Superman Through the Ages! Forum

I would like to use this thread to come up with a list of all the Superman Villians who were more powerful than Superman.

The Legion of Super-Creatures
(http://www.reynos.com/Comics4$/Covers/DC/ActionComics.326.jpg)

Robot Knight from The Ultimate Enemy

Flame-Dragon

Composite Superman

Mongul

Darkseid


anymore that you can think of?

The Flame Dragon?  Ahh, I don't know...

According to the comics he appeared in, he was, what are you basing that on?

Maybe I don't know, was there a one on one conflict where Kal couldn't deal with the Flame Dragon?

The 1st one, the Dragon was from Krypton, since is was far more powerful than Kryptonians on their native planet, when it came to Earth, logically it was of course more powerful than Superman. Superman only manage to defeat it after exposing it to Red K, he could not defeat it using his powers alone. Did you read the story? The fact that he was more powerful was the whole point of the story.

Mr. Mxyzptlk, of course.  :)

of course!  :P

Lord Satanis and Syrene pretty much had Supes every time in a straight-up meeting.

Could the/a Sun-eater be considered a villain, or was it more of a weapon?

Validus, too, is likely more powerful than Superman (didn't I read somewhere it took Mon-El, Ultra Boy, and Superboy combined to even restrain him?).

The Galactic Golem, too, had the advantage over Superman in sheer physical might, IIRC.

Kryptonite Kid/Man and Dog?

Metalo

 http://superman.nu/wiki/index.php/Metalo

Amazo is another one. I don't think Kal-El ever defeated him without having to employ wits over brawn.

I guess that the brains and brawn always seemed a package for me when I think of how powerful Supes was...

No, the name of the thread isn't which Pre-Crisis Villians smarter than Superman.  :wink:

Superman never lost his IQ when he lost his powers. See all those red sun, green sun stories.

Only when writers made him dumber to fit the story. :wink:

Or rebooted him that way forever... but that doesn't count.

:D

Well, the Flame Dragon flew with wings on Krypton, was it a faster flyer than Supes on Earth...was its flame hotter than a million suns or just an ordinary flame that could cause fires but affect a Kryptonian like Superman as well?  Sorry, I always used to think about things like that, it always seemed to me that when Kryptonians had such powers magnified to such scales, that the differences in size on the original world would be comparatively small and outweighed by the smarter opponent...

I was gonna say Amazo when someone brought up Composite Superman, but I think of DC's favorite Super-Adaptoid as more of a JLA villain than a Superman one.

Amazo started out as a JLA foe, but he had at least two Superman-specific storylines.  He's even included in the DCH RPG Superman Sourcebook as a Superman villain in the Pre Crisis days.

Whenever Superman lost his powers, he also lost his super-intelligence.  With his powers he is a super-genius, without them he is a genius.

     
     Darkseid was at most Superman's equal in power.  Lord Satanis (like most magic-using villains) was nowhere near as powerful as Superman.  If Superman were not vulnerable to magic,  Satanis would be ineffective against Superman.   Amazo seemed to be only slightly more powerful than Superman.  Mongul was slightly stronger than Superman, but not as invulnerable.  The Composite Superman was definetely more powerful.  Joe Meach had the power of two kryptonians (Superboy & Supergirl), one daxamite (Mon-El), & Ultraboy.  With the powers of several other legionaires thrown in.

Just a few points of discussion, Iloyzmandias ...

Mongul, while usually portrayed as Superman's superior after his initial appearance, was actually far below Superman when he first appeared.  Mongul could not defeat the Martian Manhunter who was guarding Warworld's crystal key, so he blackmailed Superman -- the one being guaranteed to defeat J'Onn -- to get the key for him.  It's ABC logic.  Superman > Martian Manhunter > Mongul, therefore, Superman > Mongul in Mongul's first book.  Mongul was mysteriously beefed up to Superman-plus levels after that story which was never explained.

When Superman faced team-empowered foes like Amazo or the Composite Superman (later Xan aka Amalgamax, which was a much cooler name), the circumstances usually kept Kal-El's own powers out of the mix.

Amalgamax only had the powers of Supergirl, Mon-El, and Ultra Boy, not Superboy, and even then, this was in their early teens when their powers were duplicated in the statuettes.  I believe Superman was pretty even with Amalgamax until he used Triplicate Girl's power to outnumber him for might.  The other Legionnaires tended to be irrelevant unless their specific talents were taking advantage of Superman's weaknesses (e.g. Element Lad creating kryptonite).  Look at the statuettes the LSH gave as a gift.  Superboy wasn't amongst them as why would they give a statuette of the recipient?  Also, Kal would have to be in on the gift if he himself stood in the duplicator ray.  No, Superboy's were not in the Composite Superman's arsenal of duplicated powers.

