Brief Thoughts on Final Crisis #3 (the hospital scene, anyway)
Many of the Daily Planet staff, including Lois Lane, have been seriously injured. Clark Kent is sitting by Lois’s side at the hospital while Jimmy Olsen visits.
A quick nitpick to start things off: due to privacy laws and regulations, you can’t put patient’s names on the doors anymore.
 In this panel, Clark/Superman is talking to the injured Lois and mentions that his “heat vision is the only thing keeping her heart beating.” I’m not quite sure how that would work. Speaking of that, is Clark going to stand by Lois’s side making her heart beat for the rest of her life?
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Is his heat vision physically causing her heart to contract? How would it do that?
August 8th, 2008 at 8:48 am
Not to mention, who the heck is Clark talking to? And did she buy him that shirt/tie combo? Maybe HE killed her!
August 8th, 2008 at 1:22 pm
I had the exact same thought. Is he heating her heart to make it expand and then letting it “cool” to contract? How much could that work? And wouldn’t the cooling be slow? And how would he heat her heart without damaging the tissue between his eyes and her heart?
I absolutely hate it when writers ignore physical laws relative to Superman. Hate it, hate it, hate it.
August 8th, 2008 at 1:28 pm
Isn’t there some medical procedure whre they place warmers directly on the heart? Or where they warm the blood and cycle it back through? Or is that something they invented for TV to make the surgery scenes more dramatic?
I am not sure that learning medicine from TV would be worse than learning it on the streets…
August 8th, 2008 at 7:46 pm
If the only reason her heart was beating was because of him, then she’d have been dead. Because when doctors were taking care of her he couldn’t have gotten close enough to do that.
Also, my grandmother’s been in the hospital recently. Her name’s been on the door
August 8th, 2008 at 11:48 pm
Right up there with punching time for WTH moments.
August 9th, 2008 at 9:19 am
Stupid Clark.
Maybe he is constantly using his heat vision on Lois Lane’s heart, only thinking that it is doing any damn bit of good. Maybe it is a trick that works for Kryptonians or some of the hundreds of other alien races he has encountered and he just got confused.
And when I visited my mother at the hospital, they had the names of all of the patients written on a dry-erase board outside of the door.
August 9th, 2008 at 12:55 pm
Apparently Clark isn’t going to sit at Lois’ side forever; he doesn’t even make it to the end of the PAGE!
August 9th, 2008 at 8:59 pm
Is it true that you can actually see the name “Louise” on her patient ID bracelet? Could he have been roasting the wrong woman’s heart all this time?
I’m actually more confused about whether we are to believe that this was actually Libra’s plan, and that he somehow knew Lois would not die in the blast, and that Supes would not be free to go take revenge.
August 10th, 2008 at 12:36 pm
Yeah, I think Clark’s delusional. He even thinks he can fly.
August 10th, 2008 at 11:59 pm
Official Comment
They’re not supposed to have names posted where any passerby can read them and discover who’s been admitted, but for some hospitals old habits die hard. A hospital stay is supposed to be anonymous.
August 11th, 2008 at 2:47 pm
Funny thing, last night I was reading this issue, and I thought “Uh? that heat thing can’t really work, guess I’m gonna read about it on Polite Dissent soon.”
Also, Clark is not helping her in any way.
1: When she was with the trauma team, Clark would not have been there to supply the “heat treatment”
2: Any amount of heat that would make it through to her heart would leave a noticeable trace on her skin. (Especially since the heat vision is, as far as I know, two concentrated beams)
3: Any heat projected through the glasses would cause damage to the glasses.
4: On the off chance that Clark used the glasses to compensates effect 2, and used the glasses to diffuse heat in a more radiant fashion, thus leading to controlled amounts of heat that would go through the cloth, skin and tissues and that would, for some medical reason, help keep Lois alive, he is still making sure she won’t survive, because he needs sleep, and a heating blanket might provide a more reliable alternative.
In addition, in the second frame, he is looking at her face (well throat anyway) and not her heart.
A last nitpick: she’s in a coma, she can’t really feel pain as far as I know.
August 11th, 2008 at 4:46 pm
maybe we just know less about superman’s heat vision than we thought we did, he’s superman!
August 11th, 2008 at 5:51 pm
Come on, is Morrison. If he can cure cancer with a bunch of microscopic kandorians, he can do anything! Maybe Supes is heating the entire universe!
August 11th, 2008 at 8:23 pm
Who says Clark is being literal right there? Maybe it’s a weird Morrison/tense thing of “My heat vision is the only thing keeping her heart beating (after my earlier actions)”. That’s just as likely as perpetually heating her heart (whatever that would do…)
August 14th, 2008 at 12:53 am
The glasses are made of a weird kryptonian material in old continuity, so, that’s one problem solved… ish.
August 14th, 2008 at 3:52 am
Yeah, I read it as being badly worded. Clark’s just saying that his earlier incomprehensible heat-vision actions are the only reason her heart is still beating. I would have thought that this speech bubble is why comics have editors.
January 24th, 2009 at 5:18 pm
[...] I have also discovered the blog of Polite Dissent. Not only is it 8 kinds of awesome, but he points out how stupid Superman using heat vision to keep his wife alive. Twice! He also explains why I kept wanting to write “Louis” instead of “Lois”. [...]
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