was Clark/Superman's powers neutered after Pre-Crisis and if so why?

[Adekis]

I've said it before and I'll say it again. Golden Age Superman is the most powerful being in his Universe. I think it's not until Mxyzptlk that he ever meets anyone in his power class. Superman is almost a Bugs Bunny or Popeye like figure in the Golden Age.

Yeah, that's a really key point that I think people often miss about Golden Age Superman, and the primary reason why reducing Superman's power levels has never worked as well as it's supposed to. He didn't actually struggle to perform Super-Feats, hardly ever. Every physical activity would generally come easy to him. Superman in the Golden Age would still, if he raced OG the Flash, be a legitimate contender, not that I'm aware of any such race ever happening at the time. In the pre-Flashpoint years though, literally the only reason why Superman ever has a chance in a race against Flash is because Flash goes easy on him.

When you scale Superman down, but keep everything else scaled way way up, it's a struggle to maintain the sense that Superman is the Most Powerful Super-Hero.

I do think you can run into evildoers more powerful than Superman occasionally without causing this problem, but if you look at Classic Superman stories- even or especially serious ones - he usually has interesting or complex situations that can't just be solved by blunt application of force, like "Clark lets himself get kidnapped by the mob while trying to track down a missing heiress" or things like that - and often when he does fight beings more powerful than him, they're often insurmountable without thinking his way through cleverly, like Mxy.

As for Fleischer, I think they're the best looking Superman cartoons ever made for the most part - racism aside - but when Superman has trouble breaking through a barred door, that's scaled back way too much, to the extent it's totally inconsistent with the rest of the Golden Age, haha!

[JackDaw]

I've said it before and I'll say it again. Golden Age Superman is the most powerful being in his Universe. I think it's not until Mxyzptlk that he ever meets anyone in his power class. Superman is almost a Bugs Bunny or Popeye like figure in the Golden Age.

Yes.

Put Superman at the same level now...able to jump a quarter of mile, faster than a train, etc..without altering the power levels of many other DC characters and you practically have him as a street level brawler.

Certainly there wouldn’t be any obvious in-universe reason why he’d be regarded as first among equals of the heroes, why he’d be on JLA, etc. (Especially as idea that he has super intelligence seems to have been shelved years ago.)

Is that...making him street level in current stories...really what anyone wants??

[NaVi]

They're using the entire Justice League not just Superman. The subtitle of thd game is "Kill The Justice League". And I'd argue WW gets this treatment just as much if not more than Superman.

All right, that's why the entire JL appears in the trailer, especially WW, no, forget it, my fault

[manwhohaseverything]

I don't know. I find the Fleischer struggling a bit boring. The story beats are always the hero is knocked back on his feet and then puts his back into it and triumphs. A challenge isn't really a challenge to me if the hero is always going to overcome it. I'd prefer that if you have the challenge be a 10 on the scale that Superman not find a way to achieve 11 in order to triumph. Either give me a price that Superman has to pay for getting to 11 or make him find a way to overcome the challenge that doesn't involve overpowering it.

Powerpuff girls had always had the same story beats. It's the name of the game. They are built-in a different format. They are shorts and episodic one's at that. Besides, the hero always wins regardless. I mean, sun dipping doesn't cost much. Its not like its some kind of technic that drains the life out of superman.

Superman gets knocked down by a beam. Gets back up and punches it getting apparently stronger in the process. That's that. Simple and elegant. No need for some gimmicks.Moreover, superman's use of wisdom and intelligence is massively overrated. I Haven't even seen superman use batman levels of tactics. That guy whole shtick is "i threw a rock at him".

[manofsteel1979]

Correct - he could time travel, but not to his own lifetime. Any time he time travels, he becomes spectral if he was already present anywhere in the universe at that time period. It's actually one of the things that really bothers me about the two Donner movies - he can't fcbfdking do that!

Still, I do miss Superman being able to time travel at will. I agree with CTTT, in that I think Superman should reference his pre-Crisis adventures like Batman sometimes did under Morrison. We got a little of that in the Rebirth era, actually, like Kal telling Bruce about the time he wore a rainbow colored Bat-Suit, to Bruce's confusion.

Grant Morrison also did something similar in his Action run. You can read a lot of "Classic" Superman stories into the in-between spaces in Morrison's run. For example, in Action Comics v2 # 8, Kal moves into Brainiac's ship and it becomes his first Fortress, but later in Action # 13, he has his normal arctic Fortress. When did he lose the space Fortress?

