Originally Posted by
Adekis
I didn't mean to say that the pre-Flashpoint comics lowered Superman's power - in fact it was probably an upgrade during that period, compared to after the post-Crisis reboot and a lot of the next ten or fifteen years! Other characters also got that slight boost, I believe, but Superman never recovered up to his pre-Crisis highs - not just in terms of powers, because like you point out, those could be really inconsistent too - but in terms of The Idea Of Superman, and how strong people, both writers and fans, think of him.
Where his actual power is considered though, that was different too, kind of. Other aspects of the DCU in general weren't scaled back the way Superman was, or they recovered from the scale-back. I chose Flash specifically for my example to illustrate that detail. Flash was scaled back after the Crisis, but he remembered Barry being faster. The nature of Super-Speed didn't change, Wally just had less of it.
By contrast, for Clark it was the very nature of his Super-Powers themselves which changed. So Superman gets weaker or stronger over the years as the plot demands - as he did pre-Crisis, to be totally fair - and is stronger by tail end of the pre-Flashpoint period than he was in the mid '90s, flying through the vast expanse of space's vacuum under his own power for example!
But he never got back to his those Pre-Crisis highs, and the general Idea of Superman as the Unbeatable Champion of the DCU was damaged. Flash, or Batman, or Wonder Woman, or even Plastic Man, suddenly has a real shot at being better than Superman and being able to consistently beat him in a fight. They might or might not have been scaled back themselves, but nobody really got hit like Superman did. Batman wasn't physically stronger obviously, but everyone had the idea, half a joke, half serious, that Batman could beat anyone "with prep time," which probably came from the time he beat a holding-back-Superman who was still recovering from being nuked in that one Frank Miller book. Captain Marvel couldn't time travel at will anymore either, but he could now cold-clock Superman in two hits, because people started taking the Magic Weakness really seriously. Wonder Woman's fight training got a lot more attention than Superman's ever did. And the idea that Plastic Man might be the Most Powerful Member of the JLA was thrown around in a few comics too, even - where for Superman, nobody had really suggested he might be the Strongest And Greatest in a while, lest he be open to accusations of being Too Powerful. The idea of Superman was weaker.
I guess that's more the issue than anything else, to me. Golden Age Superman was weaker than Silver Age Superman, but he was still the Unbeatable Champion. Pre-Flashpoint Superman might be stronger than Golden Age Superman, but Unbeatable Champion was gone, and wouldn't begin to maybe make a comeback for a little bit yet.