Amazo didn't have Superman's powers due to the same red radiation robbing Superman of his necessitating his use of the Supermobile, so the android was using MM's powers instead.  A later Amazo encounter in an annual book does suggest he was using Superman's real powers then.

Whatever level his non-solar-energized intelligence was at, it certainly was far beyond Ira Quinby's solar-boosted super-intelligence in DCCP.  Even without his solar-based powers, Superman took a single glance at a blackboard full of equations I.Q. spent days pouring over to create with his super-intelligence to notice he misplaced a decimal point and that the corrected figures indicated the Sun would return to normal unassisted.  I.Q.'s Chemo-beam would actually trigger the nova that he sought to avoid.  I.Q. was a Hawkman foe so intelligent that he could create super-scientific devices from scrap to escape from prison such as a blasting wand and anti-grav shoes.

(http://www.comics.org/graphics/covers/97/400/97_4_0000321.jpg)

Well, in this story, Superman was intelligent enough to build a duplicate robot of himself with super powers, an exact likeness and the right costume out of raw native materials on the dark side of a planet with a red sun...

Almost goes without saying: that's a great cover!!

Darkseid, at his strongest, was far more powerful than Superman.  In the Great Darkness Saga, a revived DS went through the Legion of Superhero's greatest enemies like Mordru & Time Trapper like swiss cheese while complianing that he was weak.  He easily moved Daxam to a yellow sun and took control of the Daxamites.  He put Mon-el into a coma with one shot.  Superboy & Supergirl with their powers amped by Highfather STILL couldn't take him.  It took a billion freed Daxamites to make him back down.

Obviously, they had to power him down to about Superman level if they wanted to use him for anytyhing less than an end of the universe blockbuster.

Superman was not even with Amalgamax.  Meach had the power of 3 Kryptonian level heros.  He surely wasn't 3 times stronger than Superman as he boasted, since they WERE teens, but he was still clearly stronger, and even without Element Lad's power, Superman didn't have a chance in a straight fight.

Good point about Mongul.  If he could have beaten the Martian, he would have, and we saw how Superman kicked Jo'nn's butt even without using his fire weakness.  But unexplained power-up or not, he was stronger than Superman in later encounters.

Darkseid 'at his strongest' in The Great Darkness Saga had just stolen power from all the 30th century's most powerful beings and objects of power.  He is a far cry much more powerful than regular Darkseid of the 20th century because of that.

Even the DCH RPG stats on him reflect this.  His regular 20th century stats are far lower than Superman's while his 30th century ones in the LSH sourcebook are far higher.

The Composite Superman added Colossal Boy's power in one fight (where Superman still got a good shot in), then combined Elastic Lad's power with his extra-super-strength to finally beat him in that latter encounter.  The one time I do recall Meach seeing to get the better of Superman in a straight punch-up was after triplicating and one body still could chuck Superman into the batcave wall, so point taken on that one.  Still, back then, all Kryptonian-level beings were considered equal to each other.

Amalgamax was blocked by Superman from reaching Saturn Girl, so he got around that by triplicating himself as Superman could only block one body.  In this Bronze Age story, the differences in gender, body size, etc. between super-beings was starting to be adhered to at DC thus explaining the different way Superman fared against a single Amalgamax body.

If kryptonians had super-intelligence even on krypton, wouldn't you expect them to have advanced further than the guardians in science & technology?


    Cap you are right about how Darkseid became so much more powerfull in the "great darkness saga".  I still suspect he also had the anti life equation as well at that point.  The real reason Darkseid was the villain of that story was admiration of Jack Kirby.

Two comments about unpowered Kryptonian super-intelligence, Ilozymandias (Hey, I think I spelled it right without copying it or looking).

One, super-intelligence is a relative thing.  To we normal level folks, once we're dealing with someone above us we're not really able to differentiate between them.  The Guardians may be several levels higher than Kryptonians but both races would be far above us anyway.

Two, the Guardians had at least five billion years to develop their tech even if they had the same super-intelligence.  So, all other things being equal, Kryptonians had anywhere from thousands to millions of years to work with, so the Oans had a clear 1,000 x headstart advantage.  We might recall that the first Oan controls on the universe involved relatively primitive stun guns and android technology not the miraculous power rings and Miracle Machines of Guardian and Controller design of much later.

I think the documented facts about unpowered super-intelligence on Krypton are not inconsistent with Oan achievements given the above.

Kal-El was self-educated.  He learned kryptonian science & technology by studying (reverse engineering) any & all examples of it that he found.  Imagine the knowledge that the Guardians (& Controllers) must have.  Considering the fact that they (as individuals) are 10 billion years old.  They could be of ordinary human level intelligence & still achieve miracles.  Kal's super-intellect enabled him to accumulate vast knoweledge about just about everything.  When he loses his powers (which include his super-intellect) he still has his super-knowledge.

I'm not sure that Kryptonians were "super intellegent" on Krypton.  They certainly had a higher tech-level than Earth, although they lacked space travel, but that doesn't mean higher intellegence.  However, the yellow sun probably boosted Superman's mental speed and memory, and he was the son of Kryptons greatest scientist, so it's not surprising that he's very smart with or without powers.

I only own the Kirby fourth world works, however, I have yet to see a single case of Darkseid demonstrating limitless physical power that would make him an equal - to say nothing of a MATCH - for Superman. I have no idea where writers got the idea in their heads that Darkseid was more powerful than Superman physically. If anything, Darkseid may be as dangerous as Superman because of the subtlety of his schemes and his ability to plan and his access to limitlessly advanced technology, but not because of sheer physical power.

Captain Kal brought up the DC Heroes RPG Sourcebook, which was constructed with research over several years. It is not without its errors (Superman had no super-smell or super-shout powers, for example) but it was a useful comparison based system. Darkseid's stats, in the 1985 edition, are as follows:

Dexterity: 7
Strength: 18
Body: 27

Now, for comparison, Strength: 30 is the score the Martian Manhunter was given. Strength: 50 is Superman. Body (a statistic that measures toughness) for Superman is 40.

This may not be relevant, but since Darkseid's powers were brought up, I always loved how Jack Kirby used unusual verbs to describe powers in operation, which made one think that possibly there was more to a power than one would think.

For instance, Darkseid says that "I have loosed the Omega Effect!" Now, that single word - loosed - implies a different way the power works than "fired." Can Darkseid control the Omega Effect when it is released? Is he constantly holding it back? It makes one think.

For instance, in NEW GODS #6 or so, Orion says "I can still contact the Astro-Force!"

"Contact" the Astro-Force? This word choice implies there is something more to the Astro-Force than just a laser beam he fires from his harness.

Isn't he a powerful threat in those classic Legion stories?

I think you missed my post earlier on this thread, Telle.



LSH Darkseid is uber-boosted Darkseid.  That's not his natural nor normal power-level.

That might explain the example where Superman used native materials on a red sun world to make a superrobot, etc.  He was just remembering how to do that.

OTOH, that doesn't explain the I.Q. example where he instantly comprehended then corrected the flaw in I.Q.'s complex mathematical formulae.  Superman had never seen this before so it's a matter of comprehension not memory, therefore he was exercising super-intelligence here without the sun to boost his brain.

Is Superman smart enough to simulate a particular computer in his head?
In Trinity, he was shown being able to slurp data off a CD (or maybe DVD) and parse it, which got me to thinking...

I thought Superman didn't lose his powers in that story.  He stopped I.Q.'s "solar-cure" by flying to the sun & intercepting Chemo.  Also how do we know that Kal never saw Ira's mathetical formulae before?  He probably came up with those calculations himself, when he was still Superboy.

Superman lost all his non-muscular powers like heat vision and super-senses.  Arguably, that included any super-intelligence since the last time I checked, the brain isn't considered a muscle.

 :P  :wink:

In the absence of proof or even a hint of that, that implies he hadn't seen or done any calculations of that nature before.  You need to prove he'd seen or done this kind of thing before.  That's not in the books.

Considering that they were specifically about magnetic manipulation of the sun and how to use Chemo's specific nature to alter/correct that, that seems very unlikely, perhaps impossible.  Superboy never encountered Chemo who happens to be a unique form of artificial life.  Neither Superman nor the younger Superboy ever created life, which is where Luthor did exceed Kal-El with his artificial protoplasm.  I'd say it's impossible for Superman to have ever encountered those calculations before given the Chemo factor in them.

As i should have said Kal-El without his super-intelligence is still a genius of the caliber of an Edison, Einstein, or William James Sidis.  A genius with Kal's super-knowledge would be (to us) virtually indistinguishable from a super-genius.

Even only a moderately bright guy, with super data intake, super speed thinking, and super recall on pre-Crisis Superman level, would still come across as a total genius.  He's probably living a lifetime between ticks of a second, and has a database floating in his head that'd make the folks at Google and Encyclopedia Galactica drool with envy. That's not to suggest that Superman is "just" a moderately bright guy, but those powers sure could go a long way.  

As far as innovativeness, I tend to think that Kal-El is roughly Jor-El's equal, though both are below classic Luthor and Brainiac on the totem pole.  I don't like Kryptonian science being so horribly super.  Otherwise, why didn't they save Krypton, or prevent Brainiac from taking Kandor?  Kryptonians as a whole are horribly status quo-focused, so it's hard to fathom their being great innovators.  (The house of El must have an "innovative" gene to them.)

