Vorlonagent

...and "teach the world to sing in perfect harmony'?

Or not. Pandrora does owe herself a coke. I think she bet herself that Rhoda would notice first.

"the swallow may fly south for the winter, or the house martin or the flubber, yet these are not strangers to our land..."

answer hazy, try again later

They tend to head for the hills in the rural US as far from "gumment" as possible...

Maybe not.

No.

These are vintage comic books, just in case I was not clear... Every hero and villain is unique in some way and has some unique rules that govern how they operate. That's just a given of the industry. Another given of the industry is that the universe and characters have to be something we can relate to. Superheroes exist in imagination space, not reality. ...or comics. They're just a different point along the spectrum from dreams to perceptive reality. A moving point, in fact. For certain values of "sense", sure. Like beauty, it's in the eye of the beholder. The Earth-1 Superman was a being in the cosmic power range, same as the Surfer, Phoenix, etc. He just was. Odds are good that he could outpower either of them if nobody knew about his innumerable weaknesses. Remember: If I say "Earth-1 Superman" I mean pre-Crisis 60s - early 80s Superman. The limits to his powers were in the collective imagination of his writers. And batman? He only goes to space in a Batship... I take no responsibility for 30+ year-old spoilers. Statute of limitations has long since passed. You probably don't want to delve too deeply into Dark Phoenix anyway. Phoenix' inception and death have been retconned, retconned again and re-re-retconned. The whole thing is a huge tangle that I never bothered to make sense of myself, but it boiled down to looking for sneaky ways of getting Jean Gray back and the inevitable temptation to play further with the story once the door was open. When was the last time you played "telephone"? Get a bunch of people in a circle and whisper a simple phrase to one of them and let it go around the circle and see what you get back. (Hint: it won't be what you started with). It's the same thing when you have a huge universe of comics characters and a huge number of writers each needing to fill out a comic every month. To make things more fun, writers usually stay for at most a year or two before moving on (sometimes much less). A comic book could have 15, 20, even 30 writers working on it over 25 years, each with a slightly different take on the character(s). A few writers have epic runs on comics and we tend to remember them, but they aren't the only ones by a long shot and it all builds up. I tend to agree if ts PC for PC's sake. There are things you can do for next to nothing. DC could gain a bit of ethnic diversity just by making Wonder Woman greek instead of caucasian. By rights she ought be greek anyway, considering the mythos she's up to her tiara in, Yet for all the shallow, silly changes DC has put the poor girl through recently, the one thing she's stayed is lilly-white.

I'm not fond of anybody and I include the two prominent 3rd-party candidates when I say that. I simply have varying degrees of not-fondness.

It's not the technical name. It's the potential for interesting stories and moments of awesome. You should read some of DC's John Constantine comics some time, especially the very first late-80s Jamie Delano issues if you can find them. I'm not a fan of horror but these were something I couldn't stop reading either. I read and like Grrl Power also. I tend to think Dave errs on the side of too much explanation, but then I would, I suppose. I look at it as an internal consistency thing, which may or may not be the same thing you're talking about. I'm not worried about the number of rules the system establishes or how they may conflict with the Real World as long as a good-faith effort is made to be true to them. I have my limits too, for how far a universe can depart reality before it ceases to be interesting to me. I will nitpick continuity errors or particularly bad violations of common sense, which actually make me pretty nit-picky myself. It's strange. In the pre-crisis 80s Marvel set a very constrained setting for themselves. Their heroes were "super" but had very hard limits set on how powerful they were on an absolute scale. The Earth-1 Superman could take a morning jog around the local galactic spiral arm before heading to work. With Phoenix, especially Dark Phoenix, Marvel tried to reach for the sort of transcendence that DC enjoyed, while DC's post-Crisis heroes came out with very Marvel-like upper limits on their powers. If John Byrne hadn't penciled in a planet of aparagus-people orbiting the star Dark Phoenix drove to supernova (the planet was NOT in Chris Cleremont's script), who knows what might have happened? But he did and Phoenix' fate was sealed by order of Marvel's Editor in Chief. She had to die. I don't think so. After...what? 25, 26 years at the time?...the DC Universe just needed a good defragging is all. And they had another small comics company's line to integrate. I think DC also wanted to make some politically correct changes to their universe as well. The Psycho Pirate survived the Crisis remembering everything that was and everything that happened. That's why the he was in a mental institution. The enormity of it all broke his mind.

