Comic Book Physics

@comicbookphysics.bsky.social

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I post interesting/fun uses of physics and astronomy from the world of comics #comics #physics #astronomy 🇨🇦

Top panel: Deadline sits against some rocks proudly holding his recently-acquired super-gun. He thinks “I wonder if you realize just how good a TARGET you make?” Middle panel: “ZAMPFF” Bottom panel: Starman on the ground, clothes in tatters. “What have you done to me?” Deadline responds “Maybe you noticed that GEL sticking to you. The explosives carried it… has a lot of BORON in it. Ever heard of boron? It absorbs NEUTRONS…”
A close up on the face of Raven. She holds up a tiny device that looks a bit like a mini SD card. She says “This DATA DISC must be run on your MICRO-COMPUTER.”
Five tall panels arranged left to right that show a coin spinning as it rises into the air, falling again, caught, face revealed and then a close up on the glaring eye of Two-Face as he says “Heads. You LOSE.”
Cyborg Superman seen full body through an infrared camera. Someone off panel reacts to the image, saying “What the hell…” The machine parts of Superman appear blue and purple in the image, contrasting with the yellow and red color of the organic parts. The bottom of the image is labelled “INFRA IMAGE”.
The cover of the New 52 Action Comics #14. Superman hovers in the air as a swarm of beings that look a lot like Angels from Doctor Who descend on him.
Superman flies through a snowstorm, thinking “BEAUTIFUL snowstorm! Man, it’s great to be BACK! One of the things I MISS in space is the weather…” (A voice from below is less appreciative, saying “Doesn’t matter where I park, blasted SNOW PLOWS always bury my car!”)
Superboy and Neon face each other left to right. Neon unleashes a blast of electricity on Superboy (“BZZZZZZT!”) but Superboy is unfazed: “See, I’m gonna live ‘cause this Neo-villain never LEARNED that even blastin’, like, a BAZILLION gigawatts of electricity is pretty lame —“
Pete Ross, Lana Lang, and Lex Luthor are sitting together in the front seat of a car. Lex, driving, says “I don’t know … I have theorized that ONE-WAY communication with the future might be possible by bouncing a radio beam off a distant planet, so that it would return to Earth hundreds or even thousands of years in the future. I won’t GUARANTEE anything but it’s sure worth a TRY!!”
In the left panel, Black Squadron is being shown around Megalox by the warden. She says “I understand that you intend to meet with one of our more… NOTABLE… prisoners. Grakkus the Hutt. That’s fine, of course— but first, I feel it is my duty to inform you of the way things work around here.” The right panel shows her gloved hand gesturing towards the planet below. “Or more specifically, down there. The enormous size and high density of the planet generate a gravitational field ten times standard.”
Professor Rikkard Rynders, trapped in the time-stream, is explaining to Firestorm how he got there. “I had come to the conclusion that TIME-TRAVEL was a matter not of PHYSICS but of the CONSCIOUSNESS. Via the astral self, utilizing psychedelic drugs, I had made several trips through time. It IRRITATED me that none of my colleagues BELIEVED my successes without demonstrable verifiable PROOF.” In the panel we see the Professor and Firestorm standing next to each other in the time-stream looking onto the events of the past, where the younger Professor and his graduate assistant are setting up the experiment.
Lex Luthor, sitting in his levitating chair, meets Dr Packard from Project Cadmus. Dr Packard exclaims “Ah, Mr Luthor! I am mightily impressed by your security measures, sir! Even a NEUTRINO, I dare say, would be hard pressed to escape this room undetected.” Luthor replies “Such a great compliment means a great deal, coming from you —“
A man leans forward, speaking into a phone held up to his ear (a large cordless landline phone). A voice asks “and which emergency service do you require?” His answer: “PHYSICS.”
Three panels left to right showing The Atom attempting to interact with a horseshoe magnet. Time travel has left him in the form of a phantom so he is not able to hold onto the magnet and return to his own time. Instead he has to use electromagnetism to attract himself to the magnet. He explains: “Got an idea! All matter contains POSITIVE protons and NEGATIVE electrons whose charges cancel each other out. By rapidly shrinking, I can disrupt my body’s normal electrical neutrality … and briefly take on the aspect of a CHARGED PARTICLE myself! And “charge-in-motion” is the physicists’ definition of …magnetism!”
