Website: https://www.lightroastcomics.com/
Gotta love the movies where someone is falling only to be caught by a superhero who has accelerated to ludicrous speeds to catch the fallen and intercepts their trajectory at 90° just before hitting the ground. So the victims goes from 150mph down to some crazy speed at a 90° vector to their original path after being slammed into by superhero.
They’re so dead.
But the superhero Suspension of Disbelief Field extends to secondary characters in the story.
You’re not wrong but there is one thing: hitting the ground is an instantaneous impact with a hard surface. Being swooped in some direction is a relatively slower process - the swooper is softer than concrete, and the change in velocity is spread over a longer period of time (even if it’s still “instantaneous” to the casual observer, it can be an “instant” 100 times longer than ground impact).
It’s like landing on a mattress vs a hard floor - from a high enough height both are deadly, but I’d still pick the mattress.
I also assumed the swooper still decelerates you a little even if not by much. If you’re falling at 50m/s as you are trying to slow your fall by taking a skydiver pose, and a superhero caches you midair, you could decelerate over half a second and stop moving within 12 meters while still only experiencing 10g.
12m is pretty tall but not insane in a superhero style piece of fiction where people may be dropped out the sky or from tall buildings. If you want to increase that g-force to the maximum survivable limit of near 100g (in theory), you’d only need to go from terminal velocity to 0m/s in 1.5 meters. Being reasonable, being caught 5 meters above the ground would be enough for most people to survive without major reprocussions, and is always better than hitting the ground.
Transformer movies were awful with this. Human falling hundreds of feet to the pavement. But wait! They’ll hit a giant steel hand instead! Much better. Soft.
Isn’t this the story of the original Gwen Stacy? Spiderman tries to save her, but does exactly this and the force on her body kills her anyway.
It’s been a long, long time since I have read the comics but iirc, it was a defining point in the spiderman canon.
It wasn’t originally. It was essentially the scene from the first Spider Man movie where Goblin makes Spidey swoop in to save her, but she was already dead.
They retconned it later to make it so Spidey killed her, which is a better story.
It’s the other way around, actually.
In The Amazing Spider-Man #125 (Oct. 1973), Marvel Comics editor Roy Thomas wrote in the letters column that “it saddens us to have to say that the whiplash effect she underwent when Spidey’s webbing stopped her so suddenly was, in fact, what killed her. In short, it was impossible for Peter to save her. He couldn’t have swung down in time; the action he did take resulted in her death; if he had done nothing, she still would certainly have perished. There was no way out.” Source
The comic (#121) is ambiguous though. There is really no way for the reader to know whether she was dead before her neck was snapped, Green Goblin certainly seems to think so (but he is hardly a reliable source). But snapping her neck certainly would have killed her anyway.
He used his web to grab her from above. I think her neck snaps from the whiplash?
I just rewatched the scene on YT, and he’s actually just a bit too late, and her head slams into the ground with full force.
I mean, when a person suddenly falls, there’s really just no way to save them, is there?
I’m the wrong guy to ask, I haven’t a clue about comic character lore and canon.
That’s exactly what I thought when I was watching that scene with that superfast dude in X Men where he saves a bunch of people by carrying them away from an explosion. They must accelerate from 1 to 1000 km/h in a mere second.
The scene is still awesome, but I don’t think anyone would be alive after that.
He would have created his own explosions just getting there either from the friction of moving all that air out of his way so he didn’t collide with the atoms, or from the nuclear forces involved in colliding his atoms with the air’s (and still creating a lot of friction in the process).
It would be like that light speed baseball pitch question and answer that ends up killing everyone in the stadium with a nuclear blast.
And Xavier would have done one of those himself in X2 when he freezes time at the mall… Maybe, actually I’m not clear if his ability is a time stop or if he did a mind control on everyone and made them stand still. There’s another one like that in Logan, though Logan is able to fight through it, which kinda makes it even less clear exactly what he’s doing. Powers!
Yeah, with the Flash, there’s the “speedforce” excuse, but quicksilver has never had that kind of effect given as part of his power set.
I hate the flash as a superhero… The dude is literally unbeatable, but he just chooses to like, not really bother.
It’s like one of the opening scenes from The Boys.
splat
Sorry Lois Lane, superman just made you into a bony pink mist.
Was thinking of the Airplane Rescue, as Homelander breaks down why everyone’s fucked no matter what they do.
