Lorendiac
Active Member
I have talked a great deal about examples of reproduction in the lives of superheroes and supervillains in previous installments (or didn’t you notice? 
), but most of the examples I gave came from matings of two people who presumably were of the same species if anyone ever bothered to check their DNA. I have also mentioned a few cases where that probably was not true, but each time I chose to firmly ignore the bizarre genetic implications in favor of discussing other aspects of the case. Until now!
This one is in two sections.
1. Different Types of Interbreeding
2. Several Answers to "What would happen if a Kryptonian Male mated with an Earthwoman?"
1. Different Types of Interbreeding
I won’t try to list every single weird species of Marvel or DC continuity that is definitely cross-fertile with normal humans, but I will try to sort them out into some general categories depending upon just how much they ought to have in common, genetically, with a “normal human.”
Just to confuse the issue, some writers commonly refer to “alien races” in contexts that clearly are supposed to mean “not related to Earth-humans at all!” I would prefer to call such peoples “alien species” for the sake of biological clarity, and reserve the term “race” for a subgroup within a single species, but what can I do?
There are at least three broad categories that come to mind.
A. Kissing Cousins
B. Distant Strangers
C. Supernatural Cheaters
A. Kissing Cousins
“Kissing Cousins” in this context refers to the relationship between two population groups that on the one hand are still nearly genetically identical and thus can successfully interbreed - at least in some cases - but on the other hand have developed enough different characteristics in each group that biologists insist they are two separate species instead of just one large species with smaller racial groups within its population. (Or, in the comic book universes, it may not be clear if biologists feel that way, but it is made very clear that the people belonging to a particular group definitely do!)
First, a real-world example: Wolves, dogs, coyotes, and jackals are all classified as separate species, but all are considered members of the Genus Canis, and online sources report that genetically they can all interbreed with one another to produce fertile offspring, although I gather that in practice, wild specimens of these various groups usually prefer not to. (Although I'm not sure wild jackals and wild coyotes have ever inhabited the same continent at the same time, so that particular mixture may not have gotten much of a field test.)
If we look for a case a tad further apart than that, we have horses and donkeys. They can interbreed to produce a mule. A mule, however, is a sterile hybrid that cannot produce children of its own. Likewise, a lion/tiger mating sometimes produces a creature called a liger which is in the same boat as a mule – it will never have children.
In the real world, no one has yet found anything that qualifies as a “Kissing Cousin” of homo sapiens. We have found other primates, but I’ve never heard of any of them managing to reproduce with a human. (I admit that I don't know how often anyone has actually tried, and frankly, I don't really want to know!)
Of course, in the real world, we have not yet managed to achieve interstellar travel, nor have we found ways to travel to parallel worlds or other types of extradimensional continuums or whatever you want to call them. Characters in the big superhero universes have many more opportunities to go out there and find strange new types of "people" to breed with.
The Marvel Universe has several breeds that are frequently called separate races, who do not seem to regard themselves as being part of the mainstream “Human Race” at all, but who would admit (if you twisted their arms) that they all come from local Homo Sapiens stock if you go back enough millennia. Eternals, Deviants, Inhumans, Atlanteans. Children who serve as examples of crossbreeding between members of two "Kissing Cousins" species include:
Namor the Sub-Mariner (child of Fen, an Atlantean princess, and Captain Leonard Mackenzie, a human).
Deborah and Donald Ritter (twin children of Thena the Eternal and Kro the Deviant).
Luna (child of Quicksilver the human mutant, and Crystal the Inhuman).
The DCU also has its fair share of Kissing Cousins to the “normal” human race. Atlanteans, for instance. Aquaman (allegedly created in the Golden Age to explicitly be a knockoff of Marvel’s popular Sub-Mariner) is at least partially Atlantean by birth. Probably.
You see, Aquaman's genetic heritage has been all over the map. At various times, beginning in the Golden Age with what would technically be the now-nonexistent Earth-2 Aquaman, he has been presented as:
1. The son of scientist Tom Curry, Tom having learned some ancient Atlantean secrets that included how to let a boy breathe underwater (both Mr. and Mrs. Curry presumably being members of the human race).
2. The son of lighthouse keeper Tom Curry by his wife, who this time around just happened to be a beautiful Atlantean princess named Atlanna who washed up near his lighthouse after being exiled from Atlantis.
3. The child of Atlanna by someone unnamed (a fellow Atlantean, maybe?), in a story written by Keith Giffen in the late 80s. I gather that a man named Arthur Curry ended up raising the boy, but apparently had never even met the mother at all, much less got her pregnant! (Bear with me - I haven't actually read that story).
4. The child of Atlanna by the mysterious, ancient wizard called Atlan, in stories writen by Peter David. (This could be called an expansion of the Giffen origin, which left his paternity rather vague.) Again, I believe we have a man named Arthur Curry being something of a father-figure to the kid for awhile, with the result that young "Orin" sometimes used the same name, Arthur Curry, in dealings with surface-dwelling humans afterwards, unless I've completely lost track of the continuity here (no promises!).
Well, three versions out of four agree that his mother was an Atlantean princess named Atlanna. That's something!
Aquaman, whether he is full-blooded Atlantean or some sort of hybrid, has managed to successfully reproduce at least twice with people who presumably didn’t have a drop of Atlantean blood in their veins; or at least we were never told that they did. Once with Mera who was from a water-breathing population in another dimensional reality, and once with Kako, an Eskimo girl.
DC also has Homo Magi (literally “magic men”). They apparently have spent centuries living apart from the rest of the human race, and have a genetic predilection for supernatural activity. Zatanna’s mother was one of them. This detail of her family tree, and the existence of the Homo Magi in general, was only revealed in the JLA title of the 1970s. For a decade or so before that, her magical powers were supposed to be solely inherited from her daddy, Zatara the GA magician hero, who just happened to have the ability to make things happen by chanting the commands backwards.
And of course DC has the Feitherans. Northwind of Infinity Inc. in the 1980s was the hybrid of an African-American father and a beaked-and-feathered mother. Their son did not have the beak, but he did have a tuft of feathers sprouting from the top of his head, which he usually covered with a turban or other headgear when he was trying to socialize with ordinary people in his “secret identity.” In his superhero costume, he didn’t bother concealing the feathers, although I would hazard a guess that most people who met him casually in his superhero activities probably assumed they were some sort of affectation rather than natural growth. (Been so long since I read my Infinity Inc. collection straight through that I could be wrong about that, however.)
B. Distant Strangers
This is what I call populations that may superficially resemble Earth-humans to an amazing degree, but - according to their backstories - should not have any noticeable genetic relationship, unlike the Kissing Cousins. As a rule of thumb, I figure if a group has been living on Earth for the last several thousand years (or is explicitly stated to be descended from people who started out on Earth and then emigrated to somewhere else, such as the people Travis Morgan the Warlord has met in Skartaris) then it makes sense that they are some sort of human being, or at most “kissing cousins” to human beings. There are some humanoid populations of other dimensional realities, etc., whose origins are extremely unclear but might be derived from Earth-human stock as well, in whole or in part, if only we had the full story. But if their ancestry is explicitly stated to come from some other planet entirely, their DNA ought to be very different from anything you see among the natives in our neck of the woods.
The most obvious example of a Distant Stranger is Superman. As a Kryptonian, it should be utterly impossible for him to “naturally” mate with any human female. The DNA ought to be completely different and thus incompatible - in fact, we have been told more than once that the DNA really is completely different! Likewise, the SA Hawkman and Hawkgirl were Thanagarians, another planet’s population that just happened to greatly resemble Earthmen by a remarkable coincidence. (On the other hand, since the Silver Age characters Katar Hol and Shiera made no secret of the fact that they were only interested in mating with each other, inconvenient questions about the plausibility of Interspecies Matings never arose in that context.)