Amadeus Cho stands in a diner, fists-clenched and facing two wide-eyed strangers with their hands up. The air around him is filled with physics equations as he calculates how to escape.
Four page-wide panels: (1) Superman speeds after a laser beam propagating in space. He thinks “… unless I can outrace this LASER BEAM!” A caption says “Consider the speed of light ..” (2) Now we see inside the laser beam, the silhouette of The Atom riding alongside the photons in the beam. The caption reads “Consider a velocity so great that it would take you around the Earth’s equator 7 1/2 times in a single second…” (3) Zoomed out again to show Superman flying alongside the head of the beam. Caption: ”Now consider a man whose powers are so vast and his will so determined that he can match that speed… and BEAT IT!” (4) Superman is using his cape to catch The Atom who is emerging from the beam and growing back to his full size. Caption: “His name, of course … is SUPERMAN!”
Dropping new Professor Ryan Choi off at his house, his colleague Panda pontificates on our place in the Universe: “Earth’s circumference at the equator’s almost twenty-five thousand miles, Ryan. It’s ten times that distance to our own Moon. Our average distance from the Sun is 93 million miles. Jupiter’s almost five times that distance, at a diameter 12 times that of Earth. Our Sun dwarfs our planet, and it’s one star out of an untold number. It’s not even a particularly LARGE star. Look up at the night sky, Ryan. We’re each and every one of us ALREADY small.”
Three panels showing Superman and Superboy first lining up facing each other preparing to run, then sprinting at high speed towards each other, and then finally flashes of light and a loud BARAMMM as they collide. The thoughts of Superman reveal what is happening: “The signal transmitted across time by the alien COMMUNICATOR I’m wearing DID THIS — DISTURBED the SPACE-TIME CONTINUUM— DISTORTING the NATURAL LAWS — allowing me to CO-EXIST with a version of MYSELF from an earlier time of my life! But as a RESULT of the disruption, both SUPERBOY and I are TRAPPED here in the 30th CENTURY! I once DREAMED about a situation like this — when I was SUPERBOY! And IN that dream, we solved our problem with a DELIBERATE HEAD-ON COLLISION BETWEEN US! The impact of an IRRESISTIBLE FORCE meeting an IMMOVABLE OBJECT — namely the two of US — hurled us back to our respective times! I just hope it works in REAL LIFE, TOO!”
Captain Comet stands flipping through the pages of a book. A woman to his left asks “Why, CAPTAIN COMET, how can you read so fast?” He replies “My mind takes a split-second PHOTOGRAPH of each page, Linda! Now, have you a television set?”
Reed Richards is at the front of the scene, looking out towards us. Sharon Ventura as She-Thing is in the background and asks “Uh, Reed?” Reed replies “MMMM. I think I hear my microchips calling, Sharon. I’ll see you later!”
Radius boasts to She-Hulk “I can cause resonating vibrations — force the very air molecules themselves to solidify around you — trap you in an unbreakable shell —“ but ends with “—Unk—!” as She-Hulk cries out “Says you!” and punches him.
An orange-coloured beam is going into Matter-Eater Lad’s mouth as he says “You forget — all energy is nothing more than converted MATTER! I can DIGEST the stun-beam with no ill effects!”
Three wide panels. Top: Leia and Luke are lying on a grassy slope looking up at the night sky. Middle: a close up on the back of Luke’s head in the foreground, looking towards Leia who faces up to the sky. Luke asks, “You still LOOK for it, don’t you?” Leia replies “Every time I look up. And the weird part is …” Bottom: “…sometimes it’s still there. We’re so far away right now, the light from its explosion still hasn’t reached us. It’s hard not to feel like… if I just fly toward that spot… it’ll still be there.”
A man buzzes with electricity in the foreground, frozen to the spot holding onto a piece of electrical equipment. He says “EEEYOW— the electric current! Turn it off! Let me go!” A sinister looking man in the background replies “I’ll turn it off, Clem— but I won’t let you go!”
A black and white poster showing the different stages of the history of the Universe. On the left is a cartoon of nested circles illustrating the Big Bang and then on the right are parallel scales showing time, energy, temperature, density. At the bottom another scale shows the constituent particles relevant for each time period. The lines are labelled with significant events such as “End of Grand Unification”, “End of Electroweak Unification”, “Matter Domination: Formation of Structure Begins” and “Formation of atoms”. This image comes from the article by Michael Turner “The Road to Precision Cosmology” published in 2022.