I speak to what I know. I do not know why post-Crisis writers dropped the psionic Superman idea. I suspect part of it had to do with the ham-handed way Byrne tried to set it and other background continuity in stone during his run on Superman. If you're a high handed, arrogant jerk, your co-workers aren't necessarily impressed with your work in a good way. Byrne tried to have the last word in several longstanding fan arguments over Superman, such as but not limited to, the nature of Kryptonian powers. I don't think later writers ought be blamed for quietly shrugging him off. I also suspect that "heat vision" is more interesting to write and read than "telekinetic agitation of molecules" even if the latter makes more literal sense. DC is, after all, in the business of selling comics and the presence of superpowers of themselves represent a serious deviation from reality, so why pick nits? I could be biased because I tend to think this way myself. I tend to prefer "reality lite" rather than a slavish adherence to it. I was also one of those who found Byrne as expressed through his writing to be an arrogant jerk. He had no shortage of fans, I should add. I just wasn't one of them. Full disclosure: His artwork on the X-Men 110s, 120s and 130s was absolutely awesome. His embellishments to Chris Cleremont's writing did get Phoenix killed and came very close to handing the same fate to Wolverine, however. Jumping back to DC, post-Crisis was a huge continuity and realism improvement over pre-Crisis. There's really no way to deny this. I think you're being unfair for dumping on it for not perfectly aligning in 1986 to 2016 sensibilities. DC had another crisis and universe reset only a handful of years ago. You can pass judgement on that if you like, though I suspect you'll find heat vision is still more entertaining to write and read than telekinetic agitation of molecules. I'm pretty sure Supergirl didn't stay dead very long after the Crisis either. Only the Psycho-Pirate could give you the details, I suppose.

If that was the attitude of the times, and we're talking the 60s and 70s here, that was the attitude of the times. Doesn't matter if it the attitude was incorrect by 2016 standards.

There's also the question of audience. If your audience is males, ages 8-13, your writing is allowed a lot of room for flights of fancy and there's no reward for being realistic. Later on, comics got adopted by the college-age crowd requiring smarter writing in all ways.

Those comics writers were simply making liberal use of the Rule of Awesome. The Earth-1 Superman can pick up a Battleship...cool! He can move the earth if it comes to it. Why bother with the realistic problems associated with actually trying to make a human-sized object interact with these much larger ones? Reality is a spoiler of fun.

...Except that Superman was not unique. Everybody with Super-Strength was able to do the same thing. So everybody who is strong must also be psychic?

Byrne's "psionic Superman" thing is filed under "the details were left to the writers" part. He may have just done it anyway. It wouldn't be the first time Byrne departed from script with a comic, though might be the first time he did it as a writer (Byrne started as an artist and graduated to writer/artist) Pre-Crisis continuity was much worse because the 60s and 70s creators weren't thinking in terms of continuity or canon. I don't think those concepts really existed in comics at the time. The writers and artists were just trying to bang out this month's issue. Edit: Draining the continuity swamp and resetting things to something approaching sense (plus integrating characters from recently-bought Charleton Comics) may well have been the reason for Crisis to begin with.

You may be thinking of the post-Crisis DC continuity where Kal-El's powers phased in as he matured. Pre-crisis, baby Kal-El was hellaciously strong. Superman: the Movie (based on Earth-1 continuity) has Superman as a toddler lifting a truck off Pa Kent without apparent effort. That could well be mild for what Superbaby was capable of in the hands of some writers. Alan Moore in the final pre-crisis Superman annual has a baby of Clark and Lois Kent idly squeezing a lump of coal into a diamond. DC's post-Crisis was pretty well thought out. I think the high-level ideas were in place but details were left to writers. Superman's first-post-crisis writer, John Byrne, was a fan of the "Psionic Superman" model for explaining how Krytonian powers worked and wrote it into his stories. He also introduced the idea of Kryptonian powers phasing as Clark/Kel matured. Successive writers quietly dropped the first but kept the second.

Seconded on Girl Genius...

Have pity on some dusted-off 25-year old memories first off. I don't actually remember where Homo Magus came from as compared to the seeded humans. I just remember that Earth had both and they interbred, with Homo Magus being genetically subsumed. Second, writers had to stitch together continuities that were not written to fit together so sometimes they had to make do the best they could. Legion of Superheroes was set in the 30th Century and featured heroes from dozens of worlds (Superboy commuted to the 30th Century now and then to help out) The primary membership was established during the 60s, so all the Legionaires were human-looking. They had to explain it somehow...

