Murder and manslaughter are state crimes (except for special cases outside state jurisdictions), and the punishment varies a lot. I'm not seeing any state where it goes up to life, but 30 years is possible, and a couple of those could be a functional life sentence even if not officially one.

I'm inclined to cut the story a fair amount of slack, because there are a lot of stories that short-circuit if Kryptonian powers are used to their fullest possible extent. (Why ever get into fistfights with people who can't fly when you've got vision powers and can throw rocks?)

J'onn's barely been a solo character for the last half century, so it's hard to judge. But he's a lot easier to write when his fire weakness and his basic alienness are brought more to the fore, and ditto when he's operating with the Justice League, whose opponents are designed to be able to challenge Superman and…

Telepathy is a really tough power to write. On the other hand, it's one that's really closely associated with J'onn J'onzz. This show isn't afraid to change up characters from their origins (Mon-El is lacking most of his comics counterpart's powers), but telepathy has strongly informed most of J'onn's uses in the…

A realistic story about a godlike alien or a billionaire working out his childhood trauma unaccountably enforcing their views of morality through violence could go a lot of different ways. None of them would look much like a Superman or Batman story

That later version of Comet was sufficiently different (and connected with a different Supergirl character) that I'd call them[1] a separate character rather than a retcon.

Unless something's changed in the research, that's still in the "compelling correlation which may explain some of the twentieth century crime statistics" rather than a fully established theory at this point. (Though it's certainly sufficiently persuasive to make me glad that we phased out tetraethyl lead.)

They haven't followed the comics with anything about Mon-El so far. That said, if they do write him off the show, I'd put even odds between "lead poisoning puts him in the Phantom Zone" and "it's my responsibility to lead Daxam into an egalitarian, slavery-free future".

Never have a I wished Powerless was a better show more than when I read that episode description.

I liked how many episodes opened with Kara doing straightforward rescues (or just helping people in small but important ways) in Season 1, and really wish they'd still devote some attention to that now. That said, superhero stories are largely about conflicts, and there's a limit to how many stories can be created…

They can't address it. They can touch on it, play with it, raise issues lightly for dramatic or comic purposes. But at the end of the day if they try to treat vigilantism realistically from either a legal or social perspective, the answer is "superheroes don't work as a concept".

I'm not really a fan of "figure it out because they're awesome". Lex Luthor is also awesome. So's the Joker. So's everyone's archvillain.

Though the more that sort of thing happens, the more dim everyone in Star City looks by comparison.

Supergirl trivia: in the Silver Age, Dick Malverne (né Wilson) was at the Midvale Orphanage with Kara. He started out as her equivalent to Lana Lang, trying to prove Linda Lee (as she was then) and Supergirl were one and the same. He went on to the distinction of being pretty much the only memorable love interest who…

which, again, calls into question why she can’t figure out that Kara and Supergirl are the same person

Bronze Age Lois was no slouch: they redoubled down on her reporter bona fides and made a regular point of the fact that she'd been trained in Klurkor, a Kryptonian martial art. (Though it was only recently that I ran across the crazy Silver Age circumstances under which she got that training in Kandor.) They even…

My favorite was a story that I first read when it was reprinted in Superman Family in the 70s. It features a) an airliner with an unlabeled button that ejects that row of seats from the plane, b) a lost valley of barbaric Welsh(!) tribal folk, c) the Cave of Doom, d) Lois and Lana facing the stark choice between…

IIRC, it was a fan suggestion incorporated into a story. Though the idea was rapidly deep-sixed and never mentioned again, since even by Bronze Age Superman story standards it made no sense.

I guess the fact that you could play Atari 2600 game cartridges on the Atari 400/800 home computers counts.

The trolley problem studies show that many people have different intuitions about the importance of actions vs inaction. And it may depend on the action— you get different response numbers for "push an innocent man in front of a trolley to save five others" than you do for "pull a switch to send the trolley in the…