What's the deal with Superman?

The story I heard on the streets when I was young is that Superman is not actually human. Apparently he illegally entered the United States at some unspecified time in the past and with the help of some lonely Kansasainians (John and Martha Kent) he wormed his way into polite society. This lead to that and so-on and so-forth and the next thing you know he’s fighting crime and boinking Lois Lane. Good work if you can get it I suppose but even if we ignore the technicalities of some alien nailing some beautiful reporter a few questions remain.

Reports I have read put Superman’s home-planet as Krypton, a planet that at one time orbited a red sun in a far off district of the galaxy. Krypton was bigger that Earth with the resulting higher gravity which had densified the musculature of its inhabitants. The red sun threw out different radiation that our own Sol does and this also affected the inhabitants of Krypton. Superman’s father, Jor-El, figured that Krypton was going to blow up so he built a rocket-ship and just before the big blow he popped his kid into it and fired him off (well, no duh. Who wouldn’t?) Eventually the rocket landed on Earth and in a totally unexpected turn of events, Earth’s gravity and the different radiations of Earth’s sun caused Superman to be super.

Yep, he can fly and has super-strength and super eyes and you can shoot bullets at him without hurting him and it’s all good, except for one niggling little detail that kind of bugs me. Why isn’t Superman fat? He eats, but with his super-strength he would never put out any real energy to do anything. By this I mean that your average Joe type guy would expend more energy dragging his sorry butt out of the easy-chair to grab a six-pack and a block of cheese than Superman would by flying around the world twenty times, corking up volcanoes and battling super-villains. Sad but true. There is nothing that Superman could do to expend the energy he takes in. That’s a comic I’d like to see.

Anyway… Humouroceros