Superman Through the Ages! Forum

Hi All,

Came across a topic somes days ago about Superman after being exposed to Gold-K.  I must apologise, but I lost the whereabouts of the topic and wanted to add these thoughts.

Would he still be able to function as a Superhero after being exposed to Gold-K and losing his powers?

Superman's powers developed because of the environmental difference between Krypton and Earth, plus the different solar radiation given out by a Red Giant and Earth's Yellow G type Sun.  Krypton's greater gravity must have caused Kryptonians to evolve with a denser molecular structure than that of the people of Earth, with a muscle structure being developed to enable a Kryptonian to function as virtually everybody can on Earth, ie move and lift objects.  These evolved modifications would not be effected by Gold-K exposure as they are  natural part of a Kryptonian's anatomy.  Therefore, in a low gravity environment, as found on Earth, Superman should still be able to leap quite high and long distances, plus his denser molecular structure should still provide him with some degree of invulnerability, ie, being shot at with small arms fire may bruise him, but heavier armanments, ie anti-tank missles etc, would give him serious injuries.  His Kryptonian developed muscles would also make him stronger than a normal human, ie being able to lift ten's of tons.

His other powers developed from the effects on his body by the different solar radiation output of Earth's Sol, than the radiation output from Krypton's Red Sun.  It can be argued that his body became a living Solar Battery powering his ability to have a variety of Super Vision powers, enhanced Super Senses, increasing his strength and healing ability and giving him the power of flight, (OK I can't explain that one very well), but the increase to his strength, enhanced his ability to leap higher and further, (the effect of being able to negate and control the effects of Earth's gravity on his body may have been artistic licence).

Exposure to Gold-K would probably negate the effects of the Yellow Solar Radiation enhanced abilities, leaving him to rely on his inborn abilities to still fuction as a hero.  Let us not forget his intelligence, as he could still develop a protective suit, with an exo-skeleton and other functions to mimic his lost powers.

I'm not a scientist, just a bloke who has been reading Superman Comics for the past 46 years.

"Superman Under the Green Sun" really illustrates for me how the powers aren't what really makes Superman Super. Even powerless and blind Superman manages to save the whole planet! He also conciously attempts to emulate his Justice league teammates who lack special powers.

Ya I guess Supes would still alot more powerful than a normal human even after gold K.  (maybe he'd be around early Golden Age superman?). but I guess the writers would make him just a normal human (in terms of strenght) because they do that EVERY time supes loses his powers.

On paper, that sort of makes sense, but there was no evidence that Quex-Ul or Superman's "son" (in an imaginary story) ever retained any extraordinary qualities above that of a nomal Earth person.

This possibility has been explored a few times, and I think the official stance is that exposure to Gold K would leave Superman with no more physical powers than any normal (if very fit) man.

However, in at least a couple of stories -- imaginary and otherwise -- Superman has lost his powers and continued crimefighting under a new ID.  This one springs to mind:

(http://www.comics.org/graphics/covers/216/400/216_4_178.jpg)

Your post title says "hero", then you say "superhero" and mostly talk about how his powers work. 

I don't think anyone here doubts he'd be a hero. 

As a superhero, though...  I dunno.  Is Batman a superhero?  Is Luthor a supervillain?

Really, this gets back to where Superman's powers come from.  Is it gravity, solar radiation, atmosphere conditions (an explanation for his powers that was eventually dropped), a mix, etc.?  How do his powers work?

Does he have "powers" that are purely a function of his physiology?  Should Kryptonians be better able to retain extract oxygen (or perhaps alternate power sources) from whatever is in their lungs (including water) to account for Krypton's noxious atmosphere?  Should Kryptonians be able to see in the UV and IR spectra and avoid easy blindness because Krypton's lightning extremes are so intense?  How smart is the average Kryptonian and why?  Are there extra organs on Kryptonians? 

I think the only way that Gold K makes sense in its portrayal is if it literally turns him "human" (not just removes his powers), or if there's only one power source for Superman's powers for it to short-circuit.  Canon on the latter has varied over time. 

I'd like the idea of Superman being "1938" powerful even if the energizing effects of particular frequencies of solar radiation were taken out of the picture.  It'd be nice to see more of the "leap tall buildings" aspect.

Would he still function as a superhero?  The most recent incarnation has Superman more or less not wanting his powers, his powers going away for a year (with all sorts of "powers" implications), and him being a crusading reporter.  Earth-2 Clark Kent did much the same thing after The Wizard "buried" Superman. 

Apparently, exposure to gold K also removed any dress sense he had.

Yes, even with his powers removed Superman still has the sufficient technology and know-how to continue functioning as a superhero.

Or Hal could offer to give him a power ring. Though, I don't know how Supes would react to taking orders from a bunch up stuck up blue midgets in red dresses.

I don't know if Superman would continue being a crimefighter-adventurer-humanitarian without his powers, because a part of his motivation for being a hero is the fact that he has them.

Superman takes pride in his alien nature and his specialness. It isn't quite as simple as the Spider-Man style "responsibility of power," although his special nature does imply truly awesome obligations, as Martin Pasko points out.

Rather, it's more like, as Alex Ross says, Superman views his powers as a gift, not just to himself but to the entire world.

Let's say he's removed of his powers in a permanent and final way, like Gold-K. Would that not also absolve Superman of his responsibility to act as a hero that his powers bring?

I'm not sure I'm comfortable with the concept of Superman being "absolved of his responsibility."

We're not talking about a Marvel character here; Superman doesn't do what he does out of guilt or obligation or any other onerous, misery-inducing motive.  He has powers so he shares them, it's as simple as that.  If his power was to do math really quick, balance objects on his nose or win hotdog eating contests, he'd find a way to turn that do the greater good, as well.

Superman does what he does because of who he is, and he is who he is because of his parents -- both sets -- and his own nature.  Jor-El and Lara gave him a shot at life in the face of unimaginable catastrophe (and in some tellings, at sacrifice of their own lives), Jonathan and Martha taught him to help his fellow man and stick to a moral code.  His own powers taught him the beauty and fragility of life in its myriad forms across the Universe.  None of that would leave him just because he could no longer "leap tall buildings in a single bound."

Further, Superman has seen "ordinary" humans risk their lives to save others, to stop crime, to better the world.  After seeing the acts of firefighters, soldiers and policemen, after knowing men like Bruce Wayne, how could he sit idly by and let the world go to rot while he enjoyed burgers on the grill with Lois somewhere in suburbia?

I think there's certainly a theme running through classic Superman tales where he wishes he could live a normal life, settle down and not be the world's savior.  On the other hand, there's an over-arching theme in those same tales that good men are required to do good deeds -- merely abstaining from evil is not enough, and not having superpowers is no excuse for not acting.  If Gold K entered the picture, I believe it wouldn't take long for plain old, depowered Clark Kent to roll up his sleeves and continue the good fight.  Superman is who is, and even he can't escape that.  Losing his powers wouldn't spur him to retirement; it would just make his job harder.

On the other hand, there are lots of ways to help without putting on a silly costume and punching thugs in the jaw.  So it's possible a depowered Kal would "crusade" in some other way entirely...some way we wouldn't find interesting enough to justify a monthly comic.

Don't forget this:

Whatever happened to Jordan Elliot? 

Do you think Superman deliberately killing someone would be enough to make him renounce his powers, give up the good fight, and live happily ever after?

Does the vision of a depowered Clark (or anyone else for that matter) fighting crime in the fugly Supermobile scare anyone else?  :)

This is additional proof that Jerry Siegel "gets" Superman more than Alan Moore does.

I really like the idea of having Gold-K only eliminate Superman's "additional" (ie, solar-based) powers but not his inherent (reduced gravity) ones.  I think that's a clever concept and makes a lot of sense.

He can always become Nightwing! :)

ha, I forgot that. He has plenty of Non-powered crime fighting skills. He could wear his kandor suit.  Maybe he wouldnt be flying through time and the universe helping everyone but he could still fight crime as nightwing (or i guess not since batmans old sidekick now has that name).
 
Everyone would miss Superman though. Maybe he could control his superman robots so that everyone thinks supes is still around (dont want any supervillians to get too excited). It would be nice to see kal use his superman robots for something else besides covering up his secret ID.

I think Supes would put alot more effort into becoming a crusading crime fighting journalists of some sort and only occasionaly suit up for superheroing.

(It could be a fun tale to see supes back at his 1938 powers if he lost his solar based powers but kept his gravity based ones)

There's a difference between being a decent human being and someone called to a special destiny.

Would Superman act to pursue goodness without his powers? The answer, as the Busiek/Johns stuff (among other things) tells us, is yes, he certainly would.

But there's a difference between, say, telling the truth as a crusading journalist, and the special duties that his powers bestow. Because he can act on such a scale, Superman makes certain things his business that otherwise wouldn't be.