We’ll address Superman’s possible reproductive problems in much more detail further down in this post. Right now, let’s just skim through some of the other noteworthy cases of “Distant Strangers” who have attempted to mate with Earthlings.
The “Kingdom Come” and “The Kingdom” stories have shown us a possible future in which the golden-skinned (like her mother), black-haired (like her father) daughter of Nightwing and Starfire is called Nightstar. Starfire, of course, is Princess Koriand'r of Tamaran (a planet that orbited Vega) and shouldn't have any human genes in her that I know of.
In the 1980s, we saw a few appearances in Titans continuity by Thunder and Lightning, also known as Gan and Tavis Williams, a couple of half-Vietnamese youngsters whose long-lost father turned out to be an alien who had posed as "Walter Williams," an American officer in Vietnam. Oddly enough, when we got a good look at him in what was presumably his "real" or "default" form, he didn't look even remotely human to me; perhaps he was a shapeshifter or something. Despite which he had been quite fertile with a Vietnamese woman.
(To clarify something: the Thunder in question is apparently no relation to two other Thunders who have subsequently been introduced into the DC Universe. CeCe Bec from the 90th Century, and Anissa Pierce, daughter of Black Lightning, the Thunder who is a member of the newest version of the Outsiders.)
On the Marvel side of things, Distant Strangers of distinctly humanoid appearance would include the Kree (who come in both blue-skinned and pink-skinned racial types) and the Shi’ar. I don’t count the Skrulls, however, because they don’t look all that “Human” in their natural forms, despite having two arms and two legs. Granted, they can change their appearances to look very human (as Johnny Storm painfully discovered when Tom DeFalco decided to bust up his marriage with a retcon), but I don’t think of them as particularly humanoid and I don't think offhand that there's any solid evidence that a Skrull can successfully mate with a human or any Kissing Cousin of humanity.
(Note: I am aware that in the "Earth X" series and its sequels ("Universe X" and "Paradise X"), it has been stated that Sui-San, the mother of Thanos and Starfox, was a Skrull female who took the shape of an Earthwoman and married Alars aka Mentor, an Eternal who came to Titan to start up a new colony. However, as far as I know, none of the retcons or revelations of "Earth X" are considered to have any official bearing on the rest of the Marvel universe - it's more like a huge Elseworlds project; the problem being that Marvel has never quite gotten a clue about the need to have an imprint that would be the equivalent of Elseworlds. Their "What If?" stories are generally much, much shorter and don't fill the same need.)
Outside of the mainstream continuities of the superhero universes, we have other cases. Mr. Spock of the original Star Trek, who has appeared in many a comic book in his time, was supposed to be a hybrid of Sarek of Vulcan and Amanda Grayson (?) of Earth. (Amanda was no relation to Dick Grayson as far as I know, but who can say, really?) I believe it was explicitly stated in the TV scripts that Vulcan blood chemistry has copper-based molecules, giving them their notorious green blood (instead of the iron-based hemoglobin that gives Earth-humans their notorious red blood). The implication seemed to be that Love Conquers All; when Amanda and Sarek went on their honeymoon, he was able to get her pregnant just as if they were members of the same species, even if their blood chemistries were wildly different.
(On the other hand, I have read many of the novels written about the characters of the original Star Trek series over the years, and I believe at least two different authors have explicitly taken the position that even if nobody ever got around to spelling it out for us in the old days, Mister Spock must have been the result of some very sophisticated and groundbreaking genetic engineering on the part of Vulcan scientists working with cell samples taken from both parents; he never could have existed if his parents had tried to do it all themselves, at home, the old-fashioned way. Since details of pregnancy were not common topics of conversation in television shows of the 1960s, I don’t think the original episodes relating to Spock’s family background and such were ever specific on exactly HOW his parents had arranged for him to be born. Could be one way, could be another!)
C. Supernatural Cheaters
I don’t mean “Cheaters” in the pejorative sense of “adulterers”; only in the broader sense of “people who break the normal rules to get what they want.” The laws of genetics, in this case.
Example: Raven of the New Teen Titans was revealed in 1981 to be the daughter of a woman named Arella and an extradimensional demon lord named Trigon. So far as I know, there has never been any particular reason to think that Trigon has genes that would mark him as a member or Kissing Cousin of the human race. But he presumably could use Heap Big Magic to make the genes contained within his sperm and those within Arella’s ovum mix together successfully to create a human-looking child who would inherit some of Trigon’s supernatural power.
(What’s that? You think all this sounds suspiciously familiar? Come to think of, you’re right! A very similar origin had been used years earlier at Marvel for Daimon Hellstrom, who initially used the catchy, upbeat nickname “Son of Satan.” Not to mention his sister, Satana! I believe Mephisto was eventually revealed to be their father. Presumably the same implicit assumptions about Magic trumping Genetic Logic would apply in that family tree.)
Similar excuses could apply to crossbreedings between mythological deities of various flavors (Graeco-Roman, Norse, Egyptian, etc.) and normal humans. (Or not, depending on what sort of origin story you like to believe applies to those "deities" in one universe or another, but let's not go into that right now.)
“Supernatural Cheater” also seemed to be the excuse back around the mid-1980s when Steve Englehart did a “Vsion and the Scarlet Witch” limited series that included Wanda Maximoff getting pregnant with twin children by her husband. Considering that her husband was an artificial construct, alleged (at the time) to basically be a heavily rebuilt version of the android body of the original Human Torch of the Golden Age, it was very hard to see how Vision could possibly have any genes at all; much less genes that could possibly mix successfully with Wanda’s as part of “normal” reproductive activity in order to produce a pregnancy! But there was a convenient built-in excuse: Wanda’s well-established mutant power allowed her to play hob with the normal “laws” of probability in a good cause, and she also had some honest-to-goodness mystical abilities as well. Put it all together and it was at least plausible for plot purposes that she could work a reproductive miracle if she really wanted to.
John Byrne, after he took over on the West Coast Avengers title, used the sheer implausibility of woman/synthezoid reproduction as an excuse to “reveal” that actually those two children had basically been physical manifestations of figments of Wanda’s supernaturally hyperactive imagination without her or anyone else realizing it for a long time. I’ve heard of the medical phenomenon of “hysterical pregnancy,” but this took that concept to a whole new level. Heck, Doctor Strange was present at the childbirth, and even he didn’t smell a supernatural rat. (But he’s only a trained surgeon and the Sorcerer Supreme, so what would he know about it?)
2. SEVERAL ANSWERS TO "WHAT WOULD HAPPEN IF A KRYPTONIAN MALE MATED WITH AN EARTHWOMAN?"
I’m going to have to delve more into Elseworlds stories and other “out of continuity” stuff than I usually do, since “in continuity” Superman has never yet had any children in the conventional fashion, and I believe DC still clings to the doctrine that he is the Last Son of Krypton, the only surviving Kryptonian Male at the moment. (Until Kara Zor-El just recently returned, he was allegedly the only surviving Kryptonian, period, except for pocket universes and time travel and other weird stuff.)
One warning: I have not yet read Mark Waid’s 12-part “Birthright.” I’ve seen the collected hardback edition on the shelves, but I don’t feel the overwhelming need to spend that much money on it. I may buy it when it’s released in TPB. If I’m missing any “new evidence” that could be derived from anything Waid said in that story, I’m sorry. In the meantime I’m just going to fiddle around with the different possibilities, based upon what I know about various takes on the subject from pre-Birthright stories.
First I’ll list what I see as possible situations, then I’ll provide a Bibliography referring to stories or other materials that would seem to support each interpretation.
In a proposed mating of Kryptonian Male and Earthwoman genes, meant to produce a child, several different situations might arise depending upon how they went about it and which story by which writer you prefer to believe. I am generally assuming that the mating and subsequent pregnancy (if any) takes place on Earth or in an Earthlike environment.
