10 Grim Realities Of Superhero Origins

1. Superman Would Be Freakish And Dead

The origin story: This one's so well known it's essentially passed into myth and legend, the way the old stories of Greek gods or King Arthur did, but we'll go ahead and do the quick version. The far-off planet of Krypton was doomed, primed to explode at any moment, and with only a tiny rocket capable of escaping this inevitable demise, a couple of concerned parents put their baby in it and blasted him off across the cosmos so he could live a full and happy life somewhere else in the universe.

That rocket just so happened to land on Earth, and that baby just so happened to gain some amazing abilities when exposed to the planet's yellow sun. Found and raised by a couple of sweet farming folk, the Kents, in a rural Kansas town, that baby grew up to be Superman, the greatest superhero of all time!

The grim reality: There's a lot of funky science going on in the Superman mythos, including the fact that Jor-El would make a spaceship to escape Krypton that's not big enough to fit more than a baby in, the fact that Kryptonite has such a negative effect on a guy who used to live on a planet literally made of it, and the whole "powers from the yellow sun" thing. The biggest grim reality of Clark Kent, though, is that he wouldn't be the Superman we have come to recognise. Because why would an alien from a planet on the other side of the cosmos look anything like us? Krypton clearly had a different environment to Earth. The only reason Superman looks like a human man is because people are unimaginative.

In reality the last survivor of an alien race would look, well, alien. He'd be adapted to the unique climate of Krypton. He might just be a single-celled organism, like the life we've discovered on Mars. He might be a giant, floating brain. He might be a marmot with six eyes and a huge prehensile tongue. He would not be a cute baby for the Kents to adopt and pass of as their own. And considering the environment on Krypton is presumably so different to Earth, as soon as he got taken out of his escape pod he'd probably be poisoned. Not so super now, huh.