Legion World Forums LEGION COMPANION Dr. Gym'll's Cultural Rarities Freeze Breath in the Superman Family: How does this make ANY sense?!?!

Okay, I know it's comic books, but really?

I can buy Super Breath. They're Kryptonians. Not too much of a stretch that they'd have super lung capacity.

But why would it be super cold?

I mean, maybe it's not as prominently used a power as it had been, but I see it displayed on the reg in the Supergirl TV series.

Do Kryptonians have hot and cold generators inside them? One for heat vision, one for freeze breath?

For some reason, I can overlook heat vision, but freeze breath just seems absurd. Their super breath should be approximately body temperature and probably have a little spit mixed in.

Why in Rao's name would it freeze stuff?!?!?

Stops typing... blows into palm of hand... it feels cooler... add comic book super-science... and publish.


It's also impressive that the original post was made using Super Ventrilotyping. You can hardly tell.

So there's this thing called the Joule-Thomson Effect, that basically says that if you force gas through a narrow passage it will cool upon expansion. Add in a bunch of stuff about super-powerful lungs, and you've got close enough to a plausible scientific explanation to keep nerds who actually debate the physical possibility of super-powers occupied for quite some time!

That's ludicrous! I mean, there aren't any nerds around HERE....right?

PLUS: Farts aren't cold, so your science is invalid!

Seriously, I'm actually surprised there isn't a discussion of this on the Big Bang Theory, because it's totally the kind of thing that physics grad students would sit around arguing about whether it would actually work.

This is literally how liquid nitrogen is made.

It's also how your fridge and air-conditioner work.

Still its a bit extreme and almost certainly came about from some writer thinking about breeze making you feel cooler due to thermodynamics, rather than the Joule-Thomson Effect. Of course to make that work you would have to blow an awful lot of air incredibly fast so I don't know how anything could stay still through it. So the JT explanation is a better one.

You can see the same transition with Heat Vision.

1. Superman has super strong muscles so can do things better than ordinary humans.
2. Muscles are in the eyes too so he has better vision, can see further and in more detail etc.
3. He can see wavelengths we can't, like X-rays.
4. He projects X-rays to see inside things (rather than just seeing X-rays that are already there). (We will ignore/not think about how X-ray radiation is damaging to biological substances.)
5. X-rays machines cause heat buildup in things they are used on, particularly metals, so Superman can use his X-ray vision to heat things up.
6. His X-ray vision is powerful enough to melt metals. See Adventure Comics 247 first Legion appearance where Superboy uses his X-Ray vision to melt Steel.
7. He can't heat things up every time he uses X-rays to see inside things so the heat bit must be a separate power - let's call it Heat Vision.
8. He can focus his Heat Vision to small and directed points so instead of heating an area he almost shoots lasers out of his eyes.

See? Over the decades successive writers take the framework they were given and add to it and having super muscles leads to heat vision beams. Aren't comics wonderful?

And, of course, since now his body is a "living solar battery", releasing stored up energy through his eyes now ties into that!

I think this is one of those things where those who know a liiiiittle bit about the science, can accept it. Super-experts (of space) might not though

At the end of the day, any super-hero universe is going to operate with laws of nature that are at least a little bit different than our own are assumed to be, so while it can be fun to find "real world" mechanisms that approximate explanations for super-powers, whether they could *really* allow a person to do something isn't that important.

Bah!

I think it's a dumb power best forgotten! And X-ray vision should cause cancer!!!

I think they should rebrand it as Fourth-Dimensional Vision!

I'm in favor of this, if only because it makes Polar Boy more relevant


You can just see the Adventure Era Legion going... I'm sorry Polar Boy, but your ice powers aren't unique because we have THREE Legionnaires with freeze breath!

And then there is the "Battery Problem", also known as the "Blow-Up Problem". If you pump enough energy into a small enough physical system, it tends to become unstable, and explode. Yes, always. The strict limits vary depending on the materials involved, but Superman and Green Lantern's Power Ring and Doctor Octopus' robot arms clearly exceed any conceivable, reasonable limits. Unless they are made of something other than, you know, leptons and quarks.

Except, of course, the Adventure Era Legion didn't actually have a unique power requirement, since that wasn't introduced until Wildfire's first appearance!

Gasp! Poor Wildfire!

Yeah, literally that whole story is premised on the Legion rejecting him on the basis of a rule they'd just made up for that issue!