated as powerful mojo in Asgard, and on and on.



It never ocurred to me that Thor was bulletproof, until Thor fans started bugging me about it and I started researching it.  As a general rule of thumb, I figure anyone who consistently deflects bullets, not allowing them to hit them, isn't bulletproof, unless they give some sort of alternate explanation.

kdb

It's the same reason Superman ducks when they throw a gun at him ;)

Anyway, I think that once fans get too anal about little details like logic, reason and facts to get in the way of a good story then they need to move on and read history books, it's just comic book, it's suppose to be fun! Gosh darn it! Heck, the more mind warping a comic is the happier I get reading it :)

I guess comics are not allowed to be fun anymore :(
It's the Iron Age and all or is it called the Dark Ages now?

There's a lot of stuff from the 70s (yes, Maggin and Bates, gasp!!!!!!!) that I found overly serious, too all encompassing, and taking the wonder and the mystery out of Superman...

But, feelings about stories are opinions...which says a lot about "canon"... :wink:

Julian that astronomer didn't destroy krypton,  he only believed he did.  He had invented a super-telescope that enabled him to discover & observe krypton.  When he learned of krypton's impending demise, he invented a device that neutralized nuclear reactions.  He used his device in an attempt to save krypton.  This story & the story of the original Black Zero seem to complement each other.  In the Black Zero story krypton's internal pressures were dying down.  Black Zero did something that counteracted the astronomer's device.  Thus if not for Black Zero that astronomer would have succeeded in saving krypton.  If the original Black Zero is not canon then the astronomer's device was not powerfull enough.

Ah. thanks for the correction, LLozy. I have only vague, vague memories of that story. I should have known it would end with a Weisenger style fakeout: "Ha ha, Lois, you see, I didn't really turn into the 'Super-Swinger from Krypton.' I just temporarily switched brains with Krypto..."

My point though, is that various ideas about how Krypton was destroyed were discarded and created; a case of the phenomenon that Captain Kal is talking about: explanations being discarded and never talked about again.



Although this brings up an interesting point: is Orion bulletproof? I always assumed he was. However, this may not be true, now that I think about it; he always seemed to duck underneath the blasts and bolts that the parademons fired at him. He could take blows from a beast like Kalibak, but Thor and Wonder Man have brawled, and Wonder Man's fist hit as hard as Thor's hammer, which could break concrete and building walls.

How about Wonder Woman, at least after Perez? Bulletproof or not? I hope she isn't; as much respect as I have for Perez as an artist, the decision to have Wonder Woman fly under her own power was, I think, a mistake, because it compromised her uniqueness by giving her the Superman-clone "power suite." Gliding is COOL - and I can't think of many other characters that have it. And it let her use that AMAZING robot plane. If someone had the Hulk fly instead of just leaping great distances, I would say that too, was a mistake. Similarly, if Wonder Woman was naturally bulletproof, it would be unfortunate, because it makes superfluous her most famous feat: the bullet and beam-blocking bracelets.

Is the Martian Manhunter invulnerable? It MAY be the case that if there are times he has demonstrated invulnerability, but it may be a manifestation of his ability to alter his density: he becomes super-dense, not unlike the Vision.

re: superman being bulletproof..

it's answered in Superman Archives Vol. 1

In the early stories, it says his skin was impenetrable by anything less than an exploding shell, but by the end of the collection, he's been upgraded to having impenetrable skin.

No immediate idea.



I say not.  If she is, the bracelets are like Luke Cage wearing a bulletproof vest; what's the point?



I always figured J'onn has Superman's powers plus a few -- though maybe not quite to the same extent -- so he'd be bulletproof.

kdb

Luckily we have a mechanism for resolving the nagging existence of "bad ideas" and seemingly out-of-continuity stories --the concept of the multiverse.  Who's to say that the whiz kid stories did not take place on an alternate Earth-TRS80?



re: Kirby

2 of the great themes of superhero comics are escape and transformation, and no one embodies these ideas better than Jack Kirby. Kirby doesn't just work through these grand narratives in terms of plot and character but through his drawing --the foundation of comics as a visual narrative art.  To tell you the truth, these days I'm less concerned with the writerly, literary mechanics of the story at hand than I am with the texture and weight of the art and how it is balanced with hand-lettered text (also art).  So whether Kirby's cartooning advances the nominal plot or character, it still tells a story.  And what I usually take away from his comics has to do with the visual --although many times it is a perfect combination of words and pictures: I find myself recalling the sequence from Jimmy Olsen where the Guardian is introduced as a sort of mantra during times of personal crisis ("I am strong --let me out!  I sense trouble!  My mission is to defend --to protect!  You face disaster!").  One of the most beautiful sequences in any art form.

