False Facts About DC You Always Thought Were True

When it comes to DC comics, it's undeniable that there's an electricity in the air. Batman vs. Superman and Suicide Squad absolutely rocked the box office, while DC is enjoying positive sales and criticism for its recent Rebirth comic event. Hell, Netflix even confirmed they're bringing Young Justice back for a third season! With all of this DC love in the air, comes a ton of erroneous assumptions about our favorite heroes and villains. If you want to be the smartest nerd in the room, it's important to brush up on what's true and what's false about the DC Universe!

It's easy to imagine that Kryptonite has always been a part of the Superman mythos. After all, it fits into that universe perfectly: since a hero is only as interesting as his vulnerabilities, it is a narrative necessity for the baddies to have something to level the playing field. However, just as Superman didn't begin his adventures by being able to fly (that "leaps tall buildings" thing used to be quite literal), he hasn't always been scared of green space rocks.

It didn't take Superman long to become a pop culture sensation. Within a few years of his comics debut, Superman enjoyed a wildly popular radio show. It was, in fact, so popular, the producers did not want to let the voice of Superman go on a much-needed vacation. But vacation he must so, in 1945, six years after his comics debut, the radio show unveiled Kryptonite as a substance that weakened our hero. The upshot for his tired voice actor? The Superman character just had to groan in pain for a few episodes, letting someone else fill in for him.

However, the idea of Kryptonite became popular enough that it finally made its way into Superman comics in 1949, and the rest is history.

Another Joker-related falsehood is that the Joker and Harley Quinn are truly, madly, deeply in love. Fans of the power couple like to refer to the classic Paul Dini Batman story "Mad Love," as well as the assorted marketing for the Suicide Squad movie. This marketing included featuring romantic shots of the two from the movie, along with the hashtag #squadgoals.

What's the problem with this? Simply: Joker canonically does not love Harley Quinn: he's actually an abusive manipulator. "Mad Love" and those other comics and cartoons you remember? They always emphasized a Harley Quinn who was in love with a man who alternated between ignoring her, and abusing her. As for Suicide Squad, that movie had more edits than Hot Topic has Harley shirts, and earlier versions of the movie emphasized more of the Joker abusing Harley — including pushing her out of a helicopter in order to murder her. Due to weird editing choices that helped make the movie such a critical darling, the final cut makes it seem like Joker pushes her out to save her life.

It turns out that, while Joker may not love Harley, Warner Bros. certainly does—or at least, they love the chance to sell countless #squadgoals shirts to emo teenagers who want to stand out from the crowd by wearing the exact same thing as everyone else. And they call Joker crazy!

Wonder Woman's sexuality has always been a subject of interest. Part of this comes from her fighting in her underwear, and part of it from the weird bondage at the heart of her stories. She can compel people to speak the truth with her magic lasso, and was often tied up in her earlier days by villains, something you never saw happen to the less-scantily-dressed Batman or Superman.

Through all of this fascination, though, lingered the idea that Wonder Woman was thoroughly heterosexual. Nope, sorry, guys: DC recently surprised many people when Wonder Woman writer Greg Rucka revealed that the character is "queer," and his reasoning was actually elegantly simple. Wonder Woman hails from an island that is supposed to be a paradise. Also, it's all women. Wouldn't it be silly to think that women on this island would be happy with all of the other aspects in their lives, but not find romantic and sexual fulfillment in those around them?

It's very straightforward logic, but the bombshell that Wonder Woman goes for girls lit the internet on fire ... as if a thousand nerds cried out at once that an island of feminist goddesses are not, in fact, waiting for men to save them, or even kiss them.

Green Lantern once suffered from one of the more baffling weaknesses in comic book history: the color yellow. Yep, Green Lantern used to get his tush kicked by anything yellow — he's the only person ever to whom bananas were super unhealthy. And casual fans may assume that the character still sports this weakness. He doesn't, though, because many of old-timey comics' stupidest weakness wound up being explained as part of comics' strangest retcon.

Back during the Death of Superman story, most people paid attention to, well, the death (or rather, not-death) of Superman. But part of the story involved the alien Mongul and Cyborg Superman completely destroying Coast City, the hometown of Green Lantern Hal Jordan. Hal went a bit crazy, killed a bunch of other Green Lanterns, and become a super-villain named Parallax.

But what does this have to do with a weakness to yellow? Green Lantern mastermind Geoff Johns later retconned that (brace yourselves, this gets confusing) Parallax was an intelligent cosmic force that embodied fear. The Guardians (those blue bosses of the Green Lanterns) tried to imprison it inside their big power battery. Johns proposed that all colors represented part of the emotional spectrum: green equalled willpower and yellow was fear, so having a fear-god inside the source of the Green Lanterns' power is what once made them vulnerable to yellow.

Once the Green Lantern Corps, and their battery, were rebuilt, they were only vulnerable to yellow when they let themselves feel fear. That means veteran Green Lanterns can now shield themselves against yellow simply by thinking brave thoughts. And, since yellow's the spandex color of choice among many villains (and represents most of Sinestro's wardrobe), this is a pretty big deal.

