The Physics of Superheroes: Spectacular Second Edition

by Kakalios, James

  Superman was the brainchild of Jerry Siegel and Joseph Shuster, two teenagers from Cleveland who dreamed of earning riches through the creation of a popular newspaper adventure strip. Combining attributes from two of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s characters, Tarzan and John Carter of Mars, Siegel and Shuster turned the conventional science-fiction adventure story on its head. Instead of an ordinary Earthman traveling to a strange new planet or the far future (as in the stories featuring Flash Gordon or Buck Rogers), a citizen of a distant world with strange powers came to Earth. This innovation, together with the colorful uniform the hero wore (inspired, perhaps, by the costumed strongmen who performed in circuses at the time) and the then-novel concept of a secret identity for the heroic adventurer, made their strip so original that it was swiftly turned down by every newspaper distribution syndicate they approached. After four years of constant rejection, Siegel and Shuster were desperate enough to try to sell their Superman concept to the decidedly lesser market of comic books. They eventually found a receptive audience in Sheldon Mayer, a young editor who saw potential in the rough, early strips of Siegel and Shuster. Mayer convinced fellow editor Vin Sullivan that this character was exactly what was needed for his new comic-book title that was due at the printer but lacked a lead story. With no time to redo the strip to fit the comic-book format, panels from the two weeks of sample newspaper strips were hastily cut and pasted into a thirteen-page story. With a cover adapted from one of the panels in the strip showing Superman lifting an auto sedan over his head while crooks fled in panic, Action Comics # 1, cover price ten cents, appeared on newsstands in June 1938. The rest, to coin a phrase, is history.

  Evolutionary biology teaches that random mutations can lead to the creation of new species. When these new species exhibit superior adaptation to a changing environment, they can quickly dominate an ecological niche. Similarly, the superhero comic book struck a resonant chord with Depression-era readers, and was an instant success. Soon the newsstands were full of superhero comics, featuring characters possessing a dazzling array of powers and abilities.

  All of these new characters shared one crucial attribute: differing sufficiently from Superman in order to avoid joining Fawcett Publications’ Captain Marvel in a lawsuit over copyright infringement by National Publications (which owned the legal rights to Siegel and Shuster’s creation). Many of these newborn heroes had a single superpower, such as superspeed (the Flash, Johnny Quick), flight (Hawkman, Black Condor), superstrength (Hourman, Captain America), or none of the above (Batman). Some of these heroes gained their superpowers via “scientific means.” The Flash of the 1940s, for example, became superfast after a chemical laboratory accident in which he inhaled some “hard water.”3 Chemist Rex Tyler developed a pill that provided enhanced strength and speed for sixty minutes, enabling him to fight crime as Hourman. The 4F-army-reject Steve Rogers became the superhero Captain America, following a series of injections with a “super soldier” serum (nowadays, these would probably be described as “steroids”).

  Much more common, though, was a mystical or supernatural origin for the characters’ abilities, due to the acquisition of, or exposure to, a magical object from some hidden corner of the globe. In this way, as they would throughout their existence, comic books merely reflected the popular cultural zeitgeist. For example, in the 1940s the Green Lantern was a hero who had come into possession of a mystical lantern originally from ancient China, from which he fashioned a ring that endowed the wearer with a wide variety of powers but was ineffective against wood. Viewed in the cultural context of the times, the world was a bigger place back in 1940. To the adolescent imagination, the “Far East” and the “Congo” were still vast repositories of powerful secrets and mysterious artifacts. When the Green Lantern character was reinvented in 1959, he was given a new costume and origin, and his lantern and ring became extraterrestrial artifacts. The ring’s vulnerability to objects that were colored yellow was now attributed to a chemical impurity in the ring’s composition, which could not be removed without making the ring ineffective.4 Similarly, the Green Lantern’s colleague, Hawkman, was a reincarnated Egyptian prince in 1940, while the 1960s version of the same hero was an intergalactic policeman from the planet Thanagar.

