Or: "You Can't Handle The Truth!"
I’ve resisted the temptation to do this before, but since Truth seems to be winding down now, I thought I’d share my thoughts on the whole thing, and why I think it’s been a missed opportunity.
I’ve been grabbing some titles I’ve never read and came across several of these gems, which are great examples of how Superman dealt with power-loss. He hitched up his britches and put his super-genius to work without even breaking stride. I’ll just going to post a couple of good examples here.
Take this story for instance:
ACTION COMICS 321
He was a powerless man who had to stop a planet of super-powered people from conquering earth. And by George, he found a way.
He built that giant robot (seriously, is it bad-ass or what?) out of raw materials with his own hands and programmed it to launch him (with his branded cheerful contempt of physics) into another solar system to regain his powers. Then he blocked the bad guy’s sun so they’d lose their powers, thus saving earth from basically kryptonian invasion. That’s why Superman is the greatest.
This kind of intelligence and ingenuity is vital to Superman, because without it, he’s just an incurious flying brick that meanders in whatever direction he’s pointed. He needs to have the super-intelligence worthy of those super-powers to utilise. He needs that dynamism and agency. His super-ingenuity should always be the very last thing to be messed with, it is his most important trait.
Next up, the Supermobile!
I had seen this cover before, but written it off as silly – but the actual story itself turned out to really engage me. Superman has to take on AMAZO who had absorbed the powers of the entire Justice League – but he himself had no powers at all! But knowing that red sun radiation would be taking away his powers, he had planned ahead for this contingency, and thus was born the Supermobile!
What I don’t know is why we’re not getting any of this. It’s seriously cool. And these are exactly the kind of stories I’d like to see from Superman, especially in the ‘depowered’ ones.
Oh no! Superman’s powerless and about to be crushed!
Could it be?!
But ahah! Never fear! Superman was prepared! Because Superman has super-prep-tastic abilities! In your face, Bats - I mean Amazo!
I won’t spoil the rest of the story, but I loved it. Seriously, read these issues.
And here’s another story where he’s lost his powers under a red sun! Not only that, but he is completely blind! But that doesn’t stop our intrepid hero!
So, My Thoughts So Far
I actually do feel like Superman is at his best under a Red Sun. It’s his peak performance, because we get to see him apply his wits, in the absence of his fantastic ultra-win spectacular super-powers. It’d get tedious and silly if it happened too much, but when it does happen, it really does show us what makes Superman so super. The powers themselves are just to give this awesome man the tools to spread his awesome to the entire universe, and look good doing it. To give us that Wow, Superman! factor. All necessary elements to a good Superman title.
This creates a nice diversity, and lets us basically have our cake and eat it too. It’s so great, because it eliminates the frustration of readers and power levels. PHENOMENAL COSMIC POWERRRR! Superman and vulnerable “grounded” Captain America Superman? Sure! Hell, we even got an orange sun for “Golden Age Bullet-Buster ‘ow, these space-bees really hurt’ Superman!” And you can get the Superman you want with just one panel of art.
It frustrates me that there’s so much easy potential going to waste here. There’s a whole universe out there – takes the shackles off and let Superman be relevant to his own myth. I honestly don’t understand why DC tentatively-binned what I thought were indestructible and winning formulas with such useful dramatic devices. They worked just as well on me as a kid in the 90s/2000s as I assume they did in the 60s.
On a personal note, I can speak from personal experience that even the fightiest comic I saw from (what I now know is) Post-Crisis - Dreadnaught & Psiphon or something - bored and disaffected me in comparison to the SA/Pre-Crisis I was reading. (Maybe it’s the ‘decompression’ everyone talks about. Isn’t that supposed to cause catastrophic death to astronauts as well?)
You don’t have to blow up Superman’s elemental formulas to write more adult-oriented/GA stories or explore different directions or pursue more slow-burning drama, if that’s what you want. Its comics, you can throw in any Deus Ex you need, and you have like half a dozen titles to use for Supes, and can cough up infinite Maybe-Imaginary Tales and Elseworlds.
(On a different note, it kind of amuses me that DC seems to be part of the fanbase or share the mentality to some extent. They’re always trying to “fix” the things that fans dread or fuss about, because of emotional attachments. Kryptonite Nevermore, Yellow Impurity, and what-not. Yellow/Red Sun doesn’t flip his powers on and off anymore. But ironically, Kryptonite is now worse than ever because apparently being poisonous to kryptonians means it can pierce him like his skin isn’t invulnerable or super-dense. So now any punk can blow his head off with a kryptonite magnum .44 - and I really don't think it was a good trade-off.)
One thing that I thought could be worth having fun with, is if Earth’s sun starts experiencing ‘cycles’ (for whatever reason), so that it’s Yellow during the “day” and Red at “night”, so to speak. So you can literally play it both ways – stories with him at SuperCosmic, and stories with him as t-shirt or night-costume wearing street level, going Reed Richards or SuperKnight or whatever (because he’s still responsible as a defender of earth, so he feels compelled to stick around – especially if super-threats keep popping up, threatening the good people of Earth).
And he can find a solution for the sun at any point convenient. Heck, if it’s a plot by Luthor or someone, then it’s something that could potentially be revisited at any point.
Truth was the perfect opportunity for this. Superman doesn’t have any power worth speaking of, especially in a duo with WW at her normal levels. So he should have adapted to the situation, and put his brain to work, while WW handled the hands-on stuff, go get ‘em, cowgirl! Supes could have had the opportunity to play Reed Richards for a while. It would have been a more interesting division of labour.
WW bringing the muscle and some magic, while Superman brought the super-science (with some Captain America muscle where helpful). Shrinking rays, phantom guns/batons, teleporters, freeze cannons, crazy cubes… heck, Superman could have rