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Super Heroes Bullshit: DC

by:Pox

2012/06/01

Alright let's finally set the record straight and talk about things we've all been thinking about for years. Super heroes have powers that don't make any damn sense and we all know it.

Maybe a more mature person would suspend their disbelief and just grant that, despite the author's best explanations, all these things are basically just magic. I am not that person. I am so much more mature than that and I will prove it by starting this first part with heroes from the DC universe.

If you're a virgin, you will love this article.

1. SUPERMAN

POWERS:
- Super speed
- Flight
- Super Strength
- Freeze breath
- Super hearing
- Heat vision
- Super Thinking
- Time.. travel??

Let's just start with the worst offender of them all so we can start covering some of the basics...

Super strength

Superman is strong. Strong enough that he can move planets and throw guys into outer space. But during the day, he works as a reporter and he even has a wife. Wow. To get an idea of what it must be like for Superman to interact with normal people, try to pull out a piece of plastic film and cut it into a perfect square without having it fold onto itself.

It'll never happen.

It takes so much concentration and care to avoid twisting that little film into a unusable mess... That's what Superman goes through every second of his day. Whenever he shakes someone's hand he has to use exactly 1/1000000th of his strength or else he's stuck holding a flesh pile. Maybe you could do it once, but dozens of times each day? Don't even think about how he has sex with Lois Lane. Instead think about Lois Lane having sex with Catwoman. Hmmmm sweeeet.

In the comics / movies, Superman picks up a lot of really heavy things like planes and locomotives... You can't pick up a 200 ton plane with two hands, the metal that makes it up can't stand up to the pressure, it would be like trying to catch a football with a needle or picking up a whale by its eyelashes.

Of course, as with all of these powers, the energy he uses up when he uses his abilities far exceeds anything that makes sense in our physical world. He consumes the same calories as a regular man and even if he absorbed 100% of the energy reaching him from the sun ( the alledged source of his power ), it wouldn't be nearly enough for him to lift a truck. Did you see how huge solar panels have to be just to heat a house? On top of that, there is no heat released from him breaking down whatever it is he breaks down to create all that energy. If it were more realistic, Superman would be a walking uranium rod, killing everyone in a 100 mile radius of him.

Lastly, why is he so damn muscular? The only way to get ripped is to break down your muscle fibers by doing resistance training. Worse, if your muscles are constantly underused, they atrophy. I may let him have a pass on this because he's constantly shown fighting giant robots and lifting comets, so that could explain his workouts, but remember that he grew up as a normal boy and reached adulthood as the buff Man of Steel instead of a before picture in a Charles Atlas comic book ad.

Also, how fucked up is it that I know who Charles Atlas is even though he stopped being relevant decades before I was born? Truly he was a man among men.

Super Flight

Here's how movement works: You create an equal push in both directions except one side of the equation has less resistance and is therefore moved. Example: Swimming. You kick the water up and down with your feet and use the resistance it creates in the water to propel yourself forward. It's the same with jet engines. So given that, Superman would have to leave a giant trail of energy behind him whenever he takes off. Look here:

Those huge water jets can BARELY keep a guy afloat so imagine what would happen to your face if Superman suddenly took off at 300mph right next to you.

Super Hearing

Not a lot of people know this, but Superman can hear basically everything that's happening on Earth. The creators did NOT think this through. According to this source there are over 209 000 accidental deaths in the USA each year. That's one every 2 minutes for the USA alone! Superman can hear all of it. Every war atrocity, every father beating his son, every rapist having his way with a defenseless horse on a ranch. That doesn't keep him from working a full-time job and sleeping soundly as he fondles his girlfriend.

Superman is one cold motherfucker, basically.

Super Thinking

The super hearing thing implies another power: A computer-like processing speed for his thoughts. How else could he sort through those billions of sounds to home in precisely on those who need his help? Some versions of the comics have actually thought about this and depict Superman as the genius of all geniuses. So where does that leave the other villains and heroes? The Riddler's got nothing BUT his intellect and he's just a mere human. Superman could probably win 500 000 simultaneous chess games against the 500 000 smartest supercomputers in the universe. You can tell the level of contempt he has for humans by the job he picked: Reporter. He could have come up with a cure for cancer, AIDs and rap if he had spent his working days in a lab instead of a stupid press room.

Freeze Breath / Heat Vision

Again, the total energy in a closed system must remain the same, so if Superman uses his freeze breath, where does all the heat go? If you touch the back of a fridge, you realize it gets pretty hot. That's because refrigeration systems just suck out the heat from a small isolated room and throw it somewhere else. Every time he'd freeze a villain with his breath, he'd have to release a mean scorching fart that would devastate all who stand behind him.

Super Speed / Time Travel

I'll cover this later with The Flash. Well, not the time travel part of it because we all know that's nonsense already.

2. GREEN LANTERN

POWERS:
- A magic thought-activated ring that can create any shape his mind desires.

I don't know if you've noticed this, but people have extremely shitty imaginations. I'm an artist and I have to use reference images for just about anything I draw for the first time, but this guy can create fully functioning jets with his imagination? How the fuck does he even know how a jet is made, let alone exactly what each part looks like so it flies correctly?

How does he not lose concentration? If he was about to smash me with a giant imaginary hammer, I'd just go "Is that Christina Hendricks in that nudist colony over there??" and proceed to shoot him.

That last point does make me wonder about the limits of what can be created with that ring... hmmmmm

3. Apache Chief

POWERS:
- He can grow to 40+ feet tall depending on who is drawing him that week.

Now here we have a classic example of what scientists have come to know as the "Soundwave Conundrum" whereby an item or person can change their mass at will without any damn explanation.

Whenever he shrinks back down, the extra mass that dissipates would have to be released into the world as energy equivalent to hundreds of atom bombs. The alternative to this would be to have him suck up matter when he grows big, instantly assimilating it into his system, so he could spit it back out when he returns to normal. Whenever he starts growing, that would be your cue to get the fuck out of there unless you want to become part of his buffalo skin jacket, which is apparently a part of his anatomy as it expands and shrinks the same as him. So that means he's constantly walking around naked and his bandana is just extra orange skin wrapped around his head. Suddenly I am disturbed.

4. Batman

POWERS:
- None lololol

In many ways, even if he has no powers, Batman is the hero who makes the least sense of them all. First of all, I think people would find out who he is pretty damn fast since he DRIVES AROUND and he always shows up in the same city. It's just a matter of time before a hobo sees him go into the Batcave under Wayne Manor and sells the information to the papers for a case of beer.

His only defense against super powered vilains is ... body armor... Guys who can punch through concrete walls and throw vans on top of skyscrapers aren't going to be stopped by a kevlar jacket. If you get shot in the chest while wearing one of those it might break your ribs... Pretty sure the first night Batman tries to take on anyone other than a street thug, he's walking home with a hole in his chest.

He sometimes moves around the city using a grappling hook gun. That's fucking crazy. He leaps off ledges and shoots that thing in the air hoping it'll latch onto a wall ( btw thanks for punching holes in every building, jackass) so he can swing onto the next rooftop... The most insanely daredevil circus performer would never do one half of one hundredth of what Batman does even if he had trained all his life to do nothing but swing from ropes. Even if it works, it's not like he's strong enough to hang onto that gun if it stops suddenly or if he catches someone who's falling mid-air, as he does all the time.

Only a matter of time...

Here's one thing I know for certain: If you try to be good at everything, you end up becoming good at NOTHING. Batman would be an ineffective Jack-of-all-Trades and get his ass kicked by the first drunken karate master he tried to confront in a bar fight.

Batman is shown to have access to technology that would greatly help humanity but which he keeps secret mainly for beating up party clowns. Comic book writers must think scientists are idiots because Bruce Wayne comes up with dozens of high-tech gadgets on his own even if each of them would take years of R&D. Even ignoring the research and money, where does he even find the time to build all this crap? He destroys his bat-vehicles on a weekly basis.... I've never tried to build a car with fully custumized parts from scratch but I'm PRETTY sure it takes more than a few hours.

5. Flash

POWERS:
- Super Speed

The Flash has the least thought-out powers of them all. He's just a regular guy who can run extremely fast. I don't know if you've ever been on a roller coaster but if you accelerate to 200mph in one second, you're going to throw up your spinal cord, yet this guy runs around at super speeds like friction and inertia were just another Republican conspiracy theory. For this to work, he'd have to also be ultra strong and made of ultra resistant material, which would make him comparable to Superman in strength. You just can't be super fast without also being super strong.

Even allowing for that, imagine what it would be like to have him around...

When you move, you displace air. When you move really fast, you displace a LOT of air. His running around would cause massive storms and twisters to form everywhere he goes, destroying everything in his wake. Worse, to keep up with the caloric needs of his speed, he'd be eating all our food and there's nothing we could do to stop him. Maybe you have this funny image in your head of a donut vanishing from your hand as you're about to eat it, but in reality your entire house would be swept up like icing sugar in a hurricane when Flash makes a grab for your snack.

Consider also that Flash couldn't stop running. His speed would be so great that if he planted his feet into the ground, he would create giant trenches hundreds of miles long before finally coming to a stop.

