Print Page - Why do they alays want Superman to be "weaker"

It's kinda stupid how they say

"Superman is wayy too powerful"

but yet when they compare him to say Thor, Hulk and Juggernaut.. they go on saying

"Those three would stomp Superman easily"

and they NEVER complain about those three

kidding aside arguments are always

"It's hard to find a 'credible threat' to him if he's powerful"

If anyone here knows the term PIS (plot induced stupidity) they use it all the time.. ignoring by and lkarge that comics is a medium FULL of PIS

I guess it's part a syndrome of "People love to see a hero fall"

or maybe their love for "conservatism is dead and those who are should be burned to a steak"

Elliot S! Maggin hated the motion of "always having to depower him" it's the easy way out..

Grant Morrison's All Star Superman was all powerful but he did make it work.

and they want supes to be as weak as the Byrne supes ARE THEY EFFING KIDDING? even without the argument of Byrne's work on the character

the power level was way wrong, he shouldn't have trouble lifting planes, and stronger bullets shouldn't hurt him it's pathetic.

The Hulk has a built-in weakness: no brain.

Thor works because rather than ramping down his power levels (how do you de-power a GOD?), they instead gave him a supporting cast nearly as powerful as himself. Thor operates in a world of cosmic-power-level beings (friends and enemies) and consequently he's always more interesting in space or Asgard than he is fighting Earth-bound menaces or (yawn) pining over Jane Foster as the lame (in every possible sense) Don Blake.

With the exception of Kirby's work on the character, few writers have seemed interested in doing the same for Superman. There's been little interest in giving him cosmic threats or space-borne adventures; instead everyone wants to hang out in Metropolis (or worse, Smallville) and focus on the marriage and Clark Kent's day job at the Daily Planet. It's a tough balance; how do you focus on "human" stuff without wasting the enormous potential of a guy of Superman's abilities, and conversely how do you make it believable that a guy who juggles stars would worry about deadlines or the water bill? Obviously it can be done, but historically only a few have really pulled it off.

Byrne avoided the issue by deciding from Day One that Superman was an Earth-man first, ruling out space missions let alone time travel, which helps if you want to take the "he's just average guy with something extra" approach, but as you say in the end it just makes him one of the crowd, and even, given his reduced power levels, something of an also-ran. It's one thing to say you want to make him more "relatable," but when everyone around him is more powerful than he is, you have to wonder how he even gets away with calling himself "Superman.' Captain Marvel ought to pat him on the head and chuckle, "Well aren't you cute?"

Comic book writers rarely have a sense of scale. The Byrne Superman was a hell of a lot more powerful than most give him credit for.

Consider this, the Byrne Superman was capable of reaching escape velocity. Translated into speed, that's mach 34. Now, what happens when an object of Superman's mass hits another at that speed? You get a massive release of kinetic energy. I'm not a physics guy, but hypersonic punches themselves should have more impact than the 16-inch shells from an Iowa-class battleship.

The Jurgens Superman, who was capable of high sub-light speeds was a bloody relativistic kill vehicle.

Of course, the funny book writers don't think like hard science fiction writers.

I always quote Neal Gaiman from here " http://herocomplex.latimes.com/2008/12/02/neil-gaiman-ala/ (http://herocomplex.latimes.com/2008/12/02/neil-gaiman-ala/)

Talking about the Sandman character's genesis.

"And I wanted someone who is absolutely and utterly powerful. It’s interesting because at the time, John Byrne had just taken over Superman and had announced that he was making Superman less powerful because he had become too powerful and you couldn’t write interesting stories about people that were too powerful. That started me thinking, “Well, no, actually you can, because what makes a person interesting or not interesting isn’t how powerful they are, but who they are.”

+ Gaiman hommaged in one of the Sandman arcs "Jonathan Carroll" a fairly well-known American author who is also the name of Lois Lane's new boyf.

There are those who believe Superman should be stronger, and those who believe he should be weaker.