Two people in a small red space ship look down at the Moon. The space ship looks like a round version of a 1950s car with fins and a long round bench seat. Pointing towards the Moon, one of the figures says “The other side of the Moon… never seen from Earth! It looks exactly the same as the Earth side!”
Awesome Andy waves hello to Jennifer Walters as she is being shown around her new office.
A man in a green suit is being held in the air by white rings that send off a bright blast of energy. On the left, a man in a helmet explains “I call myself TOKAMAK, the human reactor! ‘Tokamak’ is the Russian name for a FUSION PLASMA REACTOR…”
Barry Allen, standing in front of his class, puts his hand to his head. “What? No points for bad physics jokes? Okay, tough crowd.”
A couple on a sofa fell asleep watching TV and have just woken up to the glow of the screen. “Look it’s snowing.” “I didn’t even know televisions still did that.” In the panel below we see the TV screen filled with random noise. The captions read “I remember how as a kid, I’d get up early to watch cartoons and be disappointed that I was too early. That there wasn’t anything on. Not understanding that what I was actually seeing was the microwave radiation left over from the birth of the universe.”
Firestorm flies towards us, arms outstretched, above the words “Nuclear Reactions”, the title of the letters page.
The opening page of Classics Illustrated adaptation of “The Time Machine” from 1966. It shows the Time Traveller working on the time machine in his laboratory, wearing shirt and tie and holding a soldering iron. The time machine consists of a frame built from two circular tubes at right angles to each other, within which is a seat with various bits of wiring and controls. At the bottom of the page is a caption that reads “Scientific people know very well that time is only a kind of space. We can move forward and backward in time just as we can move forward and backward in space. To prove this theory, I invented a machine to travel through time. If you pressed one lever, the machine went back into the past. If you pressed the other lever, the machine glided forward into the future. With this machine, I set out to explore time.”
Two men in the cockpit of a space ship. Everything is cast in a green glow and swirls of green mist can be seen through the window. The caption reads “Captain Parker presses a special control button and a green light floods the starship as the mists of hyper-space close in about the CONQUISTADOR…” One of the men exclaims “So this is what it’s like to travel in a space-warp!”
In the caption Alanna is describing to Adam Strange the reason why the zeta-beam hadn’t reached him: “My father disproved that belief when he calculated that the ZETA-BEAM had struck a runaway world whose erratic course through space caused it to intercept the ZETA-BEAM on its way to Earth and you…” Below, we see Alanna looking astonished as her father shows her an image of the zeta-beam striking the rogue planet.
A hooded figure says “You’ve never heard of the MILLENIUM FALCON? It’s the ship that made the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs.” The Twi’lek next to him replies “What’s a Kessel Run?” Reply: “It’s fast enough for you, pal.”
Dr Zarkov in a panel from DC Comics Flash Gordon #1 (1988). He pounds his fist on a desk, saying “For years we have DREAMED of the stars, yearning to find life forms approximating ourselves! I’ve STRIVED toward that end myself — broadcasting radio signals out into space in the hope I would be answered.” A zoom in on his face, wide-eyed and open-mouthed. “Several years ago, that answer finally came — when my radio beacon attracted a PROBE sent from another PLANET!”
Light Lass appears on a large screen in front of a computer console. She has just entered an airlock. Our villain, dressed in a brown suit, says “Good evening, my dear… it’s a bit chilly out tonight.. minus 240 degrees…the AMMONIA LAKE is freezing over! Won’t you come in?”
Four panels top to bottom. In the first, we’re looking over the shoulder of She-Hulk as she faces a crowd of reporters. Her shirt is beginning to rip apart. She says “You guys all know I’m a HULK, right? And you know what happens when Hulks get ANGRY, right?” Then a close up on her eyes, she is wearing sunglasses that reflect the faces in the crowd. She continues “They LOSE CONTROL. And then… things get SMASHED. It’s not the HULK’s fault. It’s just how it is. And you guys …” Next panel the crowd scatters in terror as She-Hulk throws out her arms and, wild-eyed, shouts “… ARE MAKING ME MAAAAD!” In the final panel, She-Hulk turns and smiles as her companion says “Nice work.” She-Hulk laughs “Heh.”
Paul in the foreground asks “This is an impossible nightmare. How are we even BREATHING?” The Atom in the background crosses his arms and replies “I’m not sure. When you’re this size, some of the physical laws seem not to apply.”