For instance, take everybody's favorite Superman story, the Maggin/Bates "Who Took the Super out of Superman?" In his dream sequence, you've got planes crashing everywhere. That's not a concern to you or me, because what can we do about planes, right? But it's something that inspires enormous guilt in Superman, because he feels his duties are shirked by his selfish desire to act on Clark Kent's wants.

I agree with you that a great deal of what made Superman who he is, is what he was "programmed" with by his life experiences. Part of that is, that he interprets his powers as something he has an obligation to share and use to help.

In Superman comics, whenever something terrible happens and Superman wasn't around to help, or was occupied, his inevitable reaction to it is "if I was here, this wouldn't have happened." Whether you interpret that as a responsibility or an obligation, or "a spirit of giving" is up to you.


I'm sure if his power was super hotdog-eating, he'd certainly find a way to have that help others. Like, say, if a hot-dog company would give $1000 to feed orphans if somebody could eat more hot dogs than the hot dog eating robot...sure, he'd pit his Stomach of Steel against the machine, John Henry-style.

But there's a difference between Superman's frankly godlike powers and hot-dog eating, in the sense that his godlike powers, combined with his sense of purpose, imply a ROLE. Superman can't help or save everybody at all times, sure. But if a plane goes down somewhere and he hears it, he has a responsibility to save it, for no other reason than because he can.

That's what I mean by his powers being an obligation that Gold K can absolve from him: he can, so therefore he should.


I agree, he wouldn't. If Superman was from a planet with a yellow sun and had no powers on earth, he would have selected a profession that would let him do a great deal of good. You know, like crusading journalist. :)

Somebody earlier in this thread mentioned "Under the Green Sun." I think there's a difference between a story like that and a situation where Superman loses his powers permanently with Gold-K. In Under the Green Sun, he saw a problem he had to overcome with guts and know-how. He had opportunity. There was something broken and wrong with the society around him: people enslaved and a dictator.

There's a difference between that, and a de-powered Superman in our society. If there was an injustice that huge (say, the Martians from Don MacGregor's KILLRAVEN invaded) he'd be the first to organize his block together to repel the invaders. If Superman had no powers, he'd help if he could, but he wouldn't go around looking for trouble.

Also, it's unfair to compare situations where Superman has temporarily lost his powers (e.g. Kandor) and a situation where he'd be permanently depowered by Gold-K. If he temporarily lost his powers, that would just be a bad situation where he'd have to make do for a while. If he lost them forever, however...his role changes.

Note that Superman doesn't go into Kandor as Nightwing to patrol unless there's a problem.


You're seeing a dichotomy there that I don't see.

The thing I always found most interesting about Hal Jordan, for instance, the most "DC" of all the DC white-male father-figures, was that, while he was proud of being a GL, the highest honor any human or alien could aspire to...at the same time, there was a non-democratic spirit to the Green Lantern Corps that he occasionally resented. The Guardians say "jump," he says "off which building?" In other words, many times, he cursed his responsibilities and duties, which took precedent over what he wanted to do as an individual. He had to do things the Guardians' way, not his way.

Also, reading my brand-new SHOWCASE FLASH, one of the things that strikes me as interesting is how Barry Allen's personal life suffers as a result of his superheroism.


I agree he'd be pretty formidable even without his powers. That's one thing that always bugged me about SUPERMAN II. A surly guy at a truck stop could beat Superman up? C'mon! Losing your powers doesn't make you a wuss.

Superman without his powers is a pretty incredible mental and physical specimen: maybe even Batman or Doc Savage-level, and he has tons of experience as an adventurer.

Maybe if Superman lost his powers permanently, he'd be a hero-trainer and befriend a kid.


I love the Cary Bates Superman story where he comes upon a crazed Superboy robot holdout. That was a fascinating way to use an idea that was cool but doomed because it was misused.

Something as cool as the Superman Robots exist...but the BEST thing the writers can think of to do with them is something as boring as have them protect Superman's secret identity?

not only that but the super-bots had all of supermans POWERS!! and all he did with them was to have them fly by and wave at lois??
supes was a genius but some times didnt have much imagination.

Supes would still be a super genius after getting hit by Gold K ,though wouldnt be able to do super complex equations in a millionth of second anymore

It would be interesting to see him get hit by some Gold K and become a Doc Savage style guy. (and I guess finding some kind of cure later on but its one of those use only once cures that happens in comics)

Superman And His Giant Robot Army #1 -- War Against Htrae!
Superman And His Giant Robot Army #2 -- Enter...  Luthor! 
Superman And His Giant Robot Army #3 -- Superman Revenge Revenge Squad!
Superman And His Giant Robot Army #4 -- MacDuff's Navy
etc.