POSSIBLE SITUATIONS
1. No more dangerous than any normal pregnancy, because the child’s Kryptonian superpowers wouldn’t become apparent until well after the birth of the child, as organs matured and/or as the cumulative effects of years of exposure to yellow solar radiation became visible and/or as the child’s brain subconsciously learned how to flex its psychic muscles in new and different ways. (John Byrne and others have hinted that Superman’s flight, and at least some of his strength and invulnerability, may be based on subconscious telekinesis as much as anything. If so, then the modern Superboy’s obvious tactile telekinesis simply means he has much greater conscious control over the same ability – perhaps it simply took young Clark Kent several years to learn how to think in the proper ways to make the ability work at all?)
2. The tragic death of the mother during the pregnancy, probably before the child was anywhere near being viable outside the womb, because the child’s superpowers would start acting up pretty darn soon. (Unless Gold K was used to remove the child’s powers or a very carefully measured amount of Green K was used to dampen those powers without “hurting” the child.
3. The death of the mother, but probably not until the stresses of childbirth at the end of a nine-month pregnancy, when the superhuman kid, at least, would be likely to survive. As in #2, you may have the option of saving both mother and child if you have access to Green and/or Gold K.
4. “Use a Super-Powered Mother and save yourself a lot of grief!” This one is not really a variation on a Kryptonian Male/Normal Earthwoman mating, but rather an alternative. If it has to be a female of a different species than the sire, make darn sure she’s tough enough to take it. In other words, the best way to avoid the lethal problems of #2 or #3 might be to recruit a mother (or surrogate mother?) who was technically human, or at least some type of humanoid other than Kryptonian if that’s the best you can do, but in any event was superpowered in a way that made her a much better prospect to survive the unique stresses of such a pregnancy with flying colors.
5. Possibly best done in a test tube, either by simple artificial insemination or by more sophisticated genetic engineering techniques, and nurtured in some sort of artificial-equivalent-of-a-womb setup in order to completely avoid the problems of Situations 2 or 3 above. (What Lois McMaster Bujold calls a uterine replicator in her award-winning science fiction series about Miles Vorkosigan and his relatives.) The modern Superboy was allegedly the result of this approach, whether or not his genetic code actually has any Kryptonian material in it. (As I said in an earlier installment, he seems to have gone through at least three separate origin stories, genetically speaking.)
6. The very act of attempted conception through “normal” sexual activity with a Kryptonian male would probably kill an Earthwoman very quickly (unless some sort of Kryptonite, high-powered magic, alien technology, or other method of changing the basic circumstances was involved), as explained in loving detail by Larry Niven. A link to his essay is provided below, in the Bibliography. I’ll just point out that if Situation 6 applied, it would make the whole problem of how to successfully complete a nine-month pregnancy a purely hypothetical point if the prospective mother couldn’t even survive the first ten minutes of the attempt to get pregnant the old-fashioned way!
7. Possibly could be facilitated by making a few simple changes in the local environment so that the superpowers thing wouldn’t be a factor until you wanted it to be, and you don't need to play games with any radioactive kryptonite either.
8. Such a mating would obviously result in no pregnancy at all if you were trying to do it the old-fashioned, natural way, because since when can organisms that come from different solar systems suddenly be magically compatible, genetically? Two species may be sufficiently “parallel” in their anatomy to mutually enjoy sexual activity together, but that is entirely separate from the question of potential fertility. The implication of this one, if established as “true” in the modern DCU continuity, would be that Superman has nothing to worry about! He can’t get his wife Lois pregnant in the first place no matter how often they might try, therefore he needn’t lose any sleep over the dreadful thought of what terrible risks to her health such a pregnancy might pose! (Again, high-powered magic might be able to change the rules of the game in a particular case, as I discussed in the “Supernatural Cheaters” section above.)
Yessir, it would definitely be one or another of the above items in any given case, or possibly some ninth, tenth, or eleventh variation beyond the ones I’ve listed, and that’s a fact! You can take it to the bank!
When we look at all the different stories that have gotten the green light from editors at DC over the years, one thing becomes crystal-clear about DC’s Official Policy on this weighty subject. Obviously the Official Policy is “We REFUSE to have an Official Policy on this subject! We don’t impose any particular answer to that question on all our writers! Each writer can roll his own as he goes along for the sake of a specific story he wants to tell! Tomorrow morning, another writer may blatantly contradict the last writer to touch upon this topic, for the sake of a different story that he wants to tell! And so on, and so forth! Live with it, people!”
(Except, of course, that since they refuse to have an Official Policy, they don’t even admit in writing, as far as I know, that their Official Policy is to Not Have an Official Policy! I just had to derive their Non-Policy from the available evidence and hope I got it right!)
Now aren’t you glad we’ve cleared all that up? (And to think that some people have suggested the subject is confusing and ambiguous!)
BIBLIOGRAPHY – Stories Supporting One Possible Situation or Another
1. This was implicitly assumed in various pre-Crisis stories (Silver Age Imaginary Stories and so forth, including Bob Haney’s “Super-Sons” stories and Alan Moore’s “Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?”) about the possibility of Clark Kent mating with Lois Lane, or any other Earthwoman for that matter. Post-Crisis, it still got some support from such details as the experience Ma and Pa Kent had in raising Baby Clark after they saw something crash down into a field and investigated. The spacecraft opened up to reveal a baby boy. Martha Kent promptly picked him up. Nothing terrible happened. That’s important. It means:
The baby did not break her bones with superstrong flailings of his limbs.
The baby did not shatter her eardrums with superloud cries at point-blank range.
The baby did not fry her with the unwitting use of heat vision.
Nor did any of those calamities ever happen later on, despite the total ignorance of both the foster parents and the foster child in the early years regarding the possible dangers! If a newborn baby who’s a full-blooded Kryptonian in a terrestrial environment does not yet actively possess, and thus cannot accidentally use, incredibly destructive superpowers before he’s old enough to learn how to handle them responsibly, then it seems that an unborn or newborn baby who is only half-Kryptonian will be even less likely to already possess and utilize destructive superpowers at such a tender age, neither before, during, nor shortly after the actual childbirth.
2. In John Byrne’s first “Superman/Batman: Generations” miniseries, Lois Lane married Clark Kent and bore two children. Both Gold K and Green K were used at different times, with the result that she survived both pregnancies just fine. On the other hand, in Adventures of Superman Annual #3 (part of the alternate futures of the Armageddon 2001 event in DC's 1991 annuals), it did not occur to Lois and Clark to take any such precautions, with the tragic result that Lois died of internal injuries the first time the developing baby started to kick. (Action Comics Clark believes this now?)
3. John Byrne ran with this idea in his Elseworlds story for Action Comics Annual #6. In the 18th Century, Gar-El, a grown Kryptonian Male landed in England and married an Englishwoman. She apparently did fine for the nine months of pregnancy but then died in childbirth, giving her husband a healthy baby boy. Although we are only told of this in general terms in dialogue set a couple of hundred years after the fact, it seems implicit that the superpowers didn’t really start to kick in and make trouble until the mother went into labor and the baby really started trying to fight its way out of the womb. Anyway, that half-Kryptonian boy grew up and married an Englishwoman and she too died in childbirth and a new baby boy, just one-quarter Kryptonian, was born. Eventually the Kryptonian blood got watered down to the point where it was no longer particularly dangerous for a girl to marry into the family and help breed a new generation, and by the late 20th Century, young Kal-El was for all practical purposes an idealistic human gentleman who just happened to enjoy a lofty status because he had a bare trace of Kryptonian blood in his pedigree in the direct male line (but no superpowers at all).