Isn’t it well known that if you’re near Superman you"get" some of his powers. So him coming in to save you like this would be ok because you’d have some of his invincibility.
You’re saying if I have an unconscious superman, and I wear him as a backpack, I can rob banks?
Canonically Superman s 6’3” tall and weighs 235 lbs, so if you’re able to wear able to wear that as a backpack, hats off to you bud.
The cleanest explanation was that he’s Superman because his powers give a psychokinetic field around his body that can absorb kinetic and other energy. It’s what makes him invulnerable except for kryptonite that can just bypass and negate that field. It can also extend over other people so they can lift along and it can absorb the energy from the fall.
Alright, that’s enough nerding out.
I believe there is the unified theory of Superman’s powers where he actually has the ability to manipulate molecular structure of the object he touches.
He is shown picking up cruise ships and the ship doesn’t split in two, that’s because he’s strengthening the structure and making it lighter as he lifts it.
He causes the air around him to thicken and squeeze him through the sky.
He causes the air touching his eye balls to turn into hot laser beams.
So when Supes catches a falling human, he instantly makes them invulnerable to the sudden stop
All this is done unconsciously on his part.
The most famous (and internally consistent) version is control over inertia, not molecular structure.
I don’t agree with it because inertia alone can’t explain everything, but I think it’s the right track, in the form of some kind of general control over universal forces that manifests in a way he intuitively understands (unless we want to argue that all energy has inertia just as all mass does, in which case okay fair enough)
His varying power levels are both dependent on how much energy he has stored from the sun, because it is a specific EM wavelength that he can absorb and store, and how much control over the forces he can deliberately or intuitively exert.
This implies that his most powerful form is not the one that punches the hardest, but the one that realizes he doesn’t need to punch at all.
Moments before
What’s the name of this comic and/or the artist. I recognize it from the fortune teller “I see you alone in an apartment with a lot of X… Jesus that’s a lot of X” meme.
Thank your for sharing that!! I absolutely love their sense of humor! Darrrrrrrrk but it’s really funny stuff!
Largely true, but it’s crazy what the difference of just a few feet of slowing down does (rather than zero feet of abrupt stopping) to acceleration forces. The crumple zone on a car only has to be 3 feet long to turn a 60mph crash from a fatality to a horrific injury.
Check out the absorption barriers on the edges of racetracks. They’re remarkably small for cars that could be hitting them at 100+ mph.
Of course, the cars themselves are also designed to save the driver but it’s the same concept.
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I disagree, the difference in deceleration from hitting concrete vs being caught could make a difference.
If Superman (or whoever) uses the remaining distance between you and the ground to reduce the impulse on your body. But they also have to be careful about their speed coming in to grab you, because they could easily substitute your impact with the ground for an impact with them.
Spiderman could web the falling person from above like a bungee cord, or even catch them in a safety net style web.
Eh, Spiderman is both insanely fast and strong compared to a normal person, still. He can canonically catch cars and punch concrete and the like. Not sure how much spidey sense plays a role, but he’s nigh impossible to shoot, too. He’d likely be capable of the feat just with his strength and speed, let alone his other options.
Superman is still waaaay stronger and faster but he’s pretty much cheating even for a super hero. lol
See, that’s how you know people here have never touched grass. Otherwise they’d know how big of a difference it makes to fall on grass vs concrete. All over a few mm of yield.
Also anecdotally I’ve seen videos of people catching falling children (back in the day in/r/DadReflexes). It works, empirically.
Penny: Yes, I know men can’t fly.
Sheldon: No, no let’s assume that they can. Lois Lane is falling, accelerating at an initial rate of 32ft per second, per second. Superman swoops down to save her by reaching out two arms of steel. Ms. Lane, who is now traveling at approximately 120 miles per hour, hits them, and is immediately sliced into three equal pieces.
Leonard: Unless Superman matches her speed and decelerates.
Sheldon: In what space, sir, in what space? She’s two feet above the ground. Frankly, if he really loved her, he’d let her hit the pavement. It would be a more merciful death.
Superman should just fly completely under Lois, grab her and instantly match her speed, and crash through the concrete and the layers below (protecting her with his Super Bod), decelerating slowly enough that Lois is saved without harm.
Yeah, she still dies. He would have to actively dig that concrete away, in quite a high speed.