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Clark's hair...

Should Kryptonians under a yellow sun be subject to a transporter device?


  • Total voters
    5
  • Poll closed .
Maybe it was made to crumple so it wouldn't go right through the planet.

There were some beings in the Silver/Bronze Age who weren't Kryptonian and didn't utilize one of Superman's weaknesses who independently had power levels rivaling his. In addition to Mongul, Validus of the Fatal Five comes to mind.

If Clark had cut his hair on Smallville, they would have needed a pop song for the sequence. Would this have been too old for the tweenies watching in the 2000s?

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We could probably reason that Superman's hair isn't quite as invulnerable as he is. It's really strong, sure, hair is mostly "dead" it's essentially a "waste product" of our bodies and contains no living cells (the only living cells are in the follicle) so while it may be strong and may have some level of resistance to damage from fire, explosions, etc. it may still be possible to cut it with a strong enough sharp-edged blade of some sort or with powerful lasers. The comic once suggested he reflected his heat vision off mirrors to "cut" his hair (and shave) but this strikes me as needlessly complicated and, well, silly, that as smart and capable as Superman is he's able to precisely aim his heat vision in a manner to shave his face without burning his face off or give himself a nice, clean and even, haircut.

In an episode of "Smallville" a possessed Lana tries to steal some of Clark's hair (for what purpose I don't exactly recall) and she breaks a pair of scissors in her attempt to do so, Clark offers some hair by pulling it out of his scalp covering for the scissors by dismissing them as old or broken already.

There's also a "possibility" that the spaceship Clark was sent in contained Kryptonian materials that could be made into shaving/cutting devices or just outright ARE those things made from Kryptonian materials and thus capable of harming Kal-El for the same reasons he's impacted by other Kryptonian artifacts and remains. Small or trace amounts of kryptonite can shave him/cut his hair without causing him any serious harm from the exposure to kryptonite or there could just be, yet another, form of kryptonite that can cut him/his hair bur otherwise has no other effects. (Hey, if there's a version of kryptonite that causes some random effect on him, or can turn him gay, then there's got to be one that can cut his hair. Pick a color and that's the one that does it. I'll go with chartreuse because I like that word.)
 
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We could probably reason that Superman's hair is quite as invulnerable as he is.

From context, I think you meant to say "isn't quite as invulnerable."


The comic once suggested he reflected his heat vision off mirrors to "cut" his hair (and shave) but this strikes me as needlessly complicated and, well, silly, that as smart and capable as Superman is he's able to precisely aim his heat vision in a manner to shave his face without burning his face off or give himself a nice, clean and even, haircut.

Uhh, yeah, but his eyes are still inside his head and pointing forward. Without a mirror, how the heck can he aim his heat vision at his own face, let alone the back of his head? It's not like Darkseid's Omega beam -- it goes in a straight line.

What John Byrne actually proposed (and I think the page was actually posted earlier in the thread) was that Clark used a polished fragment of his spaceship to reflect his heat vision, since normal glass mirrors would melt or vaporize instantly. (The reflective part is behind the glass, and most mirrors aren't perfectly reflective, so they'd still absorb enough energy to be destroyed.) But a lot of later iterations, like Lois and Clark, have ignored that and shown him using normal mirrors.
 
Considering how crazy some of his powers are, I dunno why "He mentally controls the length of his hair" isn't just the simplest answer.

Other than that, I choose to believe his hair and nails are just a lot easier to cut than the rest of his body. As dead cells, they still have lingering amounts of his strength but it lessens every day. Or whatever. :)

As to the poll question, there's no problem with him transporting anyway...just assume that they use portals as opposed to disintegration.
 
Pretty sure Bronze Age Supes had occasion to use the JLA teleporters...and those were based on dematerialization. They did a story in which Flash, Hawkman, and an alien got transformed into three composite beings by a teleporter accident.
 
Pretty sure Bronze Age Supes had occasion to use the JLA teleporters...and those were based on dematerialization. They did a story in which Flash, Hawkman, and an alien got transformed into three composite beings by a teleporter accident.
IIRC, originally it was based on Thanagarian technology. Later retconned to Thanagarian, Kryptonian and Martian technology.
 
Pretty sure Bronze Age Supes had occasion to use the JLA teleporters...and those were based on dematerialization. They did a story in which Flash, Hawkman, and an alien got transformed into three composite beings by a teleporter accident.

Mix in red sunrays --and clark can be beamed.
 
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