Entry posted by Jean Valjean
607 views
We have justified his most famous weaknesses. We have examined the downsides to his abilities. Now it's time to invent some new problems for the Man of Steel. Considering that the Silver Age Superman was a bastion for creativity, it only seems fitting to be creative here and come up with some of the wildest things.
First, however, there's a weakness that has been in the running for a while but has long gone unmentioned, something that just might be his next Kryptonite if authors choose to go all the way. I might as well expose it now and bring it to light first as I delve into the next generation of possibilities with Superman.
In his New 52 relaunch, after he got knocked out by a train, the government had Lex Luthor interrogate Superman while he was in an electric chair. For a while, Superman was trapped, and Luthor ruthlessly sent currents through him every few seconds. This actually affected Superman. In Superman: Secret Identity, which is one of my favorite Superman comics ever, the government assaulted him with electric weapons and they actually put him down. In The Dark Knight Returns, Batman held off Superman temporarily with heavy-duty electrical gadgets, albeit this being a Superman who had recently used up a ton of his energy chopping up Soviet naval ships and taking the impact of a nuclear bomb (all during the nighttime). As an alternative to kryptonite and magic, Superman's new weakness is electricity.
This significantly broadens his spectrum of weaknesses to a point where many people can exploit them. The authors don't have to rely on fictional devices that only certain individuals could access. A lot of people have access to electricity. Perhaps Superman has a higher resistance to its affects, but I can see it disrupting the chemical bonds that make him so powerful.
I don't know why I'm so fine with that. Of course, I still love the truly invincible Superman who was untouched by just about anything, but electricity is just plain cool. Ever since I was a kid, raised on Pikachu, I used to think that electricity was a real cool power. It was that sly thing that could get past brute strength. It was that crazy ninja power that couldn't be seen and yet had a surging, sharp kick to it nevertheless. I mean, electricity was this thing that wasn't necessarily physical, but pure energy, so it was above the lowly physical powers of the other pokemon/superheroes. It had this really advanced, futuristic feel to it, and if Superman is going to be weakened by anything it's going to be something that feels advanced and futuristic.
Oh, and electricity always makes for a really cool special effect. Rule of cool dictates that it should actually affect Superman.
This opens the door for all sorts of opponents who could actually have a chance of taking him on in a creative fight that would be far more balanced. I'm not explicitly pulling from DC comics here, so bear with me: Captain Marvel, Black Adam, Pikachu, Tahnok Kal, Thor, Dr. Doom, Storm, Electro, Azula, Uncle Iroh, Nikola Tesla, and Darth Sidius. The fights would actually look cool.
For those who didn't know that electricity has been used as a weakness before, well, now you know. I didn't invent this myself, though now that I've seen it pop up a few times I see no reason why it shouldn't be mainstream. Then, if DC Comics does that, why stop there? I have plenty of other ideas. Where to start? Well, I might as well tap into the creativity that made the silver age so magical.
Out of my love for 2001: A Space Odyssey, I really wish that a weakness to red-eyed computers with an ego would make sense for Superman. Although I love the Monolith. It has to be one of my top ten favorite characters in sci-fi. Like really, it has a personality on its own, so I consider it a character. That being said, perhaps that's the reason I loved the Phantom Zone from the Superman: The Movie so much, because it reminded me of the Monolith. I really wish that the Phantom Zone could be as mysterious as the Monolith, and I would love there to be a reason for Superman to have an extra sense of dread when confronted with it. So I think that whenever Superman teleports or comes near a wormhole, something about his Kryptonian backstory puts him at risk of getting sucked to the Phantom Zone. Forget for a moment that I'm about to mention Marvel characters, but imagine that Loki's portal above New York City suddenly turned into a portal to the Phantom Zone at some point after Superman joined the fight. It would affect him and specifically him, and he would get pulled in. There was actually a comic book, Last Son of Krypton, where something similar to this happened, and a Phantom Zone portal would suck in anyone who had ever been there before. Except I want to take it a step further, add a sense of mystery and suspense, and the feeling that this could happen with any old portal or teleportation device. Something about Superman's presence could potentially reroute the wormhole and strand him in a prison dimension invented by his father himself. And I would like it if no other Kryptonian characters had this specific thing to worry about. Any good science fiction writer could easily justify why this only happens to Superman. It would add a certain element of suspense that I would enjoy, and an sense of adventure and fantasia.
