Thoughts & speculations about Krypton.

[Captain Kal]

Yeah, you're right re: real vs synthetic K.  The real stuff tended to be more effective though only once that I'm aware of, Metallo had synthetic K that had more effective properties like being able to fire laser-like K-beams with it.  That was later retconned into real K being Metallo's preferred power source.

Our matter and super-matter have been implied to be capable of being converted into each other, at least when living super-beings are involved.  Surely the adult Superman is made of super-matter yet he didn't come to Earth with 225 lbs of the stuff.  Baby Kal-El may have weighed around 40 lbs when he arrived.  That means all that other super-mass must have been produced in our environment processed in his super-body.  The same goes for waste passed out of Kal.  It must somehow be rendered back to normal stuff or we have a growing mass of super-matter gradually taking over the biosphere.

Gold K seems capable of accelerating this super-matter to normal matter conversion in Kryptonians so that not only waste is converted but their entire bodies.

I could go on but you get the idea.

[alschroeder]

The odd thing is, Kryptonians aren't the only ones to have dogs, etc. on their world.  For instance, on Apokolips, giant dogs are bred into a "dog cavalry".  There were horses there, at least on the world that  split into New Genesis and Apokolips.

    I've got my own explanation, that an alien race took some humans during the Stone Age and genetically altered them for various reasons. It would make sense that they would also take close relatives to humans (chimps, monkeys) and animals that were beginning to become man's allies (wolf/dogs, wild horses that are occasionally tamed). That there was a revolution later, and each of the human-occupied worlds drove the aliens out, and each world developed in its own way, yet still could crossbreed with the others....

    Other examples are Barsoom, where John Carter could crossbreed with Dejah Thoris....
   
     Zenna Henderson's The People, psionic aliens who looked like us and could crossbreed with us, yet survivors of a dead world around a red sun...

    In comics, we can think of Guy Gardner's Vuldarian heritage....

     And of course, there's Sarak and Amanda Grayson in the future....

     According to one movie about the Doctor, even Gallifreyians could breed with humans, despite their two hearts and odd blood pressure.  If they can crossbreed, they're all the same species, and MUST have the same origin.

       And if the time-travelling Gallifreyians were among those who revolted against the original aliens, they could have spread humanity across time AND space, so ....many worlds could be "Settled" by humanity-derived gene-altered people even before humanity developed.

     Don't believe me?

     A long time, in a galaxy far, far away....

---Al

[Captain Kal]

I like your idea of invoking time travel to help explain the spread of humans throughout the universe so that they probably all have the same ancestor species.

My only modification to that would be that we confine it to the mainstream DCU.  That means Gallifreyans, Marvel characters, other fictional universes, etc. are disqualified.  While it might be a fun exercise to posit all kinds of neat connections between these different characters and races, the actual published canon would take precedent, not to mention legal licensing issues that DC doesn't own any of these others.  Krypton and Daxam certainly could have been colonized by beings from the future.

We have enough time travellers and time travel capable races in the DCU without having to invoke outside ones.  In that vein, it was suggested in the Elseworlds Superman: Red Son that his version of 'Krypton' was actually Earth millions of years in the future (a tip of the hat to Siegel's original 'millions of years' advanced of us concept from AC #1).  It would be interesting if Earth truly is the root world of humanity and it was time and space travel that seeded the human worlds that seemed to predate ours.

But I do love Doctor Who, myself, and am delighted that the good Doctor's ninth incarnation had such a positive showing.

[Super Monkey]

You guys read this tale before right?

http://superman.nu/tales2/born/


When it comes to stuff like this I rather just go with Cannon rather than just wild theories involving ewoks and the Green Lantern Corps

Those are fun to read and speculate about for sure, but it just confuses the matter.

[MatterEaterLad]

Unlike the real world, I treat comics like myths, fun and having some internal consistency and resemblances to the real world...so maybe I'm between every one else -- the Krypt and Tonn story I treated as a tale told as an origin myth, but I really could have cared less for a detailed "factual treatise" either...after all, we are just beginning to understand and hypothesize about origins of the real universe, and our own "real world" history is very subjective in its own right...

[Captain Kal]

You guys read this tale before right?

http://superman.nu/tales2/born/


When it comes to stuff like this I rather just go with Cannon rather than just wild theories involving ewoks and the Green Lantern Corps

Those are fun to read and speculate about for sure, but it just confuses the matter.

Yep, I know about and have referenced that story before in my own speculations esp. combining it with LSOK and TOLSH #325 re: Daxam being the parent world of Krypton.

I should have stated in my last post that I can see time travel being involved in the ancestry of Daxam since it's pretty well-documented that Krypton was colonized from there.

Seeing as Maggin himself wrote the Guardians and GLC into the supermythos with "The Greatest Green Lantern of All!" Fabulous World of Krypton story, they're not off-limits.  But, yes, canon always takes precedence over fan speculations.

Since canon cannot violate copyright laws, that's another reason I reject any attempts to link let's say Steve Rogers of the MU with Kal-El of the DCU, or the Marvel Kree with the DC Kryptonians.  Gar Logan of the Teen Titans cannot be related to Logan of the X-Men no matter how fanwankishly neat that might be.

[llozymandias]

Thanks for the link.  First time i have read that story.  My take is that krypton (like earth) had many creation myths.  That story being one of them.  As for the legion stories claiming that krypton was colonized by daxam.  How was that claim presented in the stories?  Was that shown to be a fact?  Or did Lar-Gand/Mon-El mention that as something he believed?  Also how do you account for the planet Zoron?  Hyperman's home planet.


       I also wondered about matter to super-matter conversion.  As you mention the extra body mass Kal gained as he grew up had to come from somewhere.  However i'm not concerned his waste for two reasons.  One when his powers are active; he does not sweat, his hair & nails don't grow, & he didn't get tired.  I tend to think that when he did eat, his body converted his food (whatever it was) into energy.  Thus no waste.  What about when his powers are deactivated you ask?  If he is on earth,  he is eating Matter.  Since most of the waste comes from the food you eat,  no super-matter to matter conversion would be needed.  Gold-K seemed (to me anyway) to nothing more than permanently eliminate a kryptonian's access to his/her powers.


      Al if all humanoids are part of one species what about the Guardians/Controllers/Zamorans?  Even if they are why would they automatically have to all be descended from earth humans?

[MatterEaterLad]

See in the old days kids outgrew comics, they just read them for a few years and moved on to something else, continuity didn't matter as much as a result.

This is the spirit of the Silver Age to me (from another thread)...

It was fun to see Mon-el and think about another race of super beings, it was fun to track Mon-el through the Phantom Zone and his Legion stint, tying all these worlds together may make the fun mysteries a little too serious...

Its almost like looking for a "canon" that explains the fall of the Ming dynasty to the Manchus etc...its very subjective, and that really happened...