Superman's intelligence

[Johnny Thunders!]

My favorite example of Superman's Intelligence is when he memorized how to build a Miracle Machine, 30th Century Tech, based on a quick once over in Final Crisis. I just think he can examine and use advance tech, New Genesis tech, Thangarian tech, Kryptonian tech on a level that's impossible for human understanding. He can create life like Superman robots in Multiversity. I just read Infinite Frontier's President Superman issue and he is thinking about a dozen different emergencies at the same time. He solves them with tech and innovations that are all his creation. Superman at his best, it's Superhuman intelligence unlike any other hero.

[gwhh]

The 90’s animated Superman show a good balance of his intelligence.

[Alan2099]

I think the problem is the ability to write shades of intelligence. It's easy to set up a mystery for Sherlock Holmes where you plant the clues and he alone picks up on them. Or to have Reed Richard or Tony Stark use technobabble to explain how their miracle tech works.

It's when you want to show that not only is Batman the best detective, but that Dick Grayson, Lois Lane, and Jim Gordon are better detectives than most but still not quite Batman's equal. Normally you get Bruce as Sherlock dazzling in his insight and every other character as John Watson going "I don't see it. Can you explain how you figured it out?". If the point of the scene is to show that two characters are both smart you can aim at having them one-up each other ("Of course it was a merlot, but what year", "1943, but which vineyard" ...). Over time though it is hard to keep that up when you have to keep track of the fact Batman is on top of the detective list- Jimmy Olsen is at the bottom and a dozen other characters have to be slotted in between especially when the writer themselves is smarter than Jimmy but not really as smart as Bruce.

Taking Sherlock as an example here, there was a great bit from A Study in Scarlet where Watson discovered that Sherlock Holmes didn't know the earth revolved around the sun.

That any civilized human being in this nineteenth century should not be aware that the earth travelled round the sun appeared to be to me such an extraordinary fact that I could hardly realize it.

"You appear to be astonished," he said, smiling at my expression of surprise. "Now that I do know it I shall do my best to forget it."

"To forget it!"

"You see," he explained, "I consider that a man's brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose..."

"But the Solar System!" I protested.

"What the deuce is it to me?" he interrupted impatiently; "you say that we go round the sun. If we went round the moon it would not make a pennyworth of difference to me or to my work."

This is the kind of thing I feel that should come up far more often with characters, Batman in particular. Just because they're smart, and they know a lot of things, doesn't mean they should know everything. I don't even mean just science things. I mean basic facts and random trivia. Batman may be a great detective, but when Riddler is leaving clues based on popular rock music, Bruce is probabaly going to be far more out of his depth than Nightwing would be.

[Jon Clark]

Taking Sherlock as an example here, there was a great bit from A Study in Scarlet where Watson discovered that Sherlock Holmes didn't know the earth revolved around the sun.



This is the kind of thing I feel that should come up far more often with characters, Batman in particular. Just because they're smart, and they know a lot of things, doesn't mean they should know everything. I don't even mean just science things. I mean basic facts and random trivia. Batman may be a great detective, but when Riddler is leaving clues based on popular rock music, Bruce is probabaly going to be far more out of his depth than Nightwing would be.

There is that too.

I much prefer a Batman who can spot incongruities, but might need some help with what those incongruities mean. "These dirt particles stood out in the tire tread because they were darker and clung together. I took them to Dr. Jones at Gotham U's Earth Sciences Department and he told me ..." Bruce is still an exceptional person in that he spots the differences in the dirt types or recognizes the language family even if he can't translate the conversation. It wouldn't cut down on his intelligence too much if he needed Oracle (through the Internet) or some expert in a specialized field to give him details as Bruce is a detective not a walking copy of Wikipedia.

But that still leaves the general problem that most writers have trouble writing people having a range of knowledge on a subject. You rarely get a discussion like the ones here, where one person has read every JLA story since Brave & Bold #28, another read nothing before Crisis but has followed the book since Morrison brought back the Big Seven, a third started with the JL/JLU cartoons plus Wikipedia and a fourth started with the New 52. You get interplay in that type of conversation. But most comic writers would simply have one character as the expert on the League and the rest as people who have just a passing knowledge. One master and almost everyone else as students.

It's easy to show Batman lift a fallen tree, Aquaman pull the door of a car, and Superman hurl a mountain to illustrate three levels of strength. But showing Jimmy Olsen with an IQ of 125, Lois with an IQ of 157, Bruce with an IQ of 189 and Lex with an IQ of 225... what exactly are the examples you can give to distinguish it... especially if you are a writer with an IQ of 157?

[DochaDocha]

As an aside, I find it kind of funny how fiction has its own IQ arms race, kind of like it does with powers and strength. "I can bench press an asteroid. Oh yeah, well I can bench press a planet! Poo poo, I can bench the solar system!" It's like they need to keep jacking up IQ scores because an exceptional IQ like being one in a million is just not impressive anymore. I think All-Star Superman said Luthor had an IQ of 220, but using ordinal scaling such as how Stanford Binet does an IQ of 220 would require being the smartest person out of a quadrillion people. So, take planet earth and multiply its human population by 130,000. But I guess there's a multiverse... Possibly, the gap between Luthor and the number 2 guy is so inhumanly large that ordinal scaling doesn't work so you just have to throw in a lot of extra points, I dunno...

But to answer your question, I think one suggestion would be the 125 guy can solve a lot of a problem, but then would go to the 157 guy who understands it better but still has her own questions, who then goes to the 189 guy, who then goes to the 225 guy, etc. It's not easy and can be kind of tedious, but in many ways it's still better than having the binary system of smart person and not-smart person.

Just for fun, I think Jimmy's IQ should be more like 105 (around average intelligence), Lois' 120 (90th percentile). Luthor should be as high as your scale will allow, and Batman's is really tricky. I think because of the aforementioned IQ arms race, anything lower than 190 (99.9999999th percentile) for Batman would be considered insulting, by some, to the character.

[marhawkman]

As an aside, I find it kind of funny how fiction has its own IQ arms race, kind of like it does with powers and strength. "I can bench press an asteroid. Oh yeah, well I can bench press a planet! Poo poo, I can bench the solar system!" It's like they need to keep jacking up IQ scores because an exceptional IQ like being one in a million is just not impressive anymore. I think All-Star Superman said Luthor had an IQ of 220, but using ordinal scaling such as how Stanford Binet does an IQ of 220 would require being the smartest person out of a quadrillion people. So, take planet earth and multiply its human population by 130,000. But I guess there's a multiverse... Possibly, the gap between Luthor and the number 2 guy is so inhumanly large that ordinal scaling doesn't work so you just have to throw in a lot of extra points, I dunno...

I don't think that works though, DC has a LOT of super-geniuses.