4. In the aforementioned Adventures of Superman Annual #3, this was the approach that worked more successfully for Clark when he married Maxima at the end of the story. Frank Miller in “Dark Knight Strikes Again” also informed us (in an alternate timeline that only exists in his own work on a possible future for the DCU) that it worked out fine and dandy when Superman mated with Wonder Woman.
5. The modern Superboy was created this way and then rapidly aged all the way from embryo to physical adolescence; he never had a mother to carry him to term. He has variously been presented as a clone of Superman’s; as a genetically engineered organism based on cloning some human DNA and then splicing in a few special modifications meant to imitate Superman’s powers by other means if possible (with mixed success, it seemed at the time); and most recently as a genetically engineered hybrid whose ancestry is 50% Superman and 50% Lex Luthor. (That last approach, if you buy it – which I prefer not to - would in fact make him Superman’s half-human, half-Kryptonian son; it’s just that Superboy is in the odd situation of having two fathers and zero mothers.) Whatever he is, Project Cadmus was obviously able to get satisfactory results with their hi-tech substitute for the normal gestation process.
6. This is not the sort of thing that we are likely to ever see happen onstage, in graphic detail, in any comic book published by DC. And I wouldn’t enjoy it if we did. (Although I suddenly recall that there was a time in the 1970s when the Parasite was artificially magnifying Superman’s “normal” powers to the extent that when Our Hero thoughtlessly gave Lois Lane one little kiss, he accidentally sucked all the air out of her lungs in a split-second and she collapsed! She got over it, though, but it was the barest taste of all the things that could go wrong if Superman ever lost control of his powers in an intimate moment.) However, Larry Niven’s “Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex” article, first published in 1969, discusses everything he can think of that could go terribly wrong during and after a Kryptonian Male/Human Female mating session. Incidentally, Frank Miller seemed to agree with Niven’s pessimistic take on the subject when he had Superman (the “Dark Knight Strikes Again” version) caution his daughter to never have sex with mere mortals – “they’re too fragile.”
7. In the Silver Age, it appeared that if you simply put Superman in a room saturated with red solar radiation, all his powers disappeared. Lex Luthor did it that way in Action Comics #500, for instance. (More recently, Mark Millar, in his Elseworlds “Superman: Red Son” treated that same idea as gospel for his purposes.) Even his strength disappeared despite the competing theory that it was largely a function of Earth’s gravity being so much lighter than Krypton’s. At any rate, this approach does not require a single molecule of Kryptonite, but would put the female participant in no greater danger than the act of getting pregnant ever does. I suppose you would then want to keep the expectant mother in a red-solar-radiation environment for the next nine months to be on the safe side and avoid some of the scarier outcomes listed above, but with proper planning and a fat budget, all that could be carefully arranged so she would have the run of a large compound and its various facilities instead of just being required to sit in one little room and get bored to death. Heavy-Duty Magic could probably achieve much the same ends, or there might be other methods. If the red-solar-radiation thing was not adequate to reduce Superman and his unborn children to “mere human levels,” you’d have to experiment with more strenuous measures. Doing the entire thing in an exact replica of a Kryptonian environment (not just sunlight, but also gravity, etc.) seems incredibly impractical because Kryptonian gravity would presumably kill Lois Lane very quickly. (Wonder Woman might do better under high G’s, but if you’re going to use Wonder Woman as the mother, as in Situation 4, it’s probably a lot less important just where you do it than it would be with any woman with a normal human metabolism.)
8. I am not sure that any published Superman story has ever bothered to explore this highly logical, but not very dramatic, scenario. Although we have had things that might be taken as hints that it would in fact be the smart way to bet. For instance, Man of Steel (the 1986 miniseries) #5, by John Byrne. Lex Luthor has set up a project to secretly scan Superman’s body and try to analyze and then duplicate his DNA to create an artificial Superman. It doesn’t work out so well as he hoped. A scientist tells Luthor that the fundamental assumption they had all been going on in rigging up their equipment and programming it to work was that Superman’s DNA would basically be human. Probably with a few unusual mutations or other twists to give him all those neat powers, but still a member of the human family, right? In which case their project would have worked like a charm, they believe. But after glancing at the readouts from the scanning, it’s painfully clear that Superman’s genetic structure is so fundamentally different that he is definitely not any member or kissing cousin of the human race. (So what they got was a short-lived unstable Bizarro imitation that finally got smashed into a cloud of white powder.)
On a similar note, in the days of the Death of Superman and its aftermath, we were told that Project Cadmus had not succeeded in their heartfelt attempts to find a way to use gene samples from Superman to create viable clones of him. Logically, if (at that time) even the leading-edge technology of Project Cadmus could not succeed in properly analzying, manipulating, and/or cloning a sample of Kryptonian DNA by artificial measures despite their great success with Earth-human DNA, then it seems even less likely that Kryptonian DNA could somehow just magically make a successful mating with an Earthwoman’s DNA in the “natural” method of reproduction with no fancy outside assistance at all!
(Granted, that chain of logic suffered a small setback a couple of years ago when Geoff Johns “revealed” via retcon that actually, someone at Cadmus had managed to splice Kryptonian and Earthling DNA together without a hitch and then everybody lied about it for the next several years whenever the subject came up. Ah well . . .)
Now, I said that I can’t recall anytime when any Superman story explicitly said that no matter how hard he tried, he’d be totally incapable of getting an Earthwoman pregnant. However, there was at least one time when a writer dealing with a blatant Superman-knockoff character made exactly that point.
In the first issue of his 12-part Squadron Supreme series (later collected as a TPB graphic novel), writer Mark Gruenwald had Hyperion tell his reporter girlfriend that this was the case – he didn’t mention such tricks as gene splicing or Supernatural Cheating against the laws of nature as being viable alternatives; he just stated, in effect, that no marriage between them could possibly be fruitful because he was utterly alien in his biology. The way he said it and then promptly flew off, leaving her crying, contained the fascinatingly shallow assumption on his part that she couldn’t possibly still want to marry him, nor he want to marry her, for any reason other than specifically producing and raising a bunch of kids. Was Hyperion aware that even when both husband and wife are of the exact same species, some loving couples find themselves unable to reproduce but don’t automatically regard their marriage as a totally pointless experience?
For instance, George Washington, sometimes called the Father of His Country, never managed to get his wife Martha pregnant. Since he was her second husband and she’d borne several kids by her first one, it seems likely that any fertility problems were lurking somewhere in George’s metabolism rather than hers. Presumably he didn’t know that when he married her, but even if medical science of the 18th Century had been sufficiently advanced for him to know, I suspect he would have vehemently rejected Hyperion’s blithe assumption that if you can’t have kids, there’s no reason to get married!
(Am I aware that Gruenwald later stuck in a retcon to the effect that Hyperion had never actually bothered to have anybody check his DNA before, and when someone finally did, they found he was in fact descended from terrestrial stock and presumably could be fertile with Earthwomen? Yes, I am aware of that. But it’s irrelevant to the point that was being made in Squadron Supreme #1 when he honestly thought he was nonhuman and explained the fertility problem on that basis.)
That's the end of Part 10. The previous installments are available at these links:
Part 1: “We can’t follow the normal timetable!”
Part 2: Pregnancy Problems
Part 3: The Obscurity Waiver
Part 4: The Long-Lost Child Syndrome
Part 5: Never-Lost-But-Never-Before-Mentioned Children
Part 6: No Pregnancy Required
Part 7: Prefabricated Children
Part 8: New Blood Ties for Old Characters
Part 9: Foster Children
Part 11 will deal with some cases of what might be called subspecies at most, human beings who have managed to acquire one or two mutations or other oddities that give them superpowers, and what evidence there is regarding whether they can consistently pass along their superpowers to their offspring, and why. My current working title for it is: “Mutants, Metagenes, and Breeding True.” That is subject to change without notice, however.