Top panel: Ray Palmer and his ex-wife’s husband Paul have just landed on what looks like the surface of a moon. In the black sky there are flashes of light and two spheres that could be other moons or planets. Paul asks “Where are we?” Bottom panel 1: A close up on the sphere with another sphere in the background. Again, it looks a lot like a moon and planet. A voice says “I think we’re on an ELECTRON.” Bottom panel 2: a close up on the head and shoulders of Paul who puts his hand to his head and opens his eyes and mouth wide in amazement. “An electron?” Red and pink radial lines in the background emphasize his surprise. Bottom panel 3: back to the spheres again. This time the voice says “Hahahahahaha!”
The small figure of The Atom flying through a jumble of circles of different colors that represent photons inside an optical fibre. He is thinking “… I should be able to ride the PHOTON STREAM through the optic cable —“
A panel from Woman of Marvel (2021) showing Rhino who has just run headlong into She-Hulk’s stomach, snapping off his horn in the process. She-Hulk looks down, and sighs “Aleksei Sytsevich…”
She-Hulk looks out towards us and cracks her knuckles “KRAK”
A Nasgulian who has just been rescued from their ship seconds before it exploded holds up their hands and exclaims “What … what happened!” In the background the ensign jn charge of the transporter room answers “Modern technology.”
A woman with orange hair and a purple dress with white cape points at a large door covered in a large number of buttons. She says “This vault is completely safe! No one can open it unless he knows WHICH FIVE BUTTONS to press!” To the side, a man replies “And there are HUNDREDS!”
Superman is shown in his laboratory, control panels and a glass bell jar in the background behind him. A piercing EEEEEEEEEEE noise that has been tormenting Superman radiates across the panel. Superman is placing a glass dome over his head, thinking “My VACUUM HELMET should do the trick, once the air is pumped out of it! Sound-waves can’t travel in a vacuum!”
A panel from the Legion of Super-Heroes story in Adventure Comics #380 (1969, DC Comics). Ultra Boy stands on a tiny island in the centre, swinging a cable around in circles. The space ship at the end of the cable is only a blur as it whizzes around Ultra Boy. He is thinking “COSMIC BOY helped me find enough metal to make this SUPER-CABLE … now it’s up to me to SWING the ship … and slowly accelerate it till it approaches HYPER-LIGHT VELOCITY .. then, if INVISIBLE KID’S calculations are correct …”
On a purple-coloured background filled with yellow, orange, blue, green and pink circles and stars, a long line of Hulks stretches off into infinity. The caption reads “And now you are GONE — back into TIME itself — and you can no longer HEAR me, can you, Hulk? CAN YOU?!”
She-Hulk is deep under water wearing a diving mask and flippers, hair streaming out behind her. She is lit up by a bright light source that she holds in one hand. She thinks “No average human diver could make THIS trip. I must be over THREE HUNDRED FEET DEEP already!”
A panel from Chapter 4 of Joe the Barbarian (2011, Grant Morrison writer/creator, Sean Murphy artist, Dave Stewart colorist, Todd Klein letterer). With Joe and friends gathered around in front, a man stands at the blackboard explaining. He holds a staff in one hand and a piece of chalk in the other. The man is saying “…so to summarize… square root of eye of NEWT, over function of the cosine where EEE equals MAGIC times the speed of all likelihood SQUARED. WITH me? Resulting in at least two isomorphically LINKED states of being as represented by these ELLIPSES and where this CIRCLE represents the sum total of EVERYTHING.” Jack the rat reacts with a “HRRN.”
A panel from DC comics Star Trek #21 (1985) with a close up on Spock saying “This is ILLOGICAL …”
This colorful panel is filled with an explosion, with accompanying “KABOOOM”, red at the center, orange and yellow towards the edges. The voice of Element Lad comes in from the left, explaining what is happening: “— not if I turn the AIR around you into HYDROGEN. The eye’s own energy can spark into a FIREBALL!” On the right, we see the vague outline of the Emerald Empress, caught in the explosion, crying “ARRGHHH…”
A large panel showing a mainframe computer that is exploding. Jets of gas and sparks are shooting out from various locations on the control panel accompanied by sounds FZZZT! CRACKLE! CRACK! Two men (Solar and Dr. Clarkson) stand in the centre of the room trying to shield themselves with their arms. The dialog reads “He has infiltrated our giant computer as an electrical current! He’s blowing out circuits all through it! Solar, do something!” Solar responds “But what? I can do the same thing myself. But that won’t catch him, Dr. Clarkson!”