  This origin transition continues today. In 1962, Peter Parker gained the powers of Spider-Man when he was bitten by a spider that had accidentally become radioactive in a physics lab demonstration, while in a 2000 reinterpretation of the same character (as well as in the 2002 film version), the fateful bite was from a genetically engineered superspider that escapes during a molecular-biology lab demonstration. Thus the one constant would appear to be that the creation of the superhero is a way of binding the cultural anxiety of the day, whether of the “distant other” in the 1940s, radioactivity in the 1960s, or genetic manipulation today.

  The original incarnations of various superheroes in the late 1930s and 1940s were products of their time and reflected life during the Great Depression and World War II. After the war, soldiers who had acquired a comic-book reading habit while overseas continued to buy comics after returning to the States, and certain publishers catered to this older audience with adult-themed stories featuring more graphic violence. Some of the young comic-book writers and artists had also been drafted into the armed services, and their wartime experiences resulted in a more serious, and in some cases darker, tone to their postwar work. In 1945, Maxwell Gaines ended his association with National Comics and started a new publishing firm called Educational Comics, printing such titles as Picture Stories from Science, Picture Stories from American History, and Picture Stories from the Bible. After his untimely passing in 1947, his son William Gaines changed the firm’s name to Entertaining Comics (EC) and shifted their inventory to such comics as Tales from the Crypt, Crime SuspenStories, Weird Science-Fantasy, and The Vault of Horror. These comics were neither suitable nor intended for the same young audience as Captain Marvel. It was just a matter of time before someone noticed and complained.

  Dr. Fredric Wertham’s 1953 bestselling book, Seduction of the Innocent, forcefully argued that such lurid stories corrupted the minds of young children, leading them directly to careers as juvenile delinquents. In a cycle that appears to repeat itself in every generation, there was a growing concern among parents and authority figures in the post-World War II era over the coarsening effects of popular culture on the attitudes and mores of teenagers. The U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency, headed by the ambitious Sen. Estes Kefauver, held hearings on the connection between comic books and teenage crime. Initially, the committee intended to focus solely on horror and crime comics, but Wertham, a consultant to the subcommittee, brought superhero comics to the senators’ attention. Seeking to avoid the imposition of federal oversight and regulation, the major comic-book publishers created a self-regulatory agency called the Comics Code Authority (CCA). The publishers developed a set of rules governing acceptable comic-book content, with explicit instructions that gore, lewdness, drug use, zombies, and vampires were prohibited in any comic book bearing the Comics Code Authority seal of approval on its cover. Many of the guidelines created by the CCA seemed designed solely to ensure the destruction of nearly the entire EC line of comics (the only survivor being a relatively new comic satire magazine by the name of MAD). All comic-book stories had to be submitted to the CCA (whose staff was funded by the publishers) for approval before being published, similar to the current ratings board that vets motion pictures.

  While it played an important role in the 1950s and 1960s in convincing parents that comic books could be viewed as “wholesome” entertainment, the influence of the Comics Code Authority has waned over the years as the average age of the typical comic-book reader has increased. This is reflected in the decreasing size of the CCA seal on comic-book covers. In 1964, the seal took up an area roughly that of postage stamp, or two thirds of a square inch (as it was a prominent marketing tool to assure parents that the story contained within was accept
able for their children), while it was less than a quarter of a square inch in 1984 and is a barely detectible tenth of a square inch in 2004 (for DC Comics, that is; Marvel Comics quit its participation in the CCA in 2001 and employs a self-determined labeling system roughly equivalent to the PG, PG-13, and R ratings used by movies).

  Declining sales from the loss of a major distribution network and the competition from television led to the near collapse of the comic-book industry, and from 1953 to 1956, only about a half-dozen superhero comics continued to be published, a dramatic reduction from the 130 different superhero titles available at newsstands at the peak of the Golden Age. Funny animal stories, Westerns, and young-romance comics were safer alternatives for the few companies that persevered in publishing comics during this period.

  In 1956 National Comics decided to test the superhero waters with the reintroduction of the Flash in Showcase # 4. The sales figures for each issue of Showcase that featured the Flash indicated that the market for superheroes had returned, and over the next few years, National brought back new versions of the Green Lantern, the Atom, Hawkman, and others. The Silver Age of superhero comic books had begun, and superheroes have remained a mainstay of comic books ever since.

  From the very beginning in Showcase # 4, examples of correctly applied physics principles appeared in these stories. With the launching of the Soviet satellite Sputnik in 1957 at the height of the Cold War, there was considerable anxiety over the quality of science education that American schoolchildren were receiving. The Comics Code Authority seal on their covers plus the inclusion of science concepts may have convinced wary parents that there was a net positive benefit to these four-colored adventures.

  In addition to employing accurate science, comics from the Silver Age often had scholarly nuggets from other learned disciplines buried within their stories. For example, the plot of “The Adventure of the Cancelled Birthday” in The Atom # 21 (written by Gardner Fox, who was both a lawyer and a writer for science-fiction pulp magazines) revolved around the obscure fact that in 1752, when Great Britain adopted the Gregorian calendar to replace the Julian calendar, eleven days were omitted during the transition. That is, September 2, 1752, was followed the next day by September 14, in order to regularize the British calendar with other parts of Europe. Two issues later, the letters column in The Atom printed a complaint from one such fan, arguing over the poor choice of historical characters, such as the obscure Justice Fielding. The editor of Atom comics, Julius “Julie” Schwartz, responsible for reintroducing the Flash in 1956, defended the story in the letters column, pointing out that it was high time that the reader become acquainted, as had the Atom, with Henry Fielding, the author of Tom Jones.

  Even if they were not woven into the plot, bits of historical or scientific trivia would occasionally pop up in comic-book adventures through the appearance of a caption box containing a fact that had no direct bearing on the story at hand. For example, in The Brave and the Bold # 28 featuring the first appearance of the Justice League of America, an alliance of National Comics’ super heroes, Aquaman swims by a puffer fish and has a brief conversation with him using his “fish telepathy.” The puffer fish relates some crucial information gleaned while floating on the surface of the ocean. A caption in this panel informs us that “by swallowing air into a special sac beneath its throat, the puffer fish becomes inflated like a football—whereupon it rises to the surface and floats upside down.”

  Why take the time to include these educational captions? They may have been a consequence of the habits of the former pulp-fiction writers penning these tales. Prior to editing comic books at National, Mort Weisinger and Julie Schwartz, lifelong fans of science fiction, had been literary agents for science-fiction and fantasy writers, including Ray Bradbury, Robert Bloch, and H. P. Lovecraft. Certain comic-book writers had previously made their living as pulp-science-fiction writers. As such, they were walking storehouses of obscure historical and natural knowledge. The Hugo Award winner Alfred Bester, author of science fiction classics The Demolished Man and The Stars, My Destination, also wrote comics during the 1940s and penned the original Green Lantern oath. In an autobiographical essay, Bester tells of spending hours browsing through reference books in the New York Public Library searching for odd historical tidbits around which he could construct a story. Knowing a lot of trivia could also help these pulp fiction writers’ financial bottom line, as these authors were paid by the word. Consequently they would frequently pad their work with all sorts of barely relevant tangents, as reflected in this joke:Q: How many pulp fiction writers does it take to change a lightbulb?

  A: The history of the lightbulb is a long and interesting tale, beginning in 1879 in the quiet town of Menlo Park, New Jersey, and continuing on to the present day.

  While the Silver Age comic-book writers may have had an economic incentive to be verbose, it is also likely that they were motivated by considerations of self-preservation to inject educational elements into their stories. As mentioned above, the introduction of science facts and principles into these stories may have arisen from a genuine desire on the part of the writers and editors to educate, or perhaps simply to avoid any further congressional attention.