), but most of the examples I gave came from matings of two people who presumably were of the same species if anyone ever bothered to check their DNA. I have also mentioned a few cases where that probably was not true, but each time I chose to firmly ignore the bizarre genetic implications in favor of discussing other aspects of the case. Until now! This one is in two sections.
1. Different Types of Interbreeding
2. Several Answers to "What would happen if a Kryptonian Male mated with an Earthwoman?"
1. Different Types of Interbreeding
I won’t try to list every single weird species of Marvel or DC continuity that is definitely cross-fertile with normal humans, but I will try to sort them out into some general categories depending upon just how much they ought to have in common, genetically, with a “normal human.”
Just to confuse the issue, some writers commonly refer to “alien races” in contexts that clearly are supposed to mean “not related to Earth-humans at all!” I would prefer to call such peoples “alien species” for the sake of biological clarity, and reserve the term “race” for a subgroup within a single species, but what can I do?
There are at least three broad categories that come to mind.
A. Kissing Cousins
B. Distant Strangers
C. Supernatural Cheaters
A. Kissing Cousins
“Kissing Cousins” in this context refers to the relationship between two population groups that on the one hand are still nearly genetically identical and thus can successfully interbreed - at least in some cases - but on the other hand have developed enough different characteristics in each group that biologists insist they are two separate species instead of just one large species with smaller racial groups within its population. (Or, in the comic book universes, it may not be clear if biologists feel that way, but it is made very clear that the people belonging to a particular group definitely do!)
First, a real-world example: Wolves, dogs, coyotes, and jackals are all classified as separate species, but all are considered members of the Genus Canis, and online sources report that genetically they can all interbreed with one another to produce fertile offspring, although I gather that in practice, wild specimens of these various groups usually prefer not to. (Although I'm not sure wild jackals and wild coyotes have ever inhabited the same continent at the same time, so that particular mixture may not have gotten much of a field test.)
If we look for a case a tad further apart than that, we have horses and donkeys. They can interbreed to produce a mule. A mule, however, is a sterile hybrid that cannot produce children of its own. Likewise, a lion/tiger mating sometimes produces a creature called a liger which is in the same boat as a mule – it will never have children.
In the real world, no one has yet found anything that qualifies as a “Kissing Cousin” of homo sapiens. We have found other primates, but I’ve never heard of any of them managing to reproduce with a human. (I admit that I don't know how often anyone has actually tried, and frankly, I don't really want to know!)
Of course, in the real world, we have not yet managed to achieve interstellar travel, nor have we found ways to travel to parallel worlds or other types of extradimensional continuums or whatever you want to call them. Characters in the big superhero universes have many more opportunities to go out there and find strange new types of "people" to breed with.
The Marvel Universe has several breeds that are frequently called separate races, who do not seem to regard themselves as being part of the mainstream “Human Race” at all, but who would admit (if you twisted their arms) that they all come from local Homo Sapiens stock if you go back enough millennia. Eternals, Deviants, Inhumans, Atlanteans. Children who serve as examples of crossbreeding between members of two "Kissing Cousins" species include:
Namor the Sub-Mariner (child of Fen, an Atlantean princess, and Captain Leonard Mackenzie, a human).
Deborah and Donald Ritter (twin children of Thena the Eternal and Kro the Deviant).
Luna (child of Quicksilver the human mutant, and Crystal the Inhuman).
The DCU also has its fair share of Kissing Cousins to the “normal” human race. Atlanteans, for instance. Aquaman (allegedly created in the Golden Age to explicitly be a knockoff of Marvel’s popular Sub-Mariner) is at least partially Atlantean by birth. Probably.
You see, Aquaman's genetic heritage has been all over the map. At various times, beginning in the Golden Age with what would technically be the now-nonexistent Earth-2 Aquaman, he has been presented as:
1. The son of scientist Tom Curry, Tom having learned some ancient Atlantean secrets that included how to let a boy breathe underwater (both Mr. and Mrs. Curry presumably being members of the human race).
2. The son of lighthouse keeper Tom Curry by his wife, who this time around just happened to be a beautiful Atlantean princess named Atlanna who washed up near his lighthouse after being exiled from Atlantis.
3. The child of Atlanna by someone unnamed (a fellow Atlantean, maybe?), in a story written by Keith Giffen in the late 80s. I gather that a man named Arthur Curry ended up raising the boy, but apparently had never even met the mother at all, much less got her pregnant! (Bear with me - I haven't actually read that story).
4. The child of Atlanna by the mysterious, ancient wizard called Atlan, in stories writen by Peter David. (This could be called an expansion of the Giffen origin, which left his paternity rather vague.) Again, I believe we have a man named Arthur Curry being something of a father-figure to the kid for awhile, with the result that young "Orin" sometimes used the same name, Arthur Curry, in dealings with surface-dwelling humans afterwards, unless I've completely lost track of the continuity here (no promises!).
Well, three versions out of four agree that his mother was an Atlantean princess named Atlanna. That's something!
Aquaman, whether he is full-blooded Atlantean or some sort of hybrid, has managed to successfully reproduce at least twice with people who presumably didn’t have a drop of Atlantean blood in their veins; or at least we were never told that they did. Once with Mera who was from a water-breathing population in another dimensional reality, and once with Kako, an Eskimo girl.
DC also has Homo Magi (literally “magic men”). They apparently have spent centuries living apart from the rest of the human race, and have a genetic predilection for supernatural activity. Zatanna’s mother was one of them. This detail of her family tree, and the existence of the Homo Magi in general, was only revealed in the JLA title of the 1970s. For a decade or so before that, her magical powers were supposed to be solely inherited from her daddy, Zatara the GA magician hero, who just happened to have the ability to make things happen by chanting the commands backwards.
And of course DC has the Feitherans. Northwind of Infinity Inc. in the 1980s was the hybrid of an African-American father and a beaked-and-feathered mother. Their son did not have the beak, but he did have a tuft of feathers sprouting from the top of his head, which he usually covered with a turban or other headgear when he was trying to socialize with ordinary people in his “secret identity.” In his superhero costume, he didn’t bother concealing the feathers, although I would hazard a guess that most people who met him casually in his superhero activities probably assumed they were some sort of affectation rather than natural growth. (Been so long since I read my Infinity Inc. collection straight through that I could be wrong about that, however.)
B. Distant Strangers
This is what I call populations that may superficially resemble Earth-humans to an amazing degree, but - according to their backstories - should not have any noticeable genetic relationship, unlike the Kissing Cousins. As a rule of thumb, I figure if a group has been living on Earth for the last several thousand years (or is explicitly stated to be descended from people who started out on Earth and then emigrated to somewhere else, such as the people Travis Morgan the Warlord has met in Skartaris) then it makes sense that they are some sort of human being, or at most “kissing cousins” to human beings. There are some humanoid populations of other dimensional realities, etc., whose origins are extremely unclear but might be derived from Earth-human stock as well, in whole or in part, if only we had the full story. But if their ancestry is explicitly stated to come from some other planet entirely, their DNA ought to be very different from anything you see among the natives in our neck of the woods.
The most obvious example of a Distant Stranger is Superman. As a Kryptonian, it should be utterly impossible for him to “naturally” mate with any human female. The DNA ought to be completely different and thus incompatible - in fact, we have been told more than once that the DNA really is completely different! Likewise, the SA Hawkman and Hawkgirl were Thanagarians, another planet’s population that just happened to greatly resemble Earthmen by a remarkable coincidence. (On the other hand, since the Silver Age characters Katar Hol and Shiera made no secret of the fact that they were only interested in mating with each other, inconvenient questions about the plausibility of Interspecies Matings never arose in that context.)
We’ll address Superman’s possible reproductive problems in much more detail further down in this post. Right now, let’s just skim through some of the other noteworthy cases of “Distant Strangers” who have attempted to mate with Earthlings.