Here's the problem. If Superman becomes too powerful, he ceases to be Superman.
If he gets too powerful, so powerful he loses his touch with humanity, he isn't Superman. He becomes a god. And as pointed out before, a god among men is less fun then a god among gods. This is why I find the Silver Age Superboy stories more fun than the more ridiculous Superman ones- he has other Godlings to hang out with, the Legion. And even then, the stories get really silly. Nobody can sneeze out a star. Nobody can pull planets through space with a chain without hurting them. It's not believable. I don't care who it is, nobody can do that.

There's another way to keep his powers in check. He has to be Clark, to hold him back, to keep him from being a God. He has to be an everyman.
Siegel and Shuster did that on purpose, to make him relatable, despite claims that we're not supposed to relate to Superman. That's just silly.
It's the whole reason behind half of the character. But he can't be totally held back either. If he can get knocked out by a club, that's every bit as silly as if he sneezes out a star.

Because here's the other problem. If Superman becomes too weak, he ceases to be Superman. An everyman Super-Hero who's only got mild super-strength, mild invulnerability, mild super-speed? That's Spider-Man. There are good stories about Spider-Man. But the appeal of Superman is not the appeal of Spider-Man. He's a normal guy, that Clark Kent. Normal clothes, normal (okay, mildly heroic) job, normal pal, normal girl trouble. And the greatest secret on Earth is that Clark Kent is one of the most powerful beings in the universe.

Quote from: Rugal 3:16 on July 21, 2011, 08:17:08 AM

That's the sort of illogic some Marvel fans use when decrying DC heroes, such as Superman.

For instance, I know of some who hate Superman (because he's an alien), and Green Lantern (because he got his ring from an alien), because, of course, "that's impossible", on the other hand - in their opinion - of course it's perfectly possible ::) for a radioactive spider bite to create Spider-Man, or a gamma bomb blast to turn a man into the Hulk!

Nothing against the Hulk or Spider-Man (or their fans), but I've always thought it is straw-splitting to maintain that some super-powered heroes are more realistic than others because of the use of very arbitrary and selective criteria in passing judgment in what is, after all, an extremely implausible and unrealistic medium; superhero comics.

Getting back on topic, the answer to your question, "Why do they always want Superman to be "weaker"?", well the main one is that it is a lot easier to write Superman that way, rather than as a god-like being, as Denny O'Neill -for one - observed years ago.

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For instance, I know of some who hate Superman (because he's an alien), and Green Lantern (because he got his ring from an alien), because, of course, "that's impossible", on the other hand - in their opinion - of course it's perfectly possible Roll Eyes for a radioactive spider bite to create Spider-Man, or a gamma bomb blast to turn a man into the Hulk!

Hear, hear.

It's always struck me as funny that The Whizzer is considered more or less the laughing stock of the MU because he got his super-speed from a transfusion of Mongoose blood ("Hahahaa! That's stooopid!") but Spider-Man is perfectly plausible and the darling of the MU after getting his powers from a spider bite ("Oh, that could happen!").

The real reason Marvel fans don't like Superman is that (1) he's confident in his abilities and his correctness (or at least used to be), and (2) he shows too much restraint. Anyone with super-powers is supposed to spend their day beating up on somebody else; if you can't find a villain, fight another superhero. In Marvel terms, anyone who doesn't doubt himself and/or throw a tantrum every two hours is boring.

I would say that god among man stories are inherently more interesting than god among gods stories. There's a lot more to work with.

As for Superman, there were some stories where it was shown that his power level might be near infinite--in the late 70s and then again in the late 90s. And it was suggested that Superman is holding back. If he wanted, he could have a lot more power, but this is all the power he can handle.

And that's what is interesting about Superman--at his best--because it's about the man, not the power. There are philosophical and psychological reasons for Superman's limitations.