I've always figured that Luthor was mutated in the accident that caused him to lose his hair, raising his genius level even further, because that's the only way he'd be able to compete with Superman's prodigious intellect and mental abilities (let alone those physical powers of his).  But, he has a mental block thinking about the nature of his own super-intelligence, else he'd realize that he has Superboy's accident to thank for it and it'd sicken him to the core.  So, we never hear of it.

Actually Lex was already a super-genius before the accident.  Consider that he devised an effective antidote to kryptonite.  Superman was never able to do that, even after decades of research & experiments.  Also (in the early-mid 60s at least) Lex hated Kal for being an obstacle/barrier to Lex's greatness.  The loss of his hair had little if anything to do with Lex's hatred of Kal.  Lex saw kal as something that was keeping him(Lex) in check.  That & the fact that Kal was always sending Lex back to prison.

Perhaps.  Superboy has the IQ of a potted plant in that story, though.  He tends to have the IQ of a low-grade moron when it comes to handling his weaknesses.  While probably necessary to tell a good story, you have to wonder how he's even somewhat bright.  He actually found an antidote and vaporized it for no good reason as Superman:

http://goodcomics.blogspot.com/2005/09/other-amazons.html


Of course, Lexor is always a good counterexample.  A nice Superman hostile place where the world is named after him, a hot chick likes him, etc.  I always understood "losing his hair" better than most of the other motivations more complicated than "Luthor is a bad guy".

There was a Superman Family tale where both Superman-One and Superman-Two fought a villain from another dimension who was stronger than EITHER of them together, to save the life of the Earth-Two Jimmy Olsen.

---Al

Absolutely right, Al.  The villain's name was Krogg.

E-1 Superman stated in that story that they were only as strong as their weakest link, and even though both Supermen were equal, Krogg had bested one of them.  Their only option was to adapt the transmatter device -- for transporting between the two Earths -- to merge them into a single super-Superman.

They had a fixed time limit for this merger since they were too powerful and would eventually explode.  They finally noticed that Krogg had the same problem so they used their combined heat vision in their merged form to push Krogg over the critical point and Krogg exploded.

BTW, that is a case where Superman could arguably have deliberately killed someone.  In this case, both Supermen would have been guilty.

Krogg. Yeah, THAT's why I couldn't remember the name---because it was eminently forgettable.---Al

I think they recycled this plot into about 50,000 episodes of Dragonball Z.

Duplicate man wrote
Good point about Mongul. If he could have beaten the Martian, he would have, and we saw how Superman kicked Jo'nn's butt even without using his fire weakness. But unexplained power-up or not, he was stronger than Superman in later encounters.


I always figured one of J'onn's powers like telepathy played on a weakness of Mongul's or he had traps set for him. In any event Pre-Crisis one of my favorite villians.

That's an interesting rationalization that almost works, SteamTeck.

The problem with it is J'Onn clearly was confronting Mongul purely physically at the end of that story.  He had no special traps or plan but a brute force approach when he laid into the villain.  He even says he stopped Mongul before and he'll do it again as he commences his brute force attack.  Surely, J'Onn would exploit any special weaknesses or traps that were effective the last time he faced Mongul.

Also, Mongul has never shown any special weaknesses in any of his portrayals.  He's capable of being overpowered -- eventually, even at his later uber-levels.  He's capable of being outsmarted, though that still takes some doing.  But he has no real special weaknesses.  To suggest that J'Onn exploited a special weakness of Mongul is a baseless speculation contradicted by all of his portrayals.

I was looking for that issue and it was Superman Family No. 187.

I don't have that issue, but would liek to see the merged Superman (Giant Superman?) added to the http://superman.nu/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

info:

Story: “A Phoenix of Steel” (8 pages)
Editor: E. Nelson Bridwell
Writer: Gerry Conway
Penciller: Curt Swan
Inker: Jack Abel
Letterer: Ben Oda
Colorist: Anthony Tollin
Feature Character: Superman (last appearance in Superman story in last issue; appears in Jimmy Olsen story in this issue between pg. 8, panels 3 / 4; next appears in Lois Lane story in this issue)
GS: Superman of Earth-Two (next appears in ALL-STAR COMICS #71)
Supporting Characters: Jimmy Olsen (between Jimmy Olsen and Lois Lane stories in this issue), Professor Potter (last appearance in Superman story in last issue)
Villain: Krogg (last appearance)
Comment: This story continues from the Superman story in last issue, crosses over with the Jimmy Olsen story in this issue, and continues in the Lois Lane story in this issue.
Synopsis: In order to stop the monstrous Krogg from devastating Earth-One, the Supermen of both Earths are merged into a single, double-powered Superman.

http://darkmark6.tripod.com/supermanind6.html

I don't have it either.  Anyone?  

I'm often tempted, armed with a great summary like Dark Mark's, to write a Supermanica entry, but relying on the actual primary source is a better tactic.

Any more super-powerful nominees?  What's that? 5 total listed in this thread?