The “Kingdom Come” and “The Kingdom” stories have shown us a possible future in which the golden-skinned (like her mother), black-haired (like her father) daughter of Nightwing and Starfire is called Nightstar. Starfire, of course, is Princess Koriand'r of Tamaran (a planet that orbited Vega) and shouldn't have any human genes in her that I know of.
In the 1980s, we saw a few appearances in Titans continuity by Thunder and Lightning, also known as Gan and Tavis Williams, a couple of half-Vietnamese youngsters whose long-lost father turned out to be an alien who had posed as "Walter Williams," an American officer in Vietnam. Oddly enough, when we got a good look at him in what was presumably his "real" or "default" form, he didn't look even remotely human to me; perhaps he was a shapeshifter or something. Despite which he had been quite fertile with a Vietnamese woman.
(To clarify something: the Thunder in question is apparently no relation to two other Thunders who have subsequently been introduced into the DC Universe. CeCe Bec from the 90th Century, and Anissa Pierce, daughter of Black Lightning, the Thunder who is a member of the newest version of the Outsiders.)
On the Marvel side of things, Distant Strangers of distinctly humanoid appearance would include the Kree (who come in both blue-skinned and pink-skinned racial types) and the Shi’ar. I don’t count the Skrulls, however, because they don’t look all that “Human” in their natural forms, despite having two arms and two legs. Granted, they can change their appearances to look very human (as Johnny Storm painfully discovered when Tom DeFalco decided to bust up his marriage with a retcon), but I don’t think of them as particularly humanoid and I don't think offhand that there's any solid evidence that a Skrull can successfully mate with a human or any Kissing Cousin of humanity.
(Note: I am aware that in the "Earth X" series and its sequels ("Universe X" and "Paradise X"), it has been stated that Sui-San, the mother of Thanos and Starfox, was a Skrull female who took the shape of an Earthwoman and married Alars aka Mentor, an Eternal who came to Titan to start up a new colony. However, as far as I know, none of the retcons or revelations of "Earth X" are considered to have any official bearing on the rest of the Marvel universe - it's more like a huge Elseworlds project; the problem being that Marvel has never quite gotten a clue about the need to have an imprint that would be the equivalent of Elseworlds. Their "What If?" stories are generally much, much shorter and don't fill the same need.)
Outside of the mainstream continuities of the superhero universes, we have other cases. Mr. Spock of the original Star Trek, who has appeared in many a comic book in his time, was supposed to be a hybrid of Sarek of Vulcan and Amanda Grayson (?) of Earth. (Amanda was no relation to Dick Grayson as far as I know, but who can say, really?) I believe it was explicitly stated in the TV scripts that Vulcan blood chemistry has copper-based molecules, giving them their notorious green blood (instead of the iron-based hemoglobin that gives Earth-humans their notorious red blood). The implication seemed to be that Love Conquers All; when Amanda and Sarek went on their honeymoon, he was able to get her pregnant just as if they were members of the same species, even if their blood chemistries were wildly different.
(On the other hand, I have read many of the novels written about the characters of the original Star Trek series over the years, and I believe at least two different authors have explicitly taken the position that even if nobody ever got around to spelling it out for us in the old days, Mister Spock must have been the result of some very sophisticated and groundbreaking genetic engineering on the part of Vulcan scientists working with cell samples taken from both parents; he never could have existed if his parents had tried to do it all themselves, at home, the old-fashioned way. Since details of pregnancy were not common topics of conversation in television shows of the 1960s, I don’t think the original episodes relating to Spock’s family background and such were ever specific on exactly HOW his parents had arranged for him to be born. Could be one way, could be another!)
C. Supernatural Cheaters
I don’t mean “Cheaters” in the pejorative sense of “adulterers”; only in the broader sense of “people who break the normal rules to get what they want.” The laws of genetics, in this case.
Example: Raven of the New Teen Titans was revealed in 1981 to be the daughter of a woman named Arella and an extradimensional demon lord named Trigon. So far as I know, there has never been any particular reason to think that Trigon has genes that would mark him as a member or Kissing Cousin of the human race. But he presumably could use Heap Big Magic to make the genes contained within his sperm and those within Arella’s ovum mix together successfully to create a human-looking child who would inherit some of Trigon’s supernatural power.
(What’s that? You think all this sounds suspiciously familiar? Come to think of, you’re right! A very similar origin had been used years earlier at Marvel for Daimon Hellstrom, who initially used the catchy, upbeat nickname “Son of Satan.” Not to mention his sister, Satana! I believe Mephisto was eventually revealed to be their father. Presumably the same implicit assumptions about Magic trumping Genetic Logic would apply in that family tree.)
Similar excuses could apply to crossbreedings between mythological deities of various flavors (Graeco-Roman, Norse, Egyptian, etc.) and normal humans. (Or not, depending on what sort of origin story you like to believe applies to those "deities" in one universe or another, but let's not go into that right now.)
“Supernatural Cheater” also seemed to be the excuse back around the mid-1980s when Steve Englehart did a “Vsion and the Scarlet Witch” limited series that included Wanda Maximoff getting pregnant with twin children by her husband. Considering that her husband was an artificial construct, alleged (at the time) to basically be a heavily rebuilt version of the android body of the original Human Torch of the Golden Age, it was very hard to see how Vision could possibly have any genes at all; much less genes that could possibly mix successfully with Wanda’s as part of “normal” reproductive activity in order to produce a pregnancy! But there was a convenient built-in excuse: Wanda’s well-established mutant power allowed her to play hob with the normal “laws” of probability in a good cause, and she also had some honest-to-goodness mystical abilities as well. Put it all together and it was at least plausible for plot purposes that she could work a reproductive miracle if she really wanted to.
John Byrne, after he took over on the West Coast Avengers title, used the sheer implausibility of woman/synthezoid reproduction as an excuse to “reveal” that actually those two children had basically been physical manifestations of figments of Wanda’s supernaturally hyperactive imagination without her or anyone else realizing it for a long time. I’ve heard of the medical phenomenon of “hysterical pregnancy,” but this took that concept to a whole new level. Heck, Doctor Strange was present at the childbirth, and even he didn’t smell a supernatural rat. (But he’s only a trained surgeon and the Sorcerer Supreme, so what would he know about it?)
2. SEVERAL ANSWERS TO "WHAT WOULD HAPPEN IF A KRYPTONIAN MALE MATED WITH AN EARTHWOMAN?"
I’m going to have to delve more into Elseworlds stories and other “out of continuity” stuff than I usually do, since “in continuity” Superman has never yet had any children in the conventional fashion, and I believe DC still clings to the doctrine that he is the Last Son of Krypton, the only surviving Kryptonian Male at the moment. (Until Kara Zor-El just recently returned, he was allegedly the only surviving Kryptonian, period, except for pocket universes and time travel and other weird stuff.)
One warning: I have not yet read Mark Waid’s 12-part “Birthright.” I’ve seen the collected hardback edition on the shelves, but I don’t feel the overwhelming need to spend that much money on it. I may buy it when it’s released in TPB. If I’m missing any “new evidence” that could be derived from anything Waid said in that story, I’m sorry. In the meantime I’m just going to fiddle around with the different possibilities, based upon what I know about various takes on the subject from pre-Birthright stories.
First I’ll list what I see as possible situations, then I’ll provide a Bibliography referring to stories or other materials that would seem to support each interpretation.
In a proposed mating of Kryptonian Male and Earthwoman genes, meant to produce a child, several different situations might arise depending upon how they went about it and which story by which writer you prefer to believe. I am generally assuming that the mating and subsequent pregnancy (if any) takes place on Earth or in an Earthlike environment.
POSSIBLE SITUATIONS
1. No more dangerous than any normal pregnancy, because the child’s Kryptonian superpowers wouldn’t become apparent until well after the birth of the child, as organs matured and/or as the cumulative effects of years of exposure to yellow solar radiation became visible and/or as the child’s brain subconsciously learned how to flex its psychic muscles in new and different ways. (John Byrne and others have hinted that Superman’s flight, and at least some of his strength and invulnerability, may be based on subconscious telekinesis as much as anything. If so, then the modern Superboy’s obvious tactile telekinesis simply means he has much greater conscious control over the same ability – perhaps it simply took young Clark Kent several years to learn how to think in the proper ways to make the ability work at all?)
2. The tragic death of the mother during the pregnancy, probably before the child was anywhere near being viable outside the womb, because the child’s superpowers would start acting up pretty darn soon. (Unless Gold K was used to remove the child’s powers or a very carefully measured amount of Green K was used to dampen those powers without “hurting” the child.
3. The death of the mother, but probably not until the stresses of childbirth at the end of a nine-month pregnancy, when the superhuman kid, at least, would be likely to survive. As in #2, you may have the option of saving both mother and child if you have access to Green and/or Gold K.
4. “Use a Super-Powered Mother and save yourself a lot of grief!” This one is not really a variation on a Kryptonian Male/Normal Earthwoman mating, but rather an alternative. If it has to be a female of a different species than the sire, make darn sure she’s tough enough to take it. In other words, the best way to avoid the lethal problems of #2 or #3 might be to recruit a mother (or surrogate mother?) who was technically human, or at least some type of humanoid other than Kryptonian if that’s the best you can do, but in any event was superpowered in a way that made her a much better prospect to survive the unique stresses of such a pregnancy with flying colors.
5. Possibly best done in a test tube, either by simple artificial insemination or by more sophisticated genetic engineering techniques, and nurtured in some sort of artificial-equivalent-of-a-womb setup in order to completely avoid the problems of Situations 2 or 3 above. (What Lois McMaster Bujold calls a uterine replicator in her award-winning science fiction series about Miles Vorkosigan and his relatives.) The modern Superboy was allegedly the result of this approach, whether or not his genetic code actually has any Kryptonian material in it. (As I said in an earlier installment, he seems to have gone through at least three separate origin stories, genetically speaking.)
6. The very act of attempted conception through “normal” sexual activity with a Kryptonian male would probably kill an Earthwoman very quickly (unless some sort of Kryptonite, high-powered magic, alien technology, or other method of changing the basic circumstances was involved), as explained in loving detail by Larry Niven. A link to his essay is provided below, in the Bibliography. I’ll just point out that if Situation 6 applied, it would make the whole problem of how to successfully complete a nine-month pregnancy a purely hypothetical point if the prospective mother couldn’t even survive the first ten minutes of the attempt to get pregnant the old-fashioned way!
7. Possibly could be facilitated by making a few simple changes in the local environment so that the superpowers thing wouldn’t be a factor until you wanted it to be, and you don't need to play games with any radioactive kryptonite either.
8. Such a mating would obviously result in no pregnancy at all if you were trying to do it the old-fashioned, natural way, because since when can organisms that come from different solar systems suddenly be magically compatible, genetically? Two species may be sufficiently “parallel” in their anatomy to mutually enjoy sexual activity together, but that is entirely separate from the question of potential fertility. The implication of this one, if established as “true” in the modern DCU continuity, would be that Superman has nothing to worry about! He can’t get his wife Lois pregnant in the first place no matter how often they might try, therefore he needn’t lose any sleep over the dreadful thought of what terrible risks to her health such a pregnancy might pose! (Again, high-powered magic might be able to change the rules of the game in a particular case, as I discussed in the “Supernatural Cheaters” section above.)
Yessir, it would definitely be one or another of the above items in any given case, or possibly some ninth, tenth, or eleventh variation beyond the ones I’ve listed, and that’s a fact! You can take it to the bank!
When we look at all the different stories that have gotten the green light from editors at DC over the years, one thing becomes crystal-clear about DC’s Official Policy on this weighty subject. Obviously the Official Policy is “We REFUSE to have an Official Policy on this subject! We don’t impose any particular answer to that question on all our writers! Each writer can roll his own as he goes along for the sake of a specific story he wants to tell! Tomorrow morning, another writer may blatantly contradict the last writer to touch upon this topic, for the sake of a different story that he wants to tell! And so on, and so forth! Live with it, people!”
(Except, of course, that since they refuse to have an Official Policy, they don’t even admit in writing, as far as I know, that their Official Policy is to Not Have an Official Policy! I just had to derive their Non-Policy from the available evidence and hope I got it right!)
Now aren’t you glad we’ve cleared all that up?
(And to think that some people have suggested the subject is confusing and ambiguous!)BIBLIOGRAPHY – Stories Supporting One Possible Situation or Another
1. This was implicitly assumed in various pre-Crisis stories (Silver Age Imaginary Stories and so forth, including Bob Haney’s “Super-Sons” stories and Alan Moore’s “Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?”) about the possibility of Clark Kent mating with Lois Lane, or any other Earthwoman for that matter. Post-Crisis, it still got some support from such details as the experience Ma and Pa Kent had in raising Baby Clark after they saw something crash down into a field and investigated. The spacecraft opened up to reveal a baby boy. Martha Kent promptly picked him up. Nothing terrible happened. That’s important. It means:
The baby did not break her bones with superstrong flailings of his limbs.
The baby did not shatter her eardrums with superloud cries at point-blank range.
The baby did not fry her with the unwitting use of heat vision.
Nor did any of those calamities ever happen later on, despite the total ignorance of both the foster parents and the foster child in the early years regarding the possible dangers! If a newborn baby who’s a full-blooded Kryptonian in a terrestrial environment does not yet actively possess, and thus cannot accidentally use, incredibly destructive superpowers before he’s old enough to learn how to handle them responsibly, then it seems that an unborn or newborn baby who is only half-Kryptonian will be even less likely to already possess and utilize destructive superpowers at such a tender age, neither before, during, nor shortly after the actual childbirth.
2. In John Byrne’s first “Superman/Batman: Generations” miniseries, Lois Lane married Clark Kent and bore two children. Both Gold K and Green K were used at different times, with the result that she survived both pregnancies just fine. On the other hand, in Adventures of Superman Annual #3 (part of the alternate futures of the Armageddon 2001 event in DC's 1991 annuals), it did not occur to Lois and Clark to take any such precautions, with the tragic result that Lois died of internal injuries the first time the developing baby started to kick. (Action Comics Clark believes this now?)
3. John Byrne ran with this idea in his Elseworlds story for Action Comics Annual #6. In the 18th Century, Gar-El, a grown Kryptonian Male landed in England and married an Englishwoman. She apparently did fine for the nine months of pregnancy but then died in childbirth, giving her husband a healthy baby boy. Although we are only told of this in general terms in dialogue set a couple of hundred years after the fact, it seems implicit that the superpowers didn’t really start to kick in and make trouble until the mother went into labor and the baby really started trying to fight its way out of the womb. Anyway, that half-Kryptonian boy grew up and married an Englishwoman and she too died in childbirth and a new baby boy, just one-quarter Kryptonian, was born. Eventually the Kryptonian blood got watered down to the point where it was no longer particularly dangerous for a girl to marry into the family and help breed a new generation, and by the late 20th Century, young Kal-El was for all practical purposes an idealistic human gentleman who just happened to enjoy a lofty status because he had a bare trace of Kryptonian blood in his pedigree in the direct male line (but no superpowers at all).
4. In the aforementioned Adventures of Superman Annual #3, this was the approach that worked more successfully for Clark when he married Maxima at the end of the story. Frank Miller in “Dark Knight Strikes Again” also informed us (in an alternate timeline that only exists in his own work on a possible future for the DCU) that it worked out fine and dandy when Superman mated with Wonder Woman.