???Yeah, I realize superman need's some limit's. Destroying a solar system by sneezing is a bit extreme, yet you say dragging planets through space is impossible, so they do that and characters like green lantern, wonder woman, and even weaker ones do the same thing so superman is a ....underman compared to them.I think superman should be able to move planets, even if it is with difficuly. If you want to depower supes, keep him the most powerful being on earth and weaken everyone else.It was okay with golden ages superman because back then the world was simpler. Then in comics there was no all powerful darkseid gods or super hydrogen bombs.
Superman get's stronger as we get stronger.

Quote from: superboy on July 22, 2011, 03:43:31 PM

You make a really good point about Green Lantern or Wonder Woman dragging planets around. My argument isn't that Superman shouldn't be able to drag around planets, my argument is that nobody should be strong enough to drag around planets. Including Wonder Woman, Supergirl, Power Girl, Green Lantern, Captain Atom, Hulk, Thor, Juggernaut... nobody* should be that strong.

I have no problem with scaling everyone else back when Superman is scaled back, in theory, but part of the reason to scale him back is so he can be hurt by super-villains, and if they're scaled back as much as he is, he can't be. You've got to have a balance.

The Silver Age Superman could have beat Doomsday without breaking a sweat. And that's boring. Scale him down. Maybe Superman can beat Doomsday, but he has to take the rest of the afternoon off to recover. That doesn't make him too weak, but it does make the fight more entertaining.

Of course, you can create that kind of tension with other people in danger instead of Superman, but it's harder to make people interested in "Those unnamed characters must be saved to honor Superman's oath to protect all life!" than "Superman might die himself!"

[*Except maybe Captain Marvel. He's off in a world of his own, a world not grounded by basic physics, because 1) he's more childish than Superman (though often just as entertaining), and 2) he's magic, and hard or even soft SF rules don't apply to him the way they apply to Big Blue.]

Quote from: Adekis on July 23, 2011, 12:23:18 AM

Quote from: superboy on July 22, 2011, 03:43:31 PM

Or, you simply amp up the villains. One of the worst mistakes DC made post-Crisis was to neuter Mongol. Pre-Crisis, it took everything Superman had to beat him and Supes passed out from exhaustion shortly after. Stern and Perez turned Mongol into a weakling that got his ass handed to him by a weakened Byrne-level Supes.

The best thing post-Crisis was that they did away with that idiotic red flashlight weakness and de-emphasized the magic "weakness".

I've referred to Doomsday as Dumbsday when it first came out. Nothing's changed.

The more powerful the superhero is, the more unrecognizable the world should be after their emergence. With the Superman we grew up with, this could lead to ridiculous results:

Silver Age Superbaby would be everyone's Facebook friend, having invented things like Facebook, Google, and the Internet a second or two after he figured out how to use personal pronouns properly. Imagine Christmas for real, where Superman zooms to every kid everywhere and gives them what they need or want the most. Imagine all the nukes gone before anyone had a discussion over it. Any screwups along the way could be fixed by spinning back time, just like Groundhog Day, so the consequences of bad actions or bad ideas can be washed away easily. Global warming was that thing that Superboy fixed that one time so Lana wouldn't get sunburned. Religion would get blown away. And why didn't Superman just hypnotize Lois to not pursue Clark's identity once and for all, among a gazillion other things that super-hypnosis would've been good for (curing smoking and weight loss for the masses, making Luthor a productive member of society, etc.) And just imagine the landscaping possibilites of the Phantom Zone...

Yeah, I could see where a writer might want to tone Superman down a little, just to prevent the logical conclusions from constraining the world too much.

One of the Best Rebuttals i've found so far (which i completely agree with)

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There's a difference between having a prefference to a Superman who, while still extraordinary when compared to humans, is much more tame in power, and saying that it was him having been weaker that made him relevant. What's relevant is his actions, his motivations and his personality when confronted with everything that represents evil in this world, his ability to inspire the good in people and stand out for the weak, when he has it in his power to impose what he thinks and much more, not whether he can bench-press a tank or a planet. It's so asinine to think that him being 'weaker' makes him more relevant, that it's a tad sad.