I realize that in the service of a commercial dramatic medium, intended largely for children and teenagers, with fairly rigid requirements in terms of closure and clarity, Kirby can seem self-indulgent and even narratively illogical (I might even say charmingly clueless --although his pictures are never confusing).  And in no one does that behaviour seem more inexcusable than in Kirby, an experienced veteran and businessman who ran his own production shop and was a mentor and inspiration to many other artists.  However, it seems that more is going on in later-period Kirby than a slow drift into lazy self-indulgence, although he was getting older.

In the first place, Kirby is working on a different scale and with a more long-term plan, at least in the New Gods stuff: his stories and art are spread out.  Secondly, I like to see his cartooning as operating metaphorically to embody the themes I mentioned above, consciously or not.  Many of Kirby's characters are encased or imprisoned in some way.  Their costumes and situations are awkward shells from which they struggle to escape, lumbering about Frankenstein-monster-style, eyes bugging out. More and more in his cartooning, regular panel size and pacing reflect these concerns.
Third, I think that despite the epic scope of much of his later work, Kirby was exercising a lighter touch --more humour, more goofiness, less concern with genre conventions.  His ideas about the meaning of his work, his audience and the nature of the medium seem to have changed quite a bit.  Also, in many ways he seems to be operating almost as a folk artist, channelling the bric-a-brac of pop culture through his work, all the while embracing a more overtly science-fictional world view (without strict genre trappings) of an incrementally transformative humanity, entusiastically heralding "The World that is Coming!"

That being said, there are some later examples (in his 70s Captain America, say) where his plotting seems tighter, and the art more servile! :D

Whether the computer is good enough to do the calculation isn't the point. It probably is good enough, even in the real world. I can remember when I was in college, back in the early eighties where time on the college's mainframe was strictly rationed, I did a heat transfer calculation on my roommate's TRS-80. I reduced the problem to a power series on paper and then had to let the computer run all night evaluating the series, but the computer had no problem grinding out the answer.

The point is whether having the answer to the calculation would do Superman any good. Sure, you can tell him he needs to beam out thirty-two kilojoules of heat, but how does he know when he's done that, especially given his brain-addled state in the story?



Let's call it Earth-P, for Product Placement. :)  Probably the same continuity in which all those Twinkie ads take place. :)

Gary, I think those Twinkie ads took place on Earth-H (for Hostess).   :wink:

Also, Earth-PP should not be confused with Earth-PS (for Public Service).  That's the world where Superman fights world hunger, the Teen Titans combat drug abuse and Supergirl urges kids to buckle up their seat belts.   :lol:

By the way, the Supergirl "Department of Transportation/American Honda Motors Corp." seatbelt safety issues showed Supergirl in the movie costume -- something Kara never actually wore in mainstream DC continuity.  And the second issue was published in 1986 -- long after Supergirl was officially "dead and forgotten".   :cry:

If he didn't, then he'd have said so.  Apparently, that's one of the things he knows, even brain-addled.

Hell, I've seen Superman go through revolving doors at super-speed, which violates the laws of physics, but I don't throw the story out on that account.  I just snicker at it.

kdb

Superman has been shown in the stories to "know" how fast he is going very precisely, how much something weighs (one of his less "sexy" visual powers that he's used, especially in the Weisenger years, is that he could place small weights and measures in his hand and he knows how much they weigh to the last gram). As I said before, perhaps Superman has a "muscle memory" in regards to using his Heat-Vision; he can guess how hot he's making something, just as some drivers can guess how fast their cars are going, without looking at the speedometer, just by touch alone.



There's a difference between the occasional "rubber physics" of superheroes, and something that fundamentally alters how Superman's powers work - to his detriment (surely Superman can out-calculate any crummy 1980 clone PC). Especially when it isn't NECESSARY that we invalidate a wonderful well-written story, when the story ITSELF provides a way out: Superman had already inhaled Major Disaster's cloud of brain-drain k-dust when he solved the first problem "as fast" as the TRS-80.