5. The modern Superboy was created this way and then rapidly aged all the way from embryo to physical adolescence; he never had a mother to carry him to term. He has variously been presented as a clone of Superman’s; as a genetically engineered organism based on cloning some human DNA and then splicing in a few special modifications meant to imitate Superman’s powers by other means if possible (with mixed success, it seemed at the time); and most recently as a genetically engineered hybrid whose ancestry is 50% Superman and 50% Lex Luthor. (That last approach, if you buy it – which I prefer not to - would in fact make him Superman’s half-human, half-Kryptonian son; it’s just that Superboy is in the odd situation of having two fathers and zero mothers.) Whatever he is, Project Cadmus was obviously able to get satisfactory results with their hi-tech substitute for the normal gestation process.
6. This is not the sort of thing that we are likely to ever see happen onstage, in graphic detail, in any comic book published by DC. And I wouldn’t enjoy it if we did. (Although I suddenly recall that there was a time in the 1970s when the Parasite was artificially magnifying Superman’s “normal” powers to the extent that when Our Hero thoughtlessly gave Lois Lane one little kiss, he accidentally sucked all the air out of her lungs in a split-second and she collapsed! She got over it, though, but it was the barest taste of all the things that could go wrong if Superman ever lost control of his powers in an intimate moment.) However, Larry Niven’s “Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex” article, first published in 1969, discusses everything he can think of that could go terribly wrong during and after a Kryptonian Male/Human Female mating session. Incidentally, Frank Miller seemed to agree with Niven’s pessimistic take on the subject when he had Superman (the “Dark Knight Strikes Again” version) caution his daughter to never have sex with mere mortals – “they’re too fragile.”
7. In the Silver Age, it appeared that if you simply put Superman in a room saturated with red solar radiation, all his powers disappeared. Lex Luthor did it that way in Action Comics #500, for instance. (More recently, Mark Millar, in his Elseworlds “Superman: Red Son” treated that same idea as gospel for his purposes.) Even his strength disappeared despite the competing theory that it was largely a function of Earth’s gravity being so much lighter than Krypton’s. At any rate, this approach does not require a single molecule of Kryptonite, but would put the female participant in no greater danger than the act of getting pregnant ever does. I suppose you would then want to keep the expectant mother in a red-solar-radiation environment for the next nine months to be on the safe side and avoid some of the scarier outcomes listed above, but with proper planning and a fat budget, all that could be carefully arranged so she would have the run of a large compound and its various facilities instead of just being required to sit in one little room and get bored to death. Heavy-Duty Magic could probably achieve much the same ends, or there might be other methods. If the red-solar-radiation thing was not adequate to reduce Superman and his unborn children to “mere human levels,” you’d have to experiment with more strenuous measures. Doing the entire thing in an exact replica of a Kryptonian environment (not just sunlight, but also gravity, etc.) seems incredibly impractical because Kryptonian gravity would presumably kill Lois Lane very quickly. (Wonder Woman might do better under high G’s, but if you’re going to use Wonder Woman as the mother, as in Situation 4, it’s probably a lot less important just where you do it than it would be with any woman with a normal human metabolism.)
8. I am not sure that any published Superman story has ever bothered to explore this highly logical, but not very dramatic, scenario. Although we have had things that might be taken as hints that it would in fact be the smart way to bet. For instance, Man of Steel (the 1986 miniseries) #5, by John Byrne. Lex Luthor has set up a project to secretly scan Superman’s body and try to analyze and then duplicate his DNA to create an artificial Superman. It doesn’t work out so well as he hoped. A scientist tells Luthor that the fundamental assumption they had all been going on in rigging up their equipment and programming it to work was that Superman’s DNA would basically be human. Probably with a few unusual mutations or other twists to give him all those neat powers, but still a member of the human family, right? In which case their project would have worked like a charm, they believe. But after glancing at the readouts from the scanning, it’s painfully clear that Superman’s genetic structure is so fundamentally different that he is definitely not any member or kissing cousin of the human race. (So what they got was a short-lived unstable Bizarro imitation that finally got smashed into a cloud of white powder.)
On a similar note, in the days of the Death of Superman and its aftermath, we were told that Project Cadmus had not succeeded in their heartfelt attempts to find a way to use gene samples from Superman to create viable clones of him. Logically, if (at that time) even the leading-edge technology of Project Cadmus could not succeed in properly analzying, manipulating, and/or cloning a sample of Kryptonian DNA by artificial measures despite their great success with Earth-human DNA, then it seems even less likely that Kryptonian DNA could somehow just magically make a successful mating with an Earthwoman’s DNA in the “natural” method of reproduction with no fancy outside assistance at all!
(Granted, that chain of logic suffered a small setback a couple of years ago when Geoff Johns “revealed” via retcon that actually, someone at Cadmus had managed to splice Kryptonian and Earthling DNA together without a hitch and then everybody lied about it for the next several years whenever the subject came up. Ah well . . .)
Now, I said that I can’t recall anytime when any Superman story explicitly said that no matter how hard he tried, he’d be totally incapable of getting an Earthwoman pregnant. However, there was at least one time when a writer dealing with a blatant Superman-knockoff character made exactly that point.
In the first issue of his 12-part Squadron Supreme series (later collected as a TPB graphic novel), writer Mark Gruenwald had Hyperion tell his reporter girlfriend that this was the case – he didn’t mention such tricks as gene splicing or Supernatural Cheating against the laws of nature as being viable alternatives; he just stated, in effect, that no marriage between them could possibly be fruitful because he was utterly alien in his biology. The way he said it and then promptly flew off, leaving her crying, contained the fascinatingly shallow assumption on his part that she couldn’t possibly still want to marry him, nor he want to marry her, for any reason other than specifically producing and raising a bunch of kids. Was Hyperion aware that even when both husband and wife are of the exact same species, some loving couples find themselves unable to reproduce but don’t automatically regard their marriage as a totally pointless experience?
For instance, George Washington, sometimes called the Father of His Country, never managed to get his wife Martha pregnant. Since he was her second husband and she’d borne several kids by her first one, it seems likely that any fertility problems were lurking somewhere in George’s metabolism rather than hers. Presumably he didn’t know that when he married her, but even if medical science of the 18th Century had been sufficiently advanced for him to know, I suspect he would have vehemently rejected Hyperion’s blithe assumption that if you can’t have kids, there’s no reason to get married!
(Am I aware that Gruenwald later stuck in a retcon to the effect that Hyperion had never actually bothered to have anybody check his DNA before, and when someone finally did, they found he was in fact descended from terrestrial stock and presumably could be fertile with Earthwomen? Yes, I am aware of that. But it’s irrelevant to the point that was being made in Squadron Supreme #1 when he honestly thought he was nonhuman and explained the fertility problem on that basis.)
That's the end of Part 10. The previous installments are available at these links:
Part 1: “We can’t follow the normal timetable!”
Part 2: Pregnancy Problems
Part 3: The Obscurity Waiver
Part 4: The Long-Lost Child Syndrome
Part 5: Never-Lost-But-Never-Before-Mentioned Children
Part 6: No Pregnancy Required
Part 7: Prefabricated Children
Part 8: New Blood Ties for Old Characters
Part 9: Foster Children
Part 11 will deal with some cases of what might be called subspecies at most, human beings who have managed to acquire one or two mutations or other oddities that give them superpowers, and what evidence there is regarding whether they can consistently pass along their superpowers to their offspring, and why. My current working title for it is: “Mutants, Metagenes, and Breeding True.” That is subject to change without notice, however.
). From flipping through it at the store, it brought back various pre-Crisis aspects---specifically, Clark sent to Earth as an infant/toddler (not a fetus!). Don't know if they brought back his gaining powers quickly under Earth's environment or not, though the 90's/2000s stories seemed leaning more and more toward that direction as time went on....
