Book review: Comic book science was never so much fun

I saw The Science of Superheroes and its follow-up volume, The Science of Supervillains, in my library… and following my long-buried (OK, three weeks) liking for comics, I borrowed both to see where logic ended and good, reality-clean fun set in.
A few words about comics (“graphic novels” for those not among the hoi polloi): I think they’re a great medium for stories to be told, stories in the rich vein the printed word just doesn’t capture so well. How would an Asterix novel read? A Tintin one? Or for that matter, a Mickey Mouse or Donald Duck? Certainly not the same way as within the panels of a comic strip. It loses something.

Where does Superman’s strength come from? Could he exist in the real world? Taking the lens of real-universe physical laws, Gresh and Weinberg put classic superheroes like Batman, Superman, Spider-Man and the Fantastic Four under it to an entertaining read I started at the first page, and couldn’t put down.
For instance, the classic story of Superman’s origin has his father, Jor-El, putting him on a meteor and sending him to Earth. His strength is the result of coming from the higher-gravity world of Krypton; our world’s lower gravitational pull ensures our heaviest buildings are feather-light to him. And wonder of wonders, our sun’s yellow light gives him the extra Mystical Energy Boost he needs for his powers.
Only beings our size and shape cannot survive in a much higher-gravity world like Krypton—they’d be crushed. Ouch.
Ditto for our sun—yellow light is just another wavelength. Heck, they even go through the mathematics, something this A-level physics-trained guy didn’t think applied in Superman’s case. Well, you learn something new every day…
More to the point, The Science of Superheroes is great fun. I read it through twice, one of the few times I so honoured any book—once for fun, the second for a much-needed science revision.

UNFORTUNATELY (as they say in comics)… the first book wasn’t without its flaws; in the chapter on the X-men I’m sorry to say it all came apart. Because the X-men’s powers are biologically based (they’re mutants, duh), it’s fair and good to take so-and-so’s powers, and examine them to see if they’re sound. Could someone really auto-heal like Wolverine? Control the weather like Storm?

Instead the authors zero in on exactly why the X-men possess their powers—evolution, asserting: “The X-men stand or fall with Darwin’s theory.” Question, G & W: how? It’s one thing to possess a selected trait, but another to produce such a drastic change in so narrow a time-frame. And Wolverine’s mutations, for example, are clearly beneficial; his body recovers in an eye-blink from any trauma. How likely is it a ‘good’ mutation will arise, when the vast majority resulted in the mutant dying, unable to adapt to its environment? They should’ve addressed on whether so-and-so’s mutant powers are really plausible, rather than confirming every X-man possible with the same broad brush: “They may even be our children.” The Flash is rejected as being out-of-logic, but what about Magneto’s son, who possesses the same super-speed power? Believe it or not, G & W take up the entire chapter attacking creationism and literal Scripture reading, and expounding Stephen Jay Gould’s punctuated equilibrium evolutionary theory… an irrelevance if I ever saw one. To me it’s just a sneaky way of slipping yet another attack on religion into print. (They do so again in an appendix; “Science has little to say about the supernatural, except that it’s impossible.”) Such broad, sweeping statements, to me, diminished the credibility of the book to the point not even a superhero can restore it. Better minds than mine have filled in more detail, so a rehash would be out of reach for me…

But TSoSH was intriguing enough for me to try out its follow-up, The Science of Supervillains. Being an optimist at heart I hoped the out-of-date science would’ve been cleaned up since then, and we’d get a better view into the supervillain’s psyche. Could Apocalypse have lived so many thousands of years? Perhaps, with cryonic technology. Time travel? It’s there. Could a DNA computer really work, hijacking a human brain in the process? I won’t spoil the surprise, but suffice it to say G & W have done their research. The way technology is progressing, I wouldn’t be surprised to see a Dr. von Doom in the near future, though Spider-Man’s foe The Lizard remains out of reach. For now.

And I enjoyed seeing villains’ implausibilities as much as I did their demises. Anyone who loves comic books, science or both, you mustn’t miss out. If you love God, though… not to worry. The authors’ case against that is far from convincing.

FINAL RATING:
The Science of Superheroes: 6.0 (out of 10)
The Science of Supervillains: 6.4 (out of 10)

(It would've been higher, but it seems quite a few on amazon.com agreed on the evolution section. Well... that many readers can't be wrong.)