Action Comics #12: Superman M.D

[superfangirl1]

Comments

[auggie18]

Huh. So that woman from the Grounded plotline had a reason to yell at Superman.


Huh.


Wonder if this is gonna be Flash thing were he can't retain knowledge he gets at superspeed.

[darkknightjrk]

It's been established that Superman has total recall. However, that is a problem for The Flash--he can keep all that knowledge in short-term memory, but not for very long.

[terrykun]

Bart was the exception. We can probably attribute this to him having his powers since birth. It remains to be seen if this is still the case since the reboot.

[icon_uk]

Though it was retconned in during the Johns Teen Titan run that Bart was unique in that he could, which then had to be so seriously downplayed after he suddenly decides to read the entire San Francisco Public Library as part of his "upgrade" from Impulse to Kid Flash as to make it irrelevant.

[silicondream]

Bart's total recall itself wasn't a retcon--he had demonstrated it in class at the start of the Impulse series. And Jay Garrick was written, at least by Morrison and Millar, as being insanely well-informed on multiple scientific fields thanks to speed-reading.

Maybe Wally just had exceptionally bad memory.

*Edit* I kind of assumed that Bart's perfect memory was just a result of having future genes or something. It seemed to be equally effective at normal speed.

[icon_uk]

I didn' t recall Bart having super-memory at that point, I remember him trying to work out where the "On" switch on a pencil was, and rather than reading up on facts about France, going there at superspeed and finding out.

[silicondream]

It's just before the pencil bit, in Impulse #1. The teacher notices that Bart isn't paying attention, and asks him what she was just talking about. He responds with:

"You wanted to know who Sandburg wrote about. Before that, you held up a tan book with black lettering and a crease on the front. I noticed a gold bookmark, if that means anything. Before that, you asked what a biography was. Nine kids raised their hands. Seven right hands, two left. Before that--"

[icon_uk]

But that's short term memory, all the Flash's can do that (such as learning a language in seconds), it's how long they can recall that information for that makes the difference.

If he could remember with that level of detail in six months time, that's evidence he has the ability to remember things over a longer period of time.

[silicondream]

But that's short term memory, all the Flash's can do that (such as learning a language in seconds), it's how long they can recall that information for that makes the difference.

All the Flashes can do that if they're actively trying to memorize something; so could a normal person. But Bart was just sitting there at normal speed, staring into space and thinking about how bored he was, and he still recalled every detail of the last couple of minutes without even trying. I don't think we've ever seen another Speed Forcer do that. Wally, certainly, was epically bad at following conversations if they bored him.

Similarly, he runs past a normal-looking man (who turns out to be a villain, but Bart doesn't know that yet) and stops for an instant to take a look at his watch. Doesn't say a word to him or even (apparently) look him in the face. A day later, he can effortlessly pick the guy's face out of a whole book of employees.

Admittedly, those scenes don't prove that Bart's memory was outright perfect, especially over the long term. But I think they were meant to show that his memory was, at the least, exceptionally good--independent of his speed powers.

The writers never did much with that after the first few issues, but I figure Johns was harking back to that when he decided to play up Bart's memory again.

[icon_uk]

I'm getting to the point of hair splitting her methinks, but I expect the Flashers to have excellent short term memories, because they have to deal with a world full of details at far, far fastefr rates than the rest of us. They absorb details like what people looked like because normally they have tiny fractions of a second to pick up the same evel of detail as we might have seconds to do

Speed learning for Flashes lasts fopr a few days, maybe a week or so more or less by default, so recalling something the next day seems possible. Recalling someone a month later, not so much.

And it being a nod back to Johns Impulse run would strike me as plausible if this was something that had ever been directly referenced before not even Max had picked up on this part of Bart's skillset, or if he had, had kept pointlessly quiet about it to Wally.

Given that Johns also had Bart suddenly crave Wally's approval, when Bart and Wally had always been open about never actually LIKING each other that much, it doesn't seem to be an homage as a random rewrite of the sort that Johns was to do so fairly frequently in his Teen Titans run. (eg Raven the magic user, when she never was)

[silicondream]

They absorb details like what people looked like because normally they have tiny fractions of a second to pick up the same evel of detail as we might have seconds to do

Well, for the face-remembering feat at least, Bart was going by the guy at superspeed; presumably he had no more subjective time to register details than a normal person would if they ran by at normal speed. Bart, after all, generally moved faster than he thought. But yeah, might be quibbling over nothing at this point.

No question that Johns randomly retcons stuff all the time, but I wonder whether the "Flashes forget speed-learned stuff faster" idea wasn't one of those retcons itself. I haven't checked very carefully, but I don't recall Waid invoking it before the Johns run. And again, it contradicts Morrison & Millar's treatment of Jay Garrick; he's one of the most knowledgeable superheroes around because he reads every periodical on Earth. Whenever Jay encounters an article in a language he doesn't already know, he learns the language in "five or ten minutes," and that knowledge seems to be permanent. He also does chemistry research at superspeed on a daily basis.

Not that Jay's got a photographic memory like Bart, but he does apparently remember speed-learned stuff just as well as normally-learned stuff.

[mrstatham]

Not really. The Grounded thing was utterly ridiculous because Superman just can't be everywhere at once and expecting the guy to solve all your problems.. I thought that was like, the key focus of one of those Paul Dini/Alex Ross stories from years back.

[auggie18]

I was joking. Deadpan is hard to express over the internet. That scene was stupid.

