Originally Posted by
Adekis
It think it's open to interpretation, but while there are times when Superman wonders whether something can hurt him, he never actually seems to take any damage. I always interpreted the Action # 2 scene as being something that he allowed to happen, because it sure didn't inconvenience him at all, the train thing, I just figured he was never hit by a train before and wasn't sure what would happen. He's still human, after a fashion, after all. He probably thinks of getting hit by a train as something that kills you, internally. There's a great scene in DeHaven's novel "It's Superman!" where a teenage Clark is in shock after being shot for the first time in 1935 or so - because it never occurred to him that being shot wouldn't kill him. I think that's basically a good approach to some of those early apparent discrepancies.
There was a series of strips in 1942 or 1943 where some crooks turn some kind of experimental weapon on Superman, and he doesn't know whether or not it'd be able to hurt him, but doesn't take the chance, preferring to toss it into space where it can safely explode instead. My point though is more like - you know how in like, "Superman the Animated Series," or the first season of "Justice League," Superman would repeatedly get hit with a ray gun, or a lightning bolt, or at one particularly galling point, an electrified manhole cover, and just yell out in pain and go flying or keel over? I think that trend was vaguely based on this misinformed idea that Superman was much weaker in the Golden Age, but he still never did that. He was never actually badly hurt, to the best of my knowledge, in the entire early Golden Age.
It's totally fair to be bored by heroes fighting each other.
I don't like it much myself in fact, but I'm just thinking in terms of a comic environment where that happens all the time anyway, and given that fact, how I'd rather have it go.
Think about the end of Justice League 2017, where Superman is going to have a friendly race against the Flash. We don't get to see how that goes, but it's the first time in a long time where I feel like Superman actually has a chance in that race. Contrast the "Impulse" episode in Smallville, where Clark can only keep up with Bart as long as Bart is running backwards, or the famous "Clark, those races were for charity" panel from the pre-Flashpoint comics. I'm not saying Flash can't be the favorite to win those races, or that Superman should be able to beat him with ease. I'm saying that I like it better when there's a chance for Superman, than where he's completely outclassed, which is the default of how that was written for years. If Superman and Shazam arm wrestle for fun, I want it to be a legitimate question, who would win, and how often one would be able to beat the other.
I don't want Superman to completely outclass everyone all the time, but there needs to be clearly visible reasons why he's usually considered "top dog". Like you said yourself, less popular heroes are given less page time and made to look less competent in team books - and I think Superman has been on the downside of that more often than the upside for much of the last thirty years, on and off.