Seriously, Alan Moore touched on this with Supreme.  Thinking about it, the robots are mostly to show Superman doing stuff he "shouldn't" be able to do, with the key word being "Superman".  If rhe robots looked like Robby the Robot or H.E.R.B.I.E., that would've turned off the readers who wanted to see Superman do stuff.  The novelty was "looks like Superman", so he had the robots do things where 'looks like Superman" was the big deal, with "has all of Superman's powers" being mostly for show.

Maybe.  There's a lot of inconsistent portrayals on how smart Superman is without powers.  One thing is that, while he may be smart, he may have key pieces of recall tied up in his superpowers.  Take away his powers and the advanced data and intersticial glue in his normal head might be swiss cheese.  How does he know to learn something in the non-powered part of his brain versus the powered part of his brain if he's super?  Take out 99+% of your brain power and how are you so sure that the 1% left will make you functional.  This could explain why Superman tends to dumb up in the face of Kryptonite.

Realistically, Green Kryptonite will always weaken Superman, even if there's a gazillion ways he could make it irrelevant, and Red Kryptonite might as well be Mxy's gift to our dimension's Kryptonians.  But most of Superman's other weaknesses, including an endless # of colors of Kryptonite, aren't so clearly in the public consciousness, should be things he figures out a way to permanently overcome. 

Come to think of it, what happens to all the knowledge Superman has stored, like knowing every language on earth, when he loses his powers? Does he just forget it? If so, does it return when his powers are restored, or does he have to learn all the superstuff again?

Kryptonite...of any sort...has never really been shown to affect Superman's intelligence. He would probably still play an important leadership role in the Justice League, but he would also lack the ability to survive in the North Pole and would have to abandon his fortress.

In the instances in which Gold K has been used in a story (like Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow? or presumably Superman II) it has

a) been used on purpose, with the intent of Superman to go into retirement, and

b) is extremely rare, with one known piece of it in the fortress. It was to be used by Superman on himself if he broke his vow never to kill, or presumably by Batman if he ever became too much of a threat. (Very few others knew of its existence.)

Where this has been addressed, the majority of work seems to point to Superman not functioning as a hero after exposure to Gold K, because it would have been used on purpose.

It depends on what you consider "canon."  In you-know-who's "Pocket Universe" saga, Krypto is exposed to Gold K and loses his super-intelligence, becoming only as smart as the average housepet. 

Never thought my comments would generate such a diversity of views on the compexities of Superman being able/unable to function as a hero/superhero after exposure to Gold-K.

The writers always made Superman 'normal' when he lost his powers, however it was his upbringing, by the Kents that, that gave him the 'with great power comes great reponsibility' stance.  It has been part of his psyche since his childhood ( please forgive me that last comment, as to me Superman was firstly Superboy.  I grew up reading the Comics of the late 1950's through to the present day and feel that the Silver Age persona was much more moralistic than the present day persona).  So on that train of thought, a non-powered Kal-eL would surely devise some way of functioning as a crime fighter, whether in a Batman type role, or perhaps as a Iron Man type using his Kryponian intelligence and utilising any Kryptonian equipment he has at hand to create a crime fighting suit imitating the powers he has lost, aka his Kandorian Nightwing character.

Because of his upbringing, he will still feel the need to fight injustice, no matter what the challenges such a venture would bring him.  It matters not that previous tales has him whistfully yearning to be 'normal'.  He knows full well  that he could not stand by and watch innocents being brutalised and crime being committed with impunity. He would act as he has always done.  In that respect, he is a hero, because he will be fully aware that he would, in all probability, be injured trying to right wrongs.

Having said that, surely his non-powered friends would assist him with training and fighting techniques which he has never had to rely on when he was 'more powerful than a locomotive'.

It depends on how you define intelligence.  Exposure to Green K permanently impacted his ability to recall his earliest memories.  Certainly, his actions in the face of the first wavelengths of Kryptonite don't usually involve flying out of range at super speed.  I'm pretty sure that without his powers (for whatever reason), he's been shown lamenting that he can't do lightning calculations. 

Well he still comes off as super smart under a red sun, so i would guess he would just be as smart after getting some Gold K.

Superman (I assume) carries alot more air in his lungs then a normal human possibly could (seeing as he can do that whole SuperFreezingBreath thing and fly through space for a very long time) aftering getting hit by sold gold kryptonite maybe his legs would just burst and he dies.