The Extreme Lengths to which Our Boy has gone to Make Himself Strongare powerful indicatorsof The Weakness he feels that he mustovercome.
That Weakness is still there, inside.
-- Hurt.
Doctor Simon, Hurt.
He's Daddy's Evil Twin --
And Your Own.
"Samson’s Hair.
Achilles’ Heel.
The oddly elaborate gymnastic contortions that exposed the vulnerable spots of Celtic superwarriors.
Even the greatest heroes needed a weakness,
or there would be no drama, no fall or redemption.
If nothing could hurt Superman,
what could hurt him?
In fact, Weisinger and his writers understood
The Most Important Thing
about Superman:
That His Heart
was vulnerable,
and
His Self-Esteem
could be fragile.
The Super was just
The Icing on The Cake,
The sugar coating :
These were stories about
Man and His Role
in A New World.
But now that The Man of Tomorrow had achieved near-divine heights of omnipotence, The Need for some kind of convincing Physical Vulnerability was becoming greater.
Or so goes the prevailing opinion.
The glowing green killer mineral Kryptonite had been introduced in the 1943 Superman radio series.
The contaminated remains of Superman’s Home Planet fell to Earth in meteor form—much more often than the debris of A Distant World might reasonably be expected to fall, and in sufficient quantities to threaten Superman’s Life on a regular basis.
As a weapon, it had a certain symbolic resonance:
The notion that radioactive fragments
of Superman’s Birth World
had become toxic to him
spoke of The Old Country,
The Old Ways,
The Threat of The Failure
to Assimilate.
Superman was a
naturalised American.
The last thing he needed
were these lethal reminders of
Where He’d Come From;
That he, The Son of Lordly Scientists,
had been reduced to
Toiling in a farmer’s field or
Minding the general store.
Weisinger knew how his young readers’ minds worked
and stretched the idea a little further:
If there was Green Kryptonite,
couldn’t there be other colors too?
The prismatic splintering began
with the invention of Red K,
The Cool Kryptonite --
Possibly because it made literal
The Master Silver Age Theme
of Bodily Transformation.
It was mineral LSD for Superman,
affecting not just His Mind
but also reshaping His Body
into A Playground of Fleshly Hallucination.
No two trips on Red K
were the same, in-story
logic promised.
Red K would affect Superman
in a different way every time
and theoretically might never become boring.
So, under its influence, Superman might develop
The Head of An Ant, scaling The Daily Planet building as
The Commander of a Nightmarish Army of
Giant Insects —
“BZZ-BZZZ …
WE MUST CAPTURE LOIS LANE …
SHE WILL BE OUR QUEEN!”
— or split into Good Clark, Bad Superman,
or even become goofy for forty-eight hours.
Red K and The Silver Age are inextricable.
Red K was LSD for superheroes, and under its influence
Superman could unclench
his entire beingand
Walk The Razor’s Edge
of Joyous Self-Abandonment
and Ego-Annihilating Terror —
An American Pioneer.
Red-K served equally as a handy metaphor
for the adolescent hormonal shifts, physical changes,
and weird moods of elation and despair
that were being experienced by its readers.
Other Kryptonite variants were created
as plot mechanics demanded
rather than with any eye to longevity.
That’s Why --
Gold Kryptonite
removesSuperman’s Powers permanently,
Blue Kryptonite
affectsonly Bizarros,
and
White Kryptonite
is deadly to plants,
which makes it about as interesting
as matches, DDT, or a stout spade.
But, of course,
Superman’s Ultimate Weakness
was his Secret identity.
Why wouldn’t shy Clark Kent
choose to tear open his shirt
and reveal to his unrequited love
The Potent God-Man behind the buttons?
Instead he hid The Truth from Lois Lane,
devising deceptions that became so elaborate as to be cruel :
The Ghastly Tricks of Semantics
a Man-Boy might play on a Child-Woman,
all in the guise of
“Teaching Her a Lesson.”
A story like “The Two Faces of Superman” showed the hero promising to marry Lois Lane but only if she met him at a particular time outside the church.
When she met his conditions,
he contrived to seal her car door with his heat vision so that she couldn’t get out.
Unable to marry him at precisely the correct hour meant that Lois forfeited her chance.
A relieved, chortling Superman took to the skies, having hoodwinked the predator once more.
Like Rumpelstiltskin, Tom Tit Tot, and the other creatures of folklore who knew that
names held power
and kept theirs secret,
Superman maintained his distance
from Clark and vice versa.
Their paths rarely crossed.
He hid His Heart in a plain suit,
behind glasses.
For Lois, A Girl, to know Who He Was would be The End.
She’d only pressure him into exchanging his gaudy suit and life of adventure for something less embarrassing, more domestic.
She would expect him to be home for dinner, when there were stricken ocean liners to rescue.
In the end, his self-deceiving fantasies of one day carrying Lois up the aisle were just that, and if he married Lois, he’d be Clark forever.
It wouldn’t matter how strong or fast he was, he’d be Clark racing around the globe to pick up groceries. "