  A PHYSICIST READS A COMIC BOOK

  Reading classic and contemporary superhero comic books now, with the benefit of a Ph.D. in physics, I have found many examples of the correct description and application of physics concepts. Of course, nearly without exception, the use of superpowers themselves involves direct violations of the known laws of physics, requiring a deliberate and willful suspension of disbelief. However, many comics needed only a single “miracle exception”—one extraordinary thing you have to buy into—and the rest that follows as the hero and villain square off would be consistent with the principles of science. While the intent of these stories has always primarily been to entertain, if at the same time the reader was also educated, either deliberately or accidentally, this was a happy bonus.

  It is these happy bonuses, such as the one illustrated in fig. 2, that I wish to consider here. In this book, I’ll present an overview of certain scientific principles, using examples of their correct application as found in comic books. I will describe characters and situations that illuminate various physics concepts, rather than systematically considering the physics underlying an array of superheroes. (Consequently, it is conceivable that your favorite superhero may not be discussed. I know that several of my own favorites didn’t make the cut.) By the end of this book you will have been exposed to the key concepts in an introductory physics class, with a little bit of upper-level quantum mechanics and solid-state physics thrown in for fun. By examining the physical principles underlying certain comic-book adventures, we will at the same time gain an understanding of the mechanisms behind many real-world applications, from television to telephones to stellar nucleosynthesis of the elements.

  I will focus primarily, but not exclusively, on the Silver Age period in comic-book history (from the reintroduction of the Flash in Showcase # 4 in 1956 to the death of Gwen Stacy in The Amazing Spider-Man # 121 in 1973) because the writers of this period made more of an effort than those in the Golden Age to incorporate scientific principles into their stories. In addition, the Silver Age characters have demonstrated lasting popularity, and their iconic status will make it easier to refer to their exploits without forcing the reader to constantly consult the back issue bins of their local comic-book shop. It is all too easy to find flaws and errors in the science referenced in comic-book stories, and this is not the aim of this book. In addition to being unsporting and uncharitable (after all, these stories were never intended to function as science textbooks, despite the occasional student’s attempts at surreptitious substitution), it is more difficult to make a point when the only illustrative examples are negative ones. Nevertheless, sometimes we will find that some scenes in comic books are simply not physically plausible, even with the granting of a “miracle exception.”

  Before I b
egin I would like to say a few words about a common misconception concerning physicists. Despite the impression gleaned from popular movies, being a physicist does not require an encyclopedic knowledge of equations and fundamental constants, coupled with the ability to perform complex arithmetic in one’s head with robotic speed and precision. Physics is not about having memorized all the answers, but rather about asking the right questions. For when the right question is posed of a phenomenon, either the answer becomes clear or at least a path to further and more fruitful questioning is revealed.

  To illustrate that asking one right question can be more important than a bushel full of correct answers, consider the simple physics experiment of tossing a ball in an arc. There are many questions we may ask, such as: How high does the ball travel? How far to the right does it move? How long is it in the air? How fast is it going? What is the geometric shape of its path? However, I would argue that there is one simple question that implies all of the above questions and gets to the heart of the issues concerning the ball’s motion. That one single question is the following: Does the ball have any choice? If the ball does not have any choice in its motion, if it lacks free will, then its trajectory is completely determined by forces external to itself. Once we determine the nature of these forces and how they influence the ball’s motion, we may then calculate the path of the ball for a given initial velocity imparted by the thrower. This calculated trajectory would then contain any and all information we may desire regarding how high the ball rises, how far it moves, its time in flight, what its velocity is, and so on. If we then repeat the toss with exactly the same initial position and velocity as before, then the ball must exactly and faithfully trace out the calculated trajectory, for the ball does not have any choice in the matter.