Superman, the Atom and Kandor

[redsycorax]

Why didn't it occur to Superman to use the Atom's white dwarf based size reduction technology to possibly assist in the enlargement of Kandor? There are several possible reasons for this. He did consult the Atom, which could form the basis of an Earth-One untold story if anyone hasn't had the same idea. Therefore... the Atom might have done the calculations and informed Superman that the enlargement of a condensed and miniaturised city was beyond the current scale of his own size reduction technology, which only worked on a single person. Which would be logical, given that Brainiac had access to interstellar flight and a twelfth level intellect and probably the underlying answer.  Or the Legion of Super Heroes foresaw what would happen if Kandor were prematurely enlarged and covertly intervened to forestall any early enlargement according to their timeline.  Or Ray Palmer worked out that the amount  of white dwarf matter required to enlarge Kandor would be substantial and lead to excessive strain on a scaled up version of his size reduction technology, and might not even work. 

[dans]

The Legion might or might not have known; their information about 20th Century history was limited as a lot was lost in some of the intervening wars... I think the idea about his own enlarging system being too limited is good. Maybe there was something incompatible between the way his own shrinking worked and Brainiac's ray worked, so using his tech to undo the results of Brainiac's tech would have been dangerous. Or maybe it's just because nobody every thought to try it... There are a lot of cases of comic book characters, even the geniuses like Richards and Luthor, not being able to see things that are clearly obvious to an external observer...

Vernor Vinge postulated some kind of zones in space, based on the density of interstellar matter, where the higher the matter density in a region of space, the more stupid intelligent life is in that zone. (I think Asimov came up with the idea of zones of space affecting intelligence and used it in a short story, then Brin expanded on the on the idea...). We live in the 'just barely intelligent zone', but if you move toward the center of the galaxy the effect gets worse. Maybe there is some similar effect in comic books - the closer to 2 dimensional your universe is, the dumber you are about some of the really important questions?

I one time thought about writing a story based on the observation that those outside a detective novel usually know the answer before the detective does... so, some detective figures this out, and figures out how to break the 4th wall, find the book he is living in, and read it, then go back to his own world and stun everyone by solving the case!

[jonclark]

There was at least one Bronze Age story which had Tay consulting in Kandor.

There were a few unsuccessful attempts to enlarge objects from Kandor which showed that it wasn't as easy as just taking another shrinking device and using it in reverse. Both the story where Superman first became Nightwing in Kandor and the story where the city was finally enlarged showed that objects enlarged incorrectly lost molecular cohesion. And the origin of the Atom showed that everything but Ray exploded when enlarged.