This possible way of "fudging" the "Superman's as smart as the TRS-80!" comments works also with what we know about Kryptonite. Kryptonite has a cumulative effect - the longer he spends near it, the more his powers are sapped (as opposed to Red Sun Rays, which turn his powers on and off like a light switch). It wouldn't make sense that Kryptonite would be "dormant" in his system all that while. We just didn't see the cumulative effect because Superman didn't need to crunch any eight dimensional superstrings for NASA right at that particular moment; if he did, he may have noticed the brain-drain sooner.

Excellent explanation/rationalization of how that story could still be in continuity but didn't violate real world computer processing, Julian.  I can live with that.

As for rubber physics, as you put it, I don't recall any stories where Superman really did the super-speed revolving door stunt though it was in Superman: The Movie.  Aside from the movie definitely not being canon, we also have that stunt where he evidently was holding Lois up in mid-air with a single fingertip.  I suspect scenes like those made Moore, and later Byrne stole from him, suggest that famous psionic angle to Superman's powers.  It doesn't take much to rationalize some of that rubber physics away.

It becomes problematical when it completely violates any kind of consistent logic or attempts to fit into consistent logic.  Fortunately, Mr. Perez found a kryptonite-out here for the TRS-80 seeming illogic.

While this is a bit off-topic, for completeness, I do recall not only did someone show me scans of another creator depicting Thor weathering a hailstorm of bullets without deflecting from Mjolnir nor suffering any harm at all from them, but the lacklustre Secret Wars series had Thor not only easily withstanding an alien storm whose raindrops struck like bullets but he was actually enjoying the downpour.  I'd say at least two creators have seen fit to ignore Lee, Busiek, Simonson, whoever on the matter of Thor's being bulletproof.  If he were a purely scientific character, then it doesn't make sense.  But since he's magic-based, I have no problem accepting that Thor can be so powerful and yet somehow still fear bullets.

Excellent candidate story, Kurt.  But I seriously doubt any subsequent tales were dependent on that clunker nor were any references made to it ever again.  It was a one-shot that could be safely ignored.  As you stated elsewhere, some ideas aren't worth keeping around in continuity so they're just subtly ignored for better ideas later on.

It's a moot point now that Julian has rationalized the TRS-80 book on more solid terms.  I'm happier with a solid explanation like that one than just shrugging my shoulders and just saying lotsa other nutty stuff goes on.  IMHO, that's a bit of a copout.

I guess I just don't consider that a measure of whether it belongs in continuity or not.  Plus, of course, a reference was made to "The Computers That Saved Metropolis," albeit not to the computer part.



Whereas to me, it's practically a sacrament.  I like the nutty stuff.

But then, I don't look at continuity as a way of nailing down exact power levels -- almost anyone's fluctuate so much that you gotta (or at least, I gotta) figure that there's some sort of weird super-biorhythms involved, and when they're at a low ebb, snakes can beat the Hulk, but when they're at a peak, atom bombs can't.  I'm far more interested in character and history -- who have they met, how did they feel about it, what would they feel if they met those characters again?

Plus, I never thought that Radio Shack story established anything about Superman's powers that would need to affect any other story.  A couple of kids claiming something's as fast as Superman is no more a fact than Wolverine saying that he's the best there is at what he does nine million times means that he in fact is.  [Mainly, it means he feels a need to brag about himself in his own internal narrative, but remain fairly taciturn vocally, which suggests he's so messed up emotionally that he's trying to convince himself of his own worth even while he refuses to try to convince anyone else, like Sawyer on LOST...]

kdb

Hey, that's cool, Kurt.  We all like the books for different reasons so you like it your way and I like it mine.  We both shell out the bucks in the end. :D

I just remembered that the kind of SA Jimmy story like that was long before DC became continuity-conscious.  That wouldn't happen until Marvel's 60s books came out and redefined the industry.  Back then, just about any tale could be told and had neglible to nil consequences to any other book.  Hey, that's a great statement on childhood fantasies: No consequences, or at least no bad ones.

You bet!

kdb

Superman certainly can't wear Clark Kent suits without shredding them, do most feats involving syncing up with microscopic vision, or make a diamond out of coal, without "super fine-grain control" somewhere in the mix.