DC's attitude adjustment and long live the Classic Superman!

[Captain Kal]

If one reads MOS #1 carefully, it must be noted that Clark himself admits that his parents had taught him over the years to not use his powers to make himself better than anyone else, to make anyone feel useless -- and that that's exactly what he was doing.  IOW, he knowingly and deliberately disobeyed what his parents specifically taught him not to do.  And this was extended over at least several years of high school football going by those several football trophies Lois saw in his apartment later.  Darn straight that he screwed-up here.  This is yet another example of Byrne's flawed writing and characterization.  For that Jonathan-admonishing-Clark scene to work, we have to accept that Jonathan was such an uninvolved, absentee father or a remarkably dense dunderhead not to have noticed his son abusing his powers for all those years on the gridiron, and we also have to accept a Clark willfully disobeying his parents' express wishes on this matter for the same period.  His parents come off as seriously retarded and Clark comes off as immoral.  Human error is making the odd mistake.  Human culpability results from a pattern of repeatedly doing the wrong thing and knowingly.

Anyway, Byrne's 'making Clark lonely' isn't new since Clark has always been an outsider and a loner in all his incarnations.

[jmr72777]

Captain Kal,

I never meant to imply that Clark being lonely was a Byrne invention.  Merely that this loneliness is an identifiable trait as valid as if it were because of his alien origins.  It's just something more readily identifiable to the audience.

Was he amoral as a teen?  No.  He was an adolescent.  Teens do rebellious things.  It's all about perspective.  You see, first of all, with the post-crisis addition that he didn't come to Earth with powers, but that they built over time, it's perfectly plausible (at least for the sake of speed, although not invulnerability) that when he started playing football, he didn't have THAT much of an advantage over the other players.  Besides which, it's one thing to be MVP and another to effectively bench the rest of the team.  This may simply have been the apex of Clark's abilities, and it had gotten to the point that Jonathan finally had to say something.

[Captain Kal]

Clark has never come across as lonely and only can be speculated to have been so on his travels as you posited above.  This was certainly not an element of Byrne's revamp.

Clark was clearly shown lifting a truck with one hand to get his ball as a kid sometime around eight years old or so, and certainly before he turned into a teenager.  No human on Earth could stand up to a kid with that kind of strength.  He obviously was far stronger in high school.  Your speculation here contradicts what MOS #1 clearly showed us about his power development.  The coach and Lana certainly did agree that Clark had been a star player for quite awhile.  Lana agreed that Clark was just getting better and better.  The coach declared that Clark just won another one for the team which surely means he's done this before.  The coach even said Smallville has never seen such a great all-around athlete like Clark Kent which implies he's been abusing his super-powers in other sports than just football.

[jmr72777]

Captain Kal,

All valid arguments.  On the flip side, it was never shown or even hinted at that little Clark was kicking through the bottom of his cradle, nor was he flying around the ceiling as a child (post-crisis.)  As such, one could make an argument that (running with the SOLAR BATTERY theory) that he was soaking in energy, and that he could do stuff (at that age) but just not for a prolonged time.  And that long-term storage of the solar energy is what made him SUPER later on and which was why the abilities such as flight, x-ray vision and so forth didn't manifest until later in life.

Byrne glossed over it enough that many theories could be valid, depending on how you want to look at it.  As for being a football hero, I contend that there are many football heroes abounding right now that aren't from other planets.  He merely could have been a great player when he started (star status) who became phenomenal as the years passed.  If one WANTS to believe that the Kents were neglecting parents and that CLARK was an amoral thug, then certainly they could rationalize it that he had his abilities all along.

It's the fundamental difference in the YELLOW SUN part between Pre and Post crisis.  In the Pre-Crisis SUPERMAN, he couldn't have been a solar battery, because he just couldn't store the stuff.  The moment he was exposed to the rays of a Yellow Star he was up to full strength.  The moment he was exposed to the rays of a Red Sun, he IMMEDIATELY lost his powers......  Therefore, he had them all along.  The Post-Crisis SUPERMAN had to store up his energy to work at full power.  This was taken a step further when a group of villains (I forget which) decided to tax SUPERMAN by creating all sorts of worldwide havoc in an attempt to wear him down and deplete his stores of solar radiation.

[Great Rao]

Clark was clearly shown lifting a truck with one hand to get his ball as a kid sometime around eight years old or so, and certainly before he turned into a teenager.

Just for the record, this panel was not from 1986's Man of Steel, it was from a Karl Kesel story published in the 1990s.  At that time, it was a radical change of direction from the theory put forth in MOS that Clark's powers came on him slowly and didn't begin to manifest until his teens.  This was the first of many attempts to slowly alter the MOS continuity to try to fix it.

[Captain Kal]

No, Great Rao.  MOS #1 did show the truck lift scene which Byrne kept as an homage to an earlier version of Superman's origin.  This wasn't Kesel's idea nor Byrne's but from an origin in the early Silver Age.

[Captain Kal]

Clark was supposedly completely powerless as a newborn up until eight.  That was the first demonstration of super-powers: his invulnerability to being trampled to death by a bull.  His super-strength manifested next on the next page as he casually lifted that truck with one hand to retrieve his baseball.

Given all that is actually stated during Byrne's run in MOS and elsewhere, Superman does not appreciably lose his stored power for any period less than three days.  Nothing in canon supports the baseless speculation that his younger self ever had bouts of losing power in shorter periods.  Indeed, Jor-El did state that the yellow star would make Kal-El grow ever more powerful.  Speculation only counts if some evidence exists to support it.  It fails even more if evidence contradicts it.

The fact remains is that Clark did knowingly abuse his powers on several occasions and we only saw the 'final straw' that Jonathan took Clark to task on.

The coach said Clark just won 'another one' for them.  That's plural for being the star player.  He said Smallville never saw a better all around athlete like Clark Kent.  That means he did this in a number of other sports besides just football.

Only the Zero Hour retcon that put his power development in his late teens could fix that.  Post Zero Hour, Clark could compete fairly in sports since he didn't have any powers until nearly adulthood.  Before that, he was clearly cheating.

[Great Rao]

No, Great Rao.  MOS #1 did show the truck lift scene which Byrne kept as an homage to an earlier version of Superman's origin.  This wasn't Kesel's idea nor Byrne's but from an origin in the early Silver Age.

I stand corrected. I'll have to stay out of this discussion, my neurons and knowledge are obviously focused on something other than Byrne.

I'm going to go read some more Jimmy Olsen now... :oops: