Wednesday, June 29, 2011

Jim Lee on The Flash

Speedsters: How do they work?

The other day on Twitter, DC Co-Publisher and legendary artist Jim Lee was wondering about the Flash's power. He started raising the questions that many fans have pondered before, such as how The Flash manages to see while he runs around, or how much he needs to eat to stay alive, or more general topics like the issues he create with wind acceleration and friction.

Of course, the very simple answer is "Speed Force", which was introduced in modern times to explain away these inconsistencies with The Flash. However, before that, there was no logical explanation. Luckily, one physicist and super-hero fan set out to answer such questions in the book called The Physics of Superheroes by James Kakalios. I highly recommend the book to comic book fans AND professional creators everywhere, as it addresses all kinds of topics on a range of superheroes: from Spider-Man's web to how much impulse Superman needs to leap a tall building, and (of course) all of the issues created by the Flash. And don't worry, even though it is a science book, Kakalios makes a wonderful job of explaining everything in very simple terms and with a very entertaining tone.

And to answer one of Jim Lee's question, which is found in the book, if the Flash wants to accelerate to 1% the speed of light (which is quite considerable, but he is shown routinely running faster than that), he would need to eat 75 billion calories, which is roughly the equivalent of 150 million cheeseburgers. No wonder the Speed Force explanation was introduced!

In Pullquotes, we present a quote and related imagery, to provide a source of discussion and/or thought among our readers. Feel free to comment on the above image.


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6 comments:

Unknown said...

y remember that day, i toll him if he wanna make #flash a TT, but he says no, he was just wondering

Logan said...

I don't remember exactly what issue it was but I read an old Justice League comic where Wally West and Batman corner a woman who is targeting a certain individual because of his role in the death of her husband. Anyway the woman uses superspeed to escape and blow up the Batmobile at which point Flash says that she couldn't have been moving at super speed because he sees everything in slow motion. I've always thought of that as the reason why he can see when running.

Ivan said...

It was one of the horrible Chuck Austen issues.

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