The Monstrefact: Marvel Comics’ Medusa

In this episode of STBYM’s The Monstrefact, Robert discusses the Marvel Comics character Medusa, who can put her long, red locks of hair to serious use…

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (00:10):
Hi, my name is Robert Lamman. This is the Monster Fact,
a short form series from Stuff to Blow Your Mind,
focusing on mythical creatures, ideas, and monsters. In time on
Stuff to Blow Your Mind, We've discussed the mythical Gorgon
Medusa at length, but today I want to look at

(00:31):
the character with the same name from the Marvel Comics universe.
This Medusa is an inhuman, a branch of Homo sapiens,
descended from experiments conducted on primitive humans by the alien
Cree to give them various emergent powers. While other inhumans
boast devastating offensive powers or highly augmented physiologies, Medusa's power

(00:56):
is all about her long red hair, which she can
extend to double its normal six foot length, and most
remarkably of all, control each strand as if it were
a highly prehensile arm or tentacle. She can cause her
scarlet locks to bundle together into reinforcing strands and accomplish
everything from minor tool manipulation to intense physical combat with

(01:19):
other superpowered individuals. Now as the excellent book Marvel Anatomy
by Mark Sumerak and Daniel Wallace, with illustrations by Jonah
Loebe points out Medusa's hair is just normal hair. It's
perhaps fuller and longer than most human heads of hair,
but its prehensile power stems not from its internal structure,

(01:40):
which is just the standard cross linked kerat and protein filament,
but from her own powerful psionic abilities. Yes, she has telekinesis,
but can only control her own hair, and that's no
slight against Medusa here. Think about it. The average human head,
according to Harvard's Bio Numbers website, consists of between ninety

(02:00):
thousand and one hundred and fifty thousand individual hairs, and
we might position her at the upper end of that spectrum,
even allotting for thicker hair shafts, as Sumac and Wallace suggest,
even being rather conservative. Let's say she's using her brain
to minutely control one hundred thousand strands of hair as

(02:20):
if they were one hundred thousand additional arms. Assuming that
her sonic powers emerged primarily through neural tissue, her brain
is putting in quite a lot of work here, in
addition to controlling her human limbs. Of course, remember that
an octopus in order to control. Its own sophisticated system
of grasping arms depends in part on intramuscular nerve cords

(02:43):
that act as sort of many brains to provide partially
independent action. So perhaps Medusa as well benefits from something
akin to this. We might well assume her telekinetic powers
rival those of Century or even those of the mighty
Jeen Gray, only much more localized in range. But if
telekinetic hair strand control is a heavy lift, what about

(03:06):
the actual physical lift of picking up various objects and
even superheroes with her telekinetically manipulated hair. This question is
a good bit easier to nail down, as we know
exactly how strong human hair is. As Tim Radford pointed
out in a two thousand and four article for The Guardian,
Secrets of Human Hair Unlocked at Natural History Museum in London,

(03:26):
a single human hair strand can only sustain a weight
of one hundred grams or three ounces, but when hair
is woven together it can sustain much more, a fact
that hair hangar aerialists have long exploited. In fact, if
all the strands of hair on a typical human head
were woven together, the resulting megabraid could hold twelve metric

(03:49):
tons or the weight of two elephants. So the idea
of Medusa coiling her braids and holding say, iron Man
in place, isn't that far fetched, at least from a
material standpoint. Interestingly enough, in the comics, as Queen of
the Inhumans, Medusa's greatest strength is perhaps her diplomatic abilities,

(04:10):
a reminder that while superpowered hair can move around superheroes,
a well placed word can move mountains. Tune in for
additional episodes of The Monster, Fact, The Artifact, or Animally
a Stupendium each week. As always, you can email us
at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.

Speaker 1 (04:36):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.