Full page from Genis-Vell: Captain Marvel #4 (2022). Rick Jones is riding in a spaceship with Phyla-Vell. He asks her “Can’t you make this jet go any FASTER Phyla?!” She replies “We’re moving at this vessel’s MAXIMUM SPEED.” He then asks “Can YOU go any faster?” She replies “I don’t need to be limited to FTL. On my own, I can warp space. Create a sort of localized wormhole.” At the bottom of the page we see Phyla flying through space with Rick on her shoulders, having sent their ship home on automatic pilot. Phyla asks “You okay?” Rick: “Aweeeeesome…”
A huge horseshoe magnet is pulling Iron Man up backwards through the air. Watching from the ground are Enchantress, Executioner, and Zemo, who says “Knowing he’d be here, I arranged the ONE thing that can stop iron — a huge, simple infallible MAGNET!” Iron Man, who can’t see what is pulling on him, thinks “He took me by surprise! I’m stopped COLD! That magnet must be ENORMOUS!”
Three wide panels. Top: Magneto, on the right, is trying to use his powers to pull Doctor Doom, on the left towards him. She-Hulk holds on to Doctor Doom, preventing this, saying “Oh I beg to DIFFER, Mags. Your magnetic ZAPS won’t do much good if I keep the late Doctor PINNED!” Doom replies “What…? Release him!” Middle: Magneto’s magnetic lines of force reach across towards She-Hulk. “RELEASE him, She-Hulk! You cannot RESIST the power of Magneto!” Straining against the pull, she replies “No…way…bucket…head…” Bottom: She-Hulk says “Oh …All right.” Doom’s body flies across the panel crashing into Magneto, knocking him over as he exclaims “OHHUFF!”
A panel from the first issue of Star Hunters, 1977 DC Comics. A man wearing a space suit with a backpack kneels down, holding out a sensing device towards a grey cloud-shaped blob on the ground. The background is dark and one of his feet is half-obscured by a red mist. He exclaims “Why, it’s INCREDIBLE! This pile of ooze is — ALIVE!” A caption across the top of the panel reads “Intrigued, the eminent exobiologist removes complex instruments, takes hurried readings… and…”
The opening page of Star Hunters #1 from DC comics in 1977. Two crew members float in the air inside a space ship playing chess while the commander of the ship orders them to come down. The caption reads “In space, TIME is RELATIVE — and in many cases, quite MONOTONOUS as well… Therefore, FEW could fault a pair of rather BOREDOM-STRUCK crew members for taking advantage of their ship’s SELECTIVE GRAVITY controls to WHILE AWAY a bit of that time… Unfortunately, Ms DARCY VALE — COMMANDER of the C.S.V. “Sunrider” happens to BE one of those few…”
A close up on the bowed head of Arion is in the foreground. He is shackled to the wall. Garn Daanuth stands in the background, speaking. “You may thank your own alchemists for the shackles, Arion. The metal is called ORACHULUM, resistant to ANY form of sorcery… not that you can summon much of it here in your own city’s deepest dungeon. Myself, I have always PREFERRED the darkness, and gathered strength from it — a pity that YOU, as Lord of Light, must ever derive your power from the STELLAR ENERGIES. ‘Twould seem that your future here is rather … DIM.”
General Eiling, inset at the top left, says “Tell me HOW, Megala…” The scientist Megala is pictured in the main panel, body encased in a robotic wheelchair with robot arms. Multiple wires connect from the chair to his head. Raising one arm in the air he haltingly replies, “HOW does a man presumed ‘VAPORIZED’ 18 years ago melt his way up through 1000 feet of solid rock to say ‘He’s been trying to reach us since yesterday?’ Consider — relativistic PHYSICS! Einstein showed us that — SPACE and TIME —are INSEPARABLY connected — to form a — fourth dimensional continuum — we call SPACE-TIME. Although this — intangible realm — is IMPERCEPTIBLE to OUR senses — it EXISTS — nonetheless. It can be TRAVERSED! I believe the 1968 blast — ‘BUMPED’ your Captain Adam — headlong through the FOURTH DIMENSION!”