There is possibly no sadder villain in comics than Mr. Freeze. From his appearance in Episode 14 of Batman: The Animated Series, all the way to his unfortunate live-action portrayal in Batman and Robin, everyone remembers the story of the scientist, Victor Fries, who tried to preserve his dying wife, Nora, in cryogenic stasis until she could be cured. When his boss discovered what he was doing with company equipment, he shut Fries' experiment down, sending Fries into a vat of cryogenic chemicals during a struggle and seemingly consigning Nora and Fries to certain death. Fries survived, though, and returned as a transformed villain who needed to stay in a special suit to keep his body cold, and who used a freeze ray to share his chilling despair with other people.

However, everything about this sad origin story was created whole cloth for the animated series. The original Mr. Freeze didn't even go by that name — he had the less-catchy name "Mr. Zero" and he was pretty much a generic bald mad scientist (told you they were a dime-a-dozen) with a freeze ray. He appeared again in the Adam West Batman show, now called Mr. Freeze, but he was still a generic villain that was played for laughs, rather than pathos.

Critics and fans alike responded so well to the major changes in his animated origin, that it became his canonical story in the comics, video games, cartoons, and even in his introduction to the Gotham TV show. Sadly, though, the tagline of "Ice to meet you" died with Batman and Robin.

Once you get past the sheer absurdity of rich people putting on underwear to fight the mentally ill, there is another insane assumption about DC comics: that super villains never figure out the secret identities of our heroes. And we're not just talking about villains like Lex Luthor, who have enough money to throw thousands of private investigators and use high-tech technology to figure out who their foes are and yet ... don't. On a long enough timeline, all comics stories will have their Freaky Friday equivalent, and the heroes' minds are placed in villains' bodies and vice-versa, letting even the lowliest of villains peak beneath the cowl and see who their nemesis is.

Casual fans just throw their hands up and assume this is a conceit of the genre, but DC has provided a darker explanation. Many villains HAVE figured these things out, but they then have their minds forcibly wiped by the magical hero Zatanna. This continued until it was a bit out of control, such as mind-wiping Dr. Light after he raped Elongated Man's wife. That wound up affecting Light's intelligence, which is how the Identity Crisis story explained Light going from Justice League threat to fodder for the Teen Titans. While Zatanna has nominally stopped doing this, it is chilling to think of the number of telepathic and magical heroes who are likely lobotomizing people left and right because somebody's mask fell off in a fight.

Thanks in part to the popularity of her new live-action show, many people think they have a handle on Supergirl. On the show, she has been presented as Superman's cousin from Krypton who works alongside her sister to help Martian Manhunter and his team defend Earth from domestic threats, plus threats so foreign that they come from other planets.

However, this is only one of the Supergirls based on comics that have brought this character to life time and again.

The TV Supergirl shares a lot of DNA with the character's original comic book origin. That character, too, was Superman's cousin from Krypton who was eager to wear the "S" and protect the planet. This comics incarnation famously died, though, as part of the Crisis on Infinite Earths storyline. That story was kind of a cosmic "reset" button for DC, and Supergirl eventually came back. This time, though, she was actually artificial, shape-shifting goo, created by Lex Luthor. She eventually got into a relationship with what she thought was the son of Lex Luthor, but was actually a clone body. (Presumably, Luthor never cloned Freud to discuss what his desire to have sex with a female Superman might actually mean.)

This version of Supergirl eventually found out that Lex was the bad guy, and later merged with a teenage girl that she rescued from a cult. She became a literal Earth angel, and then reverted back to Supergirl. But she wasn't the Supergirl (just a living pile of goo, remember), and DC eventually brought the familiar cousin of Superman back to star in her own series again, before making the leap to live-action in a single bound.

Since long before most comic readers were ever born, there have been jokes and insinuations that Batman and Robin were gay. This cultural association between the two heroes traces its roots back to Dr. Fredric Wertham's infamous 1954 book, Seduction of the Innocent. Wertham's book claimed that the common denominator in all his investigations of juvenile delinquency was that they read comic books. He also famously alleged that Robin was drawn to encourage homosexual behavior (what with his bare, often-spread legs) — to Wertham's old bigot sensibilities, this was just one more layer of deviant behavior that comics were luring young boys into.

In addition to the obvious point that there's nothing wrong with homosexuality in the first place, Wertham's book was pretty insane. First, he practiced a kind of junk science that mostly boiled down to "guilt by association." For instance, most young men read comics, but because delinquents he spoke to had read comics (being a subset of "most young men"), he assumed comics were the cause. That's like blaming candy for murder because murderers like candy. He also lamented the bad physics that Superman taught children (would you believe, in real life, that a man cannot fly?) and was ornery about a heroic Wonder Woman who didn't encourage women to stay under the thumb of men.

Basically, Dr. Wertham was a textbook example of a bad researcher and terrible human being, and while comics have mostly escaped his long shadow, he still looms over society whenever we see super-powered people in spandex fighting aliens, and decide their heterosexuality is what's most difficult to believe.