Kandor

     I love superhero comic books. I feel like I need to say that before I go any further, but I love them for everything they are. I love the high flying super heroes, the melodrama, and everything else. Well almost everything.

   Lets talk about Kandor. Kandor is a city in the Superman comics that was stolen from Krypton and shrunk down to the size of a bottle. Superman recovered it from the supervillian Brainiac, and since then he hasn't figured out a way to get the city back to normal size, and this is where the problem is.
   With superheroes, nothing is off limits. Just about everything has been figured out and is possible, and because of this, Kandor doesn't make sense. Nothing should be impossible for you, especially something as simple (for superheroes) as making something bigger than it is. Kandor is a symbol of Superman's failure, it's a humanizing factor that he's alone in the world, and the only surviving members of his race are tiny and vulnerable. The future of an entire race hedges on Superman figuring out this problem, and he can't do it. It's meant to show us that the Man of Steel isn't all powerful, he's not omniscient, he's vulnerable like the rest of us.
     All of this would be perfect if it wasn't for the fact that it's so easily solvable. Because the answer's so obvious, it breaks suspension of disbelief to have it left unsolved, but to solve the puzzle is to remove Kandor's purpose. Kandor doesn't function as a symbol if you make it bigger, it's just another place, another plot point. A couple of times in the comics they did make Kandor full sized, but it ended up as you would expect, important for a few issues, then gone and never spoken of again. It breaks the immersion of the story to leave it in, and it makes the city pointless if you solve it. Just something to think about.