It was in Superman # 187, from 1966! Urko the Terrible, a gaseous being set on conquest, invaded the Fortress, forcing Superman to abandon it when he realized how it might draw alien threats!

Other stories are simply implied, like the entirety of the early Golden Age being present "in spirit" in the way Superman acts with that street level mindset, or the Silver Age in the zaniness of some of the threats Superman faces later on!

Also, even though it was based on more recent Pre-Flashpoint continuity. Morrison showed that Kal still had his Aztec temple South American Fortress from the last few months of the Second Volume of Superman circa 2005. I loved little nods like that during Morrison's ACTION.

[Powerboy]

Yes.

Put Superman at the same level now...able to jump a quarter of mile, faster than a train, etc..without altering the power levels of many other DC characters and you practically have him as a street level brawler.

Certainly there wouldn’t be any obvious in-universe reason why he’d be regarded as first among equals of the heroes, why he’d be on JLA, etc. (Especially as idea that he has super intelligence seems to have been shelved years ago.)

Is that...making him street level in current stories...really what anyone wants??

1938 power level stories would have to be set in 1938. Either that or tone down the entire DC Universe.

I believe Grant Morrison had the right idea. Start him at those power levels but his levels are at least doubling every issue.

When you think about it, that's more toned down than the original. The description said that, at some point in his childhood, he could leap an eighth of a mile. But, the moment he needed to be able to leap to the edge of the atmosphere, he could do it. Within a couple of issues, he wasn't just outrunning a train but bullets. His hearing and vision powers were presented as if he always had them (which really is lame because there were numerous stories where he would have used them if he had them). Even when leaping, he was always doing stuff like changing directions long before he officially had flight.

So that whole eighth of a mile/ train/ bursting shell thing was ignored the moment it was inconvenient. Likewise, any modern story that started like that would probably last one issue followed by his being magnitudes more powerful followed by ignoring all limits.

[superduperman]

I think the only way that a Superman with 1938 power levels works in the modern day is a New 52 type situation where he starts off with lower power levels and then gets more powerful as time goes on.

[Kuwagaton]

I've said it before and I'll say it again. Golden Age Superman is the most powerful being in his Universe. I think it's not until Mxyzptlk that he ever meets anyone in his power class. Superman is almost a Bugs Bunny or Popeye like figure in the Golden Age.

Very well said. I guess people have also pointed out that were more accurately called gags than feats in most cases leading up to the eighties.

Yeah, that's a really key point that I think people often miss about Golden Age Superman, and the primary reason why reducing Superman's power levels has never worked as well as it's supposed to. He didn't actually struggle to perform Super-Feats, hardly ever. Every physical activity would generally come easy to me. Superman in the Golden Age would still, if he raced OG the Flash, be a legitimate contender, not that I'm aware of any such race ever happening at the time. In the pre-Flashpoint years though, literally the only reason why Superman ever has a chance in a race against Flash is because Flash goes easy on him.

When you scale Superman down, but keep everything else scaled way way up, it's a struggle to maintain the sense that Superman is the Most Powerful Super-Hero.

I do think you can run into evildoers more powerful than Superman occasionally without causing this problem, but if you look at Classic Superman stories- even or especially serious ones - he usually has interesting or complex situations that can't just be solved by blunt application of force, like "Clark lets himself get kidnapped by the mob while trying to track down a missing heiress" or things like that - and often when he does fight beings more powerful than him, they're often insurmountable without thinking his way through cleverly, like Mxy.

As for Fleischer, I think they're the best looking Superman cartoons ever made for the most part - racism aside - but when Superman has trouble breaking through a barred door, that's scaled back way too much, to the extent it's totally inconsistent with the rest of the Golden Age, haha!

The pre flashpoint stuff didn't scale Superman down, it just scaled others a little higher here and there. Sounds kinda the same, but ends up being the opposite. Like Superman is ten times faster than he was at the beginning of post Crisis, but the Flash who was equal to him is now fifteen times faster. So Superman is compromised by comparison, but he's also no longer as "down to earth." He's a light speed fourth wall breaker even if he doesn't behave like the jovial pre crisis version or stack up in sheer power, and ultimately he ended up looking less clever than the all powerful or the version that had to think his way through something like a tornado.

I think fleischer is still my ideal presentation for that Superman outside of comics. Like that sort of scene reminds me of the random, hilariously underwhelming moments from those old creators working on the fly. Like Superman just being knocked out by a grenade while running at invisible speed.