For all the talk of a weaker Superman - he doesn't seem to realize that Superman was still above anybody else in his Universe in the Golden Age. And once his Universe was expanded to include Gods and other heroes, he became more powerful. A 'Golden Age' powerlevel Superman won't work in a shared Universe, where there's space travellers with wishing rings and extra-dimensional gods attacking Earth. Superman's power adapts through all mediums - but he is still supposed to be the pinacle of heroism, as far as everything is concerned.

Wanting to see him hurt by tanks and wrecking balls is fine. Does that make him more inspiring or relatable, than when he stands up to Darkseid fighting for humanity's free will and soul until his last breath? Not for me. I can't do either, and I'd rather read of something more fantastical, than to see Superman get depowered and "realistical" because it supposedly makes him better.

Just because he is godlike, doesn't mean he can't be challenged. Challenge isn't about being hurt physically with human-made machines from the last century. That doesn't make him seem more incredible, or more worthwhile to read. If anybody actually thinks his relevany is dependent on that, he's missing the point. Big. Rags Morales hates a Superman who is even remotely powerful. Ok. I get it. And thankfully, he's not writing the book. But his "love love love love weak Superman, because he gets hurt by tanks and thus is more relevant!" is inane, from every logical standpoing.

credit goes to Philosophía

There's a topic I've meant to develop that would examine the relationship between Superman's super-powers and the United States as a super-power. I think this correlation exists and may even influence writers and editors (albeit unconsciously) in how they approach Superman.

Just briefly, you can see how from the Depression through World War Two, Superman gains power and emerges as a force in the world. Until he's the world's policeman. When the U.S. is the preeminent nuclear power (presumably with the ability to destroy the Earth several times over), Superman is at the zenith of his powers. As the reputation of the United States falters during the Vietnam War, Superman's powers fall into question.

The one tangled issue in my argument is the relationship between Superman's powers and the powers of the U.S. during the Reagan era. It seems like John Byrne de-powered Superman just when the U.S. was gaining in strength (and all its enemies were on the ropes).

But certainly in the present circumstance, given all the doubts about America and the deepening financial crisis, the fact that Superman's powers have been downgraded may be in line with the publishers' doubts about the power of the United States in the current era.

We should all be nervous if even Superman can't get us out of the mess we're in.

Quote from: India Ink on October 10, 2011, 04:34:55 PM

The one tangled issue in my argument is the relationship between Superman's powers and the powers of the U.S. during the Reagan era. It seems like John Byrne de-powered Superman just when the U.S. was gaining in strength (and all its enemies were on the ropes).

I can see how it's tangled - but I also see that, in a sense, Reagan was a desire to return to the 1940s or '50s, doing away with all the 1960s and 70s baggage of Vietnam, Hippies, etc. Similarly, Byrne claimed to be stripping off detritus (also of the '60s and '70s , although in this case Mort Weisinger and Julie Schwartz) from Superman and returning him to the Golden Age (ie, the '40s). A sort of post-modern nostalgia for the same era, and dislike of the same era, in both camps.

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We should all be nervous if even Superman can't get us out of the mess we're in.

Agreed.

I think that really the arrival of other Kryptonians on Earth made Superman retroactively have to be more powerful as Superboy.

Because, when these guys arrive, they already have all the powers of grown up Superman. It's purely a story mechanics thing. You see the same sort of thing happen again when Geoff Johns is loading up the Earth with more Kryptonians. Then suddenly Clark had most of his powers earlier in life. It's still hard to square this with Supergirl and her power levels.

And then you get into a lot of tortured logic to make all of this work. So it's just easier to say that all Kryptonians get their powers immediately as soon as they are under a yellow sun.

Superman Through the Ages! Forum

Superman Comic Books! => Superman! => Topic started by: Rugal 3:16 on July 21, 2011, 08:17:08 AM