Comments on: Super Vision revisited

By: John Nowak

John Nowak — Sun, 18 Sep 2005 06:37:59 +0000

Yeah, that’s true. It might be fun to count how many non-humans with glowing eyes you see depicted in a day .

By: Carl Fink

Carl Fink — Sat, 17 Sep 2005 13:54:21 +0000

John, actually the idea that the eye projects rays of some kind is ancient. Most pre-science peoples had a belief that we see by our eyes sending something out.

Also, think of the Evil Eye. People are being executed as witches right now in some countries because their neighbors think they have the Evil Eye.

By: John Nowak

John Nowak — Fri, 16 Sep 2005 13:59:27 +0000

I’ve always wondered where this “energy emitting eyes” came from. Superman to Cyclops, and even the Terminators have LEDs behind their eyes for some reason… Maybe it’s a cat thing.

By: Seth Finkelstein

Seth Finkelstein — Fri, 16 Sep 2005 13:22:22 +0000

I’d go for saying that the labels for the powers are just simplifications for much more complex mechanisms.

“I have telescopic vision” is much easier to say than “I have the ability to detect fine variations over large ranges of the electromagnet spectrum, which I can process similar to sight at long distances” (and doesn’t mean “My eyes have telescope lenses inside of them”).

I’d assume that the heat vision doesn’t actually come out of his eyeballs. It’s energy-projection that uses a part of the brain similar to vision. But it’s not like he has tiny lasers behind his pupils (it just looks that way).

By: David Oakes

David Oakes — Fri, 16 Sep 2005 05:55:44 +0000

Number one is tempting and all, but I am going to have to go with Two, Monty.

Considering the sheer diversity of effects that come out of his eyeballs, I think not only are his lenses more adjustable, I am sure he has multiple lenses that can be used in sequence to produce the desired effect. (Kinda like the optometrist – “Which as more Heat Vision, number three or number four? Good.”)

And he has a vestigal nictating membrane that can close off his eye completely in case he is ever subjected to eye damaging levels of radiation. Only he has completely forgotten about it since it never came up. Yet.