[Adekis]

The pre flashpoint stuff didn't scale Superman down, it just scaled others a little higher here and there. Sounds kinda the same, but ends up being the opposite. Like Superman is ten times faster than he was at the beginning of post Crisis, but the Flash who was equal to him is now fifteen times faster. So Superman is compromised by comparison, but he's also no longer as "down to earth." He's a light speed fourth wall breaker even if he doesn't behave like the jovial pre crisis version or stack up in sheer power, and ultimately he ended up looking less clever than the all powerful or the version that had to think his way through something like a tornado.

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.

[Kuwagaton]

I definitely see what you mean. He seemed to get distributed, like GL is more the hero of the space ways, Diana is the tough one, Bruce answers all the questions, etc.

But with the silver age Superman, I think most writers, many general fans, and some of us Superman fans in particular see what should be an unbeatable hero as an obstacle. I guess it's as if the idea of Superman made the story weaker. If Superman can be so smart and so powerful so quickly, how could you ever need Batman or Aquaman? He was literally able to be in more than one place at a time and just in case you thought a story niche was safe, here's his shrink ray device to get as small as the Atom. I can't imagine when an editor came up to a writer and said, "hey use Superman, too." Though never much of a JL reader, they got it right imo by the seventies where WF and DCP showed how others were able to support him.

[NaVi]

I definitely see what you mean. He seemed to get distributed, like GL is more the hero of the space ways, Diana is the tough one, Bruce answers all the questions, etc.

But with the silver age Superman, I think most writers, many general fans, and some of us Superman fans in particular see what should be an unbeatable hero as an obstacle. I guess it's as if the idea of Superman made the story weaker. If Superman can be so smart and so powerful so quickly, how could you ever need Batman or Aquaman? He was literally able to be in more than one place at a time and just in case you thought a story niche was safe, here's his shrink ray device to get as small as the Atom. I can't imagine when an editor came up to a writer and said, "hey use Superman, too." Though never much of a JL reader, they got it right imo by the seventies where WF and DCP showed how others were able to support him.

in your comment you see precisely the problem of the modern superman. A writer has to worry about the character he is writing, but with superman, they worry about other characters, instead of looking for the potential of superman, they limit it so that other characters can stand out, an example is when superman wants to see how to be half Kryptonian half human affects Jon, the writer instead of demonstrating the intelligence of superman, brings batman to explain it to superman. the modern superman is not a hero, he is not a character, he is an accessory that others use to stand out.

[Stanlos]

I liked his powers just how crazy they were, being able to spin the world around time travel...I wish current Supe issues referenced his Pre-Crisis adventures and powers much like Grant Morrison did on Batman

It is not so much that his powers changed as it is that the audience changed. Most kids back then could accept ANYTHING back then due to simple imagination. However, today the audience is NOT kids--it is adults with more sophisticated sensibilities and saying "x flew around the world and turned back time" would get called out as silly.

However Superman was designed with legendary heroes like Samson and, more impactful, Hercules, Superman naturally possesses the strength to move celestial bodies but for a modern audience some effort would have to go into development of a plot device to enable the leveraging of that are power to do so.

I think the tail end of PAD's Supergirl run did a great job of explaining

[Ra-El]

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.

You are right. Superman, the Unbeatable Champion, became Superman, the guy someone kicks to show how cool they are.

At some point, DC as a whole realized that it was way easier to use Superman to show how powerful, cool or skilled some character was, than doing the actual work to establish it. So when Miller wrote TDKR and needed a great ending to his love letter to Batman, he decided that having him beating Superman was a good way of showing his Bruce's ingenuity and perseverance.

[LifeIsILL]

Yes they have. Silver Surfer in particular suffers from this given how much he struggles with maintaining an ongoing.

His longest ongoing was 140 something issues....so he actually doesn't have a problem holding an ongoing. They just bring in more and more powerful villains for him to deal with, which is what they do with Thor as well. It's an absurd form of storytelling because you always see Surfer or Thor pull some crazy power out of their asses in the last minute instead of defeating the villain with some sort of creative plan.

For Superman, at least he uses his brain and wits to defeat his villains or whatever he's fighting against, we've seen it many times before.

[Johnny Thunders!]

The most recent runs of Thor feature a cosmic time spanning hero. I think it’s been a high point for the character. Jason Aaron’s run has been pretty good. The Silver Surfer run by Mike Allred was big and cosmic and arguably a new classic. Silver Surfer Black was good too! They are obviously very different books but I think there is a lot of Superman in both those runs. I don’t think Superman was neutered but he was grounded.