Comic book science is notoriously unreliable. One time I got bitten by a radioactive spider and absolutely nothing happened. Nothing.
So that's the approach I'm taking to Plastic Man No More, a new comic just released by DC Comics. In it, the pliable superhero gets blasted by a death ray from the villain Solaris.
Plas stops the ray, allowing the Justice League of America to defeat the bad guy. But he later finds out he's essentially slowly melting away from the effects — or depolymerizing, as a scientist tells him.
To the credit of writer Christopher Cantwell, depolymerization is a real thing that happens when plastics reach their ceiling temperatures and revert back to their component monomers, although generally that comes into play during chemical recycling.
Here's some ceiling temperature info to impress people at parties. The ceiling temperature for acrylic is 198° Celsius. Polystyrene is 395°, polyethylene is 610° and PTFE is 1,100°. It's never been clear what type of plastic Plastic Man is made of.
We'll have to follow future issues to see how this particular comic book science experiment turns out. There's a not-zero chance that it involves a radioactive spider.