Stitching Up the Man of Steel
This scene raises a good question: how do you close the wounds of a man with invulnerable skin?
As I see it, there are several options:
2. Use a needle that can puncture the skin — for example the Kryptonite needle used against Supergirl in Justice League Unlimited.
3. Decrease the skin’s invulnerability while the repair is going on. In the Silver Age, exposure to Kryptonite would rob Superman of his invulnerability; magic would be another possibility (like the time Clark had to donate blood at work).
4. Superman could rip open tiny holes in his skin with his super-strength, then the suture could be threaded through them and pulled tight, like a shoelace. Sounds masochistic, I know, but this is how Superman used to donate blood: by ripping open his skin and veins. Conceivably, his heat vision could be used the same way.
5. Argue semantics. Is it just the skin that is invulnerable, or all of his tissues? If it is just the skin that’s invulnerable, then you could sew up the wounds with subcuticular sutures (stitches which go just below the skin).
Scene from Superman/Wonder Woman: Whom Gods Destroy, a mostly forgotten Elseworlds series from 1997 by Chris Claremont and Dusty Abell
February 27th, 2009 at 7:00 am
>>a mostly forgotten Elseworlds series from 1997
Not forgotten by me! This is actually one of my favorite Elseworld comic series!
February 27th, 2009 at 7:58 am
I remember in one of the first issues John Byrne’s reboot of Superman, back in the ’80s (Superman #4 Apr-87, to be precise), when Bloodsport (the black one) shoot Supes with kryptonite needles, and the surgeon who removed them used the same needles to “weaken” the skin in order to suture it. Now, another proof of the quality of John Byrne reimagining, not the E. Coli they have been doing this century.
February 27th, 2009 at 9:50 am
You are overthinking the room, good doctor. This is the DCU. I’ll give you several options:
1. “Laeh Namrepus.”
2. Firestorm can transmute Superman’s skin into human flesh.
3. Martian Manhunter can read Doctor Midnite’s mind and phase through Superman’s skin and perform the necessary prodecures.
4. A Green Lantern (Earth has one in every Zip Code) can will a steel-skin puncturing suture kit into existence.
5. Rip Hunter could time warp Superman to before he got injured.
6. Hit Batman and Lex Luthor up for steel-skin cutting gear. I’m sure they have closet-fulls.
February 27th, 2009 at 10:59 am
Harvey – A+ I like it.
Scott – “5. Argue semantics. Is it just the skin that is invulnerable, or all of his tissues? If it is just the skin that’s invulnerable, then you could sew up the wounds with subcuticular sutures (stitches which go just below the skin).”
If it’s just the skin, he would be able to be treated like just about anything other person, with the exception of how to bind the skin back together, but I suspect tape/glue would be fine. However, if its all his organs, which seems much more likely he may still be ok, as when they are patching him up they can man-handle his organs with very little fear of damaging them any further(most doctors dont have super powers, except you). I would imagine at that point it would be similair to the skin repair, the medical staff could just reaasemble what was broken using tape/glue/bandages etc even on his internal organs. It wouldn’t be pretty, but it might work.
Disclaimer – I’m not a doctor, but I have seen people who pretend to be doctors on TV. :-P
February 27th, 2009 at 12:09 pm
Sorry Harvey, Firestorm can’t do organics.
I suppose if Supes was forced to, he could always stop bleeding with his heat vision, but that wouldn’t do much for larger open wounds. Sadly this sounds like a case where super-ventriloquism does not apply.
February 27th, 2009 at 12:38 pm
Wouldn’t red sun light do the trick without the toxic effects of Kryptonite or the unpredictable side effects of magic?
February 27th, 2009 at 6:35 pm
I suspect that it’s not just his skin that’s invulnerable. He’d have to be similarly resilient all the way through. Otherwise, I imagine his insides would liquefy the first time he got punched by Doomsday or Zod or flew into a mountainside.
February 28th, 2009 at 7:02 pm
Um, going off topic for a moment, how the heck could Superman donate blood to a human? He’s an extraterrestrial, remember? (Not that anything else about the guy is remotely plausible, of course.)
February 28th, 2009 at 11:37 pm
In the silver age, Supes could also get a needle from Krypton’s past. All Kryptonian objects became similarly super under a yellow sun, so it would now be a super-needle capable of piercing his skin.
As a stop-gap measure, he could always be put into the Phantom Zone. Well, it worked for Lar Gand, right?
Supes (or Supergirl) could shave off a fingernail chunk and form it into a needle-like shape.
Supergirl could use her heat vision to form the holes through with the sutures could be passed.
Without going into the past, surely there’s a fragment of either Kal’s or Kara’s ship that could be used as a needle (again, it would have become super in an Earth environment).
I’ll have to think some more about this one. :)
-David
February 28th, 2009 at 11:38 pm
Oh, and if Superman’s skin is so hard as to be invulnerable, does that mean he can’t be X-rayed?
-David
March 1st, 2009 at 10:41 am
“In the silver age, Supes could also get a needle from Krypton’s past. All Kryptonian objects became similarly super under a yellow sun, so it would now be a super-needle capable of piercing his skin.”
Finally, a solution to the man of steel, woman of tissue paper dilemna. Clark just needs to find one Kyrptonian condom, and they’re set for life.
March 1st, 2009 at 10:42 am
” Tualha: Um, going off topic for a moment, how the heck could Superman donate blood to a human? He’s an extraterrestrial, remember?”
SHUT UP, THAT’S WHY!
March 2nd, 2009 at 12:09 pm
What about hemostatic agents like Quikclot? Presumably Superman has water in his blood, and the rest is simple chemistry (if clotting can be thought of as simple).
December 19th, 2009 at 5:27 am
1. Take him to Kandor.
2. Or counterwise, call out the Superman Emergency Squad.
3. Don’t forget, Superman has at least 200 pounds of kryptonian steel and copper from when he had to fight that kryptonian robot. And he has a device his father invented, i think it’s called a decoherer, that can cut, weld, and shape the metal. So he can make a set of medical tools from it.
4. There was that one story in which Superman faked his own death by building a short lived fleshly robot. His supposed will included a kryptonite laser scalpel. Surgeons were able to dissect the robot with the laser so that part could be used as transplants. I distinctly remember that the panel where the surgeons were looking at the organs they’d retrieved was solid black with the caption “this scene censored by the Comics Code Authority”. The fake death was of course a ploy to trick criminals into stealing the organs, which were preprogrammed to fail after transplantation. That scalpel should still exist.
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