If his mind responds fast enough to his body to allow him to maneuver at insane speeds, that means he's got the same computing power as Superman. I'm not sure what that would feel like. Imagine living in a world where everything unfolds extremely slowly. One of our seconds would seem like YEARS for Flash. He'd have to stand in front of you for the equivalent of 2000 years just so you could say "Hello".

That's not the worst. He does everything so fast that he'd have trouble eating at all. If he picks up a sandwich at a speed that seems normal to him, he'd actually be accelerating it so fast that it would disintegrate by the time it reaches his mouth. Could you imagine him slowly inching a hot dog towards his face for what seems like decades?

Like this...

This brings up another point: his metabolism and the microorganisms contained in Flash's body would have to operate at super speeds or else he'd just die. Let's assume that everything that goes in his body is accelerated... If he caught a disease, it would start mutating at speeds thousands of times faster than regular bacteria or viruses. He'd be a walking germ warfare since his antibodies are just normal, unlike Superman who's immune to everything, not to mention Flash would need to travel all over the world just to feed himself thus picking up and mixing together every possible disease.

So in a nutshell, one day after the Flash comes to be, the entire planet would be ravaged by storms, disease, famine and covered in piss and shit.

Now here's another thing that happens when you go super fast: You fly. Flash couldn't run anywhere since running involves a series of small jumps and falls. His jumps would be so powerful compared to Earth's gravity that he'd fly into space, so he'd have to constantly flap his arms and legs to avoid escaping the atmosphere.

Like this...

6. Wonder Woman

POWERS:
- Truth Lasso
- Invisible Jet
- Indestructible bracelets
- Super speed / strength / flight

If she tied you up with her "Lasso of Truth", then you had to tell the truth. I have no idea how this works in a useful way. For instance, let's say you want a crook to reveal where he's hidden his loot, does he have to tell her if he knows? Because "I don't want to tell you" works for pretty much everything otherwise. She'd probably get tired of using it after hearing "I have a huge boner right now" every time.

In the Super Friends show, she also has an invisible jet. Let's see if you can pick out some of the flaws of that device:

Now remember that, like Superman, she can FLY ON HER OWN. Yet she chooses to maintain an invisible jet. Let's think about that for a while. That means she has to keep the jet somewhere like a hangar or a private runway and fly there herself every time she needs to use it. She has to buy fuel, rent a garage and pay at least one mechanic to take care of the damn thing. All this to fly an invisible jet THAT DOESN'T MAKE HER INVISIBLE, thus rendering both the stealth and flying aspect of it entirely meaningless.

I'm not done yet...

Here's what an airplane cockpit looks like:

How many buttons and gauges can you count in there? How the hell does she even know how much fuel is left? Or her altitude? Even the most seasoned pilot would crash this thing within minutes. How does the invisibility work so selectively? Why is it that only Wonder Woman is visible but not the plane's fuel, oils or cooling fluids? Did she actually have to invent special brands of invisible products to run her plane?

Her bracelets are indestructible. She uses them to deflect bullets, mostly, which is a waste of their power since she can withstand bullets all on her own. They're not the worst offender because she's almost as strong as Superman and can fly but next time around we'll observe what happens to Captain America when he tries to use a piece of indestructible equipment...

7. Aquaman

POWERS:
- Super Strength/ Swimming
- Can breathe under water
- Can control / communicate with sea life telepathically

Aquaman was always kind of a joke with Superman around. When the best thing you can do is call whales to help you push stuff around under water while Superman is throwing mountains in the sun then it must constantly feel like you're a benched midget in an eternal basketball game.

His main unique power is to communicate with sea life. It's not clear what constitutes sea life. I don't think he can control plankton or algae but I'm fairly sure they'd let him control sea sponges or urchins, which don't even have brains.

Also, why does it only work with SEA life? What makes a sea lion's brain so different than a dog's or a bear's? I'm pretty sure it's not the presence of sea water, as seen here:

It seems he can control and communicate sea life in or out of water and his powers can be exerted over mammals, fish, reptiles, amphibians, arthropods and basically anything that has the bad luck of growing up near / around / in some body of water. Given that, can't his powers work on land animals if it rains? What about half aquatic life, like hippos or crocodiles?

It's also important to note that Aquaman is super strong all by himself so his choices in any emergency are either to solve the problem by himself of wait for minutes / hours as primitive animals slowly make their way onto the scene where all they can usually do is this:

Ok that's enough for now! I hope you'll join me next time when I bash on Marvel Comics for their lack of scientific rigor. I can grant you that radiation will turn your into a super powered freak, but it sure as fuck won't make your purple pants grow bigger, that's BULLSHIT.

Seriously.

Now off to put my head in the microwave...

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