[mrstatham]

Internet tone is something I always seem to struggle with, so my apologies there. I obviously agree that scene was utterly stupid.

[shadowpsykie]

heh people have legitimately complimented me on the internet and i thought they were insulting me :D

[cf105]

If anyone ever bothered to teach Wally how to make a memory palace he probably wouldn't have that problem. Bart was raised in a VR world and thus is used to storing data in metaphors and other deep recall methods (at least thats my take on it)

[jaybee3]

A part of me thinks Morrison is just poking fun at Grounded with this.

And Lois has a niece? By Lucy? Or some other new sibling?

[superfangirl1]

It been said by that general sam lane got remarried and lois/lucy have step siblings.

[biod]

I know you're being deadpan, but the answer is still "not really". Cancer, the group of diseases we label such, is something we don't know how to cure yet, while what Supes is doing here is just already practiced medicine made more efficient with superpowers.

[icon_uk]

And w're back to Silver Age Supergod who held doctorates iin more fields than most universities offer.

[darkknightjrk]

I honestly don't have a problem with that--the powerset's never been the problem, it's the personality, and Morrison at least does a good job at making Clark a powerful, heroic individual, but with flaws of his own. Not to mention that the true villain of it is definitely bigger in terms of power than Clark.

[icon_uk]

In solo stories it makes me wonder why he lets himself have any downtime at all, when he could be saving lives with his astonishing medical skills.

In team books it makes the combined knowledge of most of the other members instantly redundant.

[fredneil.livejournal.com]

In one of the first comics I read, way back at the end of the silver age, it was established that if he didn't sleep, it wouldn't affect him physically, but he'd go insane. I'd guess he needs downtime for similar reasons.

[arilou_skiff]

Go crazy and try to murder himself, if I recall correctly.

[icon_uk]

Sleep yes, sleep is fine, but he might be able to save more lives as a surgeon than he does as a reporter.

[md84]

Entire storylines have been written about Clark's struggles to balance his good Samaritanism and his personal life. The general idea seems to be that Clark can do a lot more than he already does thanks to his powers, but he can't be Superman 24/7. He needs to be Clark Kent at least part of the time. It's even worse for him since he has super hearing that lets him pick up screams for help worldwide which he has to tune out.

[espanolbot]

This may be a kind of reference to Red Son (which MAY have had a Morrison influence, as Millar back in the day used to run a lot of work past Grant to bounce ideas off of him, in his Authority run for example, before the pair had a falling out regarding whose ideas were whose), which Superman reads an entire library in seconds to diagnose Stalin with cyanide poisoning.

[michael_ellis_day]

As a matter of fact, Morrison has said that Red Son incorporated some of his ideas. One of them was the ending, about which he said (paraphrased) "I gave Mark the best idea for Superman I'd ever had, and he used it as the end of Red Son."

[sianmink]

I'm fine with supercramming as long as he doesn't get good retention out of it. Otherwise it's something that would break stories really quick. :|

[dr_archeville]

... and then she got a nasty infection from the bacteria on his diamond-hard thumbnail.

[deepspaceartist]

If only had Superman had some way of generating heat that he can completly control, allowing him to quickly vaporise the bacteria on his hands without harming himself.

[werehawk]

Because he is Kryptonian, his skin may not even harbor bacteria that can infect humans. I don't think he can even get sick from human diseases.

[halloweenjack]

If only there were some way for the narrator to depict that, say by a combination of words and pictures, without requiring people to fill in the blanks for him.

[werehawk]

You are right. The real problem is not sharpness, but jaggedness. A nail has microscopic wavy edges that would make wound a) harder to seal and b) more prone to infection, compared to a industrial scalpel. And, how long is the fingernail to cut through the skin all the way. Kinda dumb.

[silicondream]

Maybe he plays guitar. And uses heat vision to file his nails to Wolverine-sharpness, because he never knows when he might have to do some barehand surgery. Don't ask Superman to scratch your back.

I'm rather amused that he apparently failed to do anything about her broken ribs, or to remove the heavy metals that he just vaporized and spread around her body cavity.

[an_idol_mind]

I wish medical training in real life was only a matter of reading a lot of books.

[arbre_rieur]

It is if you have a superbrain. :)

[darkknightjrk]

Well, that's why the surgeons are still there, I suppose.

[arbre_rieur]

Great scene.

[darkknightjrk]

Looking at it again, I can see where it could be done a little better--instead of reading EVERY medical book he could have read every book that pertains to surgery and treating wounds, or asked them what he needed to do and kind-of do it on the fly in the operating table.

[silicondream]

Hey, if this hospital has a library containing every medical textbook ever published, I can understand Superman feeling obliged to read them all just to do it justice. Even if 1600s texts on how humour imbalances cause earaches in small children are not entirely relevant to saving Lois' life.

[halloweenjack]

This really is pretty awful, both in terms of the specifics already mentioned (no, you don't learn everything you need to know about being a doctor, let alone a thoracoabdominal surgeon, from books--you need experience, and lots of it; no, you can't close major incisions like that) and in the general sense of this being an example of the type of Silver Age narrative that had Superman use his powers in ways that simply don't make sense if you stop to think about it for just a second; it requires either a massive suspension of disbelief or that the reader either hasn't gotten to fifth-grade science or that they didn't pay attention if they have. Kal is about yea close to being Dr. Manhattan here, and I wonder if Morrison isn't transferring his near-total power over the character to the character himself.

[jaybay]

fuck yes Supes.

You kick so much ass