Originally Posted by
Robanker
A lot's been said much better than I can muster past Midnight, but I'll chime in with my two cents.
With respect to Clark's alien biology, one thing gets passed around that has always bothered me: he can't feel bullets.
This makes no sense in a world where he can feel someone's hand in his, or pretty much any physical contact. I understand that it stands to reason that if he can't feel a bullet connect with his eyeball then he wouldn't feel Lois kissing him, but it's also tragically cold for a Superman concept so I don't care for it. Instead, I imagine they and pretty much a ton of blunt force trauma feels like a light graze to him. He can feel the bullets make contact, the brief burst of heat from when they stop dead in their tracks and it registers as much pain as gently holding an infant's hand. He feels it, but it doesn't hurt. I don't want to live in a world where a tearful Martha Kent embraced her son after he returned from the grave and he felt absolutely no physical sensation from her hugging him with everything she had. That's too depressing.
I'd also prefer if he actually does need to eat, sleep and so on. I imagine the sun can actually keep him going but not at top performance. Think of someone being fed through a tube as opposed to eating a properly balanced and prepared meal. Prolonged absence from food or rest would have him start to significantly slow down, albeit after a lengthy time. He may die from starvation if he didn't eat a damn thing for, I don't know, a month? I imagine actually being in the sun pretty much negates his needs, so perhaps it's the intensity of the radiation that should affect how it influences his biology.
Again, I'm siding a bit more into fantasy than reality here to make him a bit more approachable to a new fan. Clark really should always have one foot in the fantastic and one in the familiar. He's a bridge to something greater, but that bridge needs to feel like something you can actually cross as opposed to admire from afar. This is part of J'onn's problem. He's just a touch too alien for a lot of readers to connect with despite his exceptionally human soul.
Have I enraged everyone yet? Here's the one I know nobody would care for. I like a Superman with an average lifespan! I think for his story to really inspire the universe, it'd have to be under the same time crunch as anyone else. Probably not hard to imagine the guy who lived for 15,000 years is the greatest legend ever. He'd win by default. If Jon truly is the Superman of tomorrow, the Great Disaster happens in the 25th century and so on, Clark's gotta be out of the picture. I don't mind a Superman who lives a great deal longer, but I prefer him to be a man who for all his great powers has to face the final curtain as anyone else. It certainly makes those moments he stops to help someone with car trouble more meaningful-- those seconds are as precious to him as they are to you and yet he-- possibly the busiest, most important man on the planet-- will always offer his time to help anyone in need.
As for him having sex... I mean, he's had to have broken wind at some point in his life and not leveled a building. He probably sneezes and doesn't take out an entire city block. He has every other possible muscle controlled to function as any of us do, so I imagine he can slow down. Honestly I don't care much how or why, it's really peeking too far behind the curtain, but one can infer that it's possible for him to control that when he does so in every other facet of his life.
Balance is key with Clark to make him interesting; go too far into the alien nature of his character and he really can come across as the overly perfect wish fulfillment cypher for children he's often criticized as. Stray too far from it and, well, he's the same as any other meta. Even though it's all different under the hood, he looks exactly like us and Kryptonian DNA is close enough to humans to produce healthy offspring. He shouldn't be that different in function even if his bone density, organs and so on are likely really bizarre.