You're probably right about Lois Lane, but it was too good a line to pass up. Can you imagine what it would actually be like trying to care for a baby with that much super-strength? I'm amazed that the Kents survived Clark's first year of life at all, let alone with all their parts and pieces intact. I anticipated charges of caddishness, actually. I'm attempting a Matrix dodge. I'm either not a cad with maybe a rip in my uniform for how close the bullet came to connecting or I'm doubly so. Power Girl is not literally the Earth-1 Superman's cousin. She's a cousin to his Earth-2 equivalent. Since there are certain...well...obvious differences between Earth-1's Kara Zor-El (Supergirl) and Earth-2's Kara Zor-El (Power Girl). It suggests other genetic differences under the hood. Power Girl may not actually be a first cousin to Earth-1's Superman at the genetic level, but they're still both pureblood Kryptonians. So naturally if Earth-1's Kal-El and Earth-2's Kara Zor-El can breed safely, there's a good chance that the same can be said for the Earth-2 Superman and Earth-1's Supergirl.

I put a lot of stock in this comic. Carol is older than the Main 8 and she is completely used to local weirdness. I take from this that things have been weird probably since before Carol was born (weirdness taken for granted by the time Carol was old enough to start processing such things + an amount of time for weird things to start happening and for people to get used to it), so I'd say strange stuff has been happening in Moperville for at least 30 years minimum. The further back we can trace weird stuff happening, the more strongly Occam's Razor suggests that something other than Pandora is responsible. 30 years says Moperville was not normal before Pandora and Raven showed up. Raven is probably there, along with Nanase's family and Ed Verres' FBI unit, because of a long history of weirdness in Moperville. If we build on that reasoning and decide that Ed Verres' parents and Nanase's grandparents moved to Moperville because of the strangeness of the place, we can push the probable arcane history of Moperville back to 40 years ago and make a case for 50.

Correct. Earth-1 human.

I make an argument for Moperville as a place where strange things just happen and have for a while, sort of like Buffy's Sunnydale. The whys and wherefores are up for grabs. Like Sunnydale Moperville has a pre-existing natural oddity associated with it. Sunnydale was a Hellmouth, Moperville was a point where magic flowed from one side of the world to the next. It seems simpler to expect Moperville's longstanding oddity to account for its longstanding weirdness.

Peter Sellers was great in all the roles he had in that film. Maybe it's been too long since I've seen it but I'm not getting what you're saying. Maybe Voltaire's entire visit, is just to set up the question, "Why?" Why would he try to bump Elliot off in the first place?

No, actually. A normal human has *better* magic resistance than the Earth-1 Superman. I will try to be brief with my exposition. DC Lore prior to the mid-1980s Crisis on Infinite Earths, which reset the DC universe, had a proto-hominid species seeding multiple worlds with humanoid life forms, including both Earth and Krypton. It's how Supes looks so human. He is in fact a distant cousin. Earth had these seeded humans but also hosted a unique subspecies that was called Homo Magus, which was capable of magic. Homo Magus tended to dilute into the general population, giving all humans what amounted to some magic resistance but no real ability. The Earth-1 Zatanna was a pureblood Homo Magus. I think she was the last one but my memory could be in error. Anyway, there is no Homo Magus in Kal-El's lineage so he is worse off against magic than Ambush Bug. I don't know how well Earth-1 magic was resisted with willpower, It's been too long. Superman's will is usually considered exceptional. Some DC lore has Kal-El as planned to be a Kryptonian Green Lantern candidate, but I don't remember if that was pre-Crisis, post-Crisis, or both. Very true. Especially the Earth-1 Wonder Woman. She's just ungodly powerful by comparison to Superman's uneartly, but probably strong enough to handle pregnancy with a baby featuring the full-Kryptonian powerset. She'd have a few caveats of her own to watch out for. If she were carrying a male child, it's possible she could end up depowering Paradise Island if she went home to have the baby. Obviously the best choice would be a Kryptonian female, i.e Supergirl. Power Girl was native to Earth-2 at that time. Technically, both women were Kara Zor-El. Given the obvious physical differences between the two, cross-dimensional pairings (Earth-1 Superman + Power Girl, Earth 2 Superman + Supergirl) might be genetically viable, but over the objections of a couple of Lois Lanes...