Next, when we consider the source of his powers, we know that his Kryptonian body is capable of extrordinary things but it wasn't made for those powers. Kryptonian genes didn't evolve with a yellow sun in mind. All that power must be a lot for his body to handle, so perhaps Superman really needs his rest. I can see a Superman who needs to sleep 12 hours a day. Not that it would be absolutely necessary, but that would be his average time spent sleeping. Besides, I base this in actual fact, where in Superman: The Movie Jor-El revealed that Krypton had 28 hours in a day. I think a Kryptonian's sleepign clock would naturally be different and they would usually get much more sleep.
Taking this idea of sleeping much further, imagine a Superman who must hibernate during autumn. The new movie, Man of Steel, actually provides a background that would give much justification to this idea. Krypton began biologically engineering its people and growing them in genesis chambers to control its population. While I am not a fan of the unnatural births, since families are very fun to write about and would play a large role in my ideal origin story (especially when humanizing the villains), I can still see Krypton messing with its population and creating a gene that would cause people to hibernate during one of the seasons so that they would require no resources. I would choose fall for Superman because I would want him to sleep during a colder season associated with the recession of the sun, but not winter because I would like to see him associated with Christmas, New Years, Valentine's Day, and other wintertime events. That, and I have a fondness of the images of him fighting the Soviet Union and Batman in the snow in The Dark Knight Returns. The winter seems enough like a time when the world needs hope and the sun the most, so naturally he would be there. Whereas the autumn...I guess that can be what DC would call a long Halloween. Sorry, Bats, you're all on your own. It seems that there should be three months out of the year where the world would be without Superman.
Of course, some nerd might throw out the technicality that "Superman could just fly to another part of the Earth where it's spring so that he doesn't have to hibernate!" I'd agree with you, but then, I think his biological clock necessitates that he spends a quarter out of every year sleeping nonstop, and that biological clock was first set when he spent up to eighteen years of his life in Smallville, Kansas. Once the pattern got started, it didn't matter where he was in the world. The hibernation would come upon him anyway.
What would be the consequences of him skipping his necessary sleep intervals? Well, he carries with him Kryptonian bacteria, which I can only imagine would have a devastating effect on the human population if they were unleashed. It always seemed too good to be true that he never infected anyone. So therefore, if Superman loses enough sleep, he will infect mankind with disastrous diseases. I personally would prefer it if they weren't merely deadly diseases. This is, after all, a comic book character. However, I can see them having interesting effects like turning people into quasi-zombies or making them hyper-paranoid, or causing terrible mutations or inducing madness. These are pretty good motivations for Superman not to defy nature.
So therefore Superman, the man who goes around without a mask and gloves, is not too good to be true, but that got me thinking: if Superman isn't the one who's too good to be true, what about the other way around? What if Earth is too good for him? Let us put ourselves in Krypton's shoes and fast-forward Earth a billion years or so, where we are a weak planet, timid and fragil. Our sun is inhospitable. Our world has little to offer us. Our society has become cold. Yet, we humans are still the salt of the Earth, still believing and hoping for a greater destiny. Then imagine one of our children freed from the chains of our mundane world and sent off to a paradise. Perhaps Krypton isn't the paradise we thought it was, but we are. Krypton may be his heritage and it may have prepared him for Earth, but Earth is what gives him his strength, and Krypton is what holds him back and weakens him. Or rather, perhaps, maybe it is Krypton that humbles him and humanizes him than anything else.
Keep this in mind with these next two points.
Looking back at history, I found it interesting how Julius Caesar, a figure of such great power who was worshiped like a God, ironically had epilepsy. What if Superman had epilepsy? I know that normally he parallels Jesus Christ, who has more to do with American culture than Julius Caesar does, but I can see him having parallels with any historic figure of great presence. However, since Julius Caesar parallels would potentially take away from his all-American aura, I can think of another figure of immense power from which Supeman writers could take inspiration.
What if, like Franklin Roosevelt, Superman was secretly paralyzed from the waist down? I can just imagine it: the unseemly Clark Kent, bound to a wheel chair, would be the last person anyone would suspect to be the flying man who can crush coal into diamonds with his bare hands. Nobody would have to know that Superman couldn't use his legs, since he usually flies. His legs would still appear muscular, since his Kryptonian biology, adapted to a planet with gravity several times that of Earth's, has made him rather well-endowed, even when he never uses those muscles. Perhaps this paralysis is a genetic defect passed down from his biological parents. Maybe he had it since birth, or maybe it struck with a sudden stroke when he was just finishing up high school and looking forward to independence in his life. Perhaps it was what made him believe a man could fly.
He would, of course, eventually overcome this Kryptonian defect. That's what Christopher Reeve would have believed in.
24601
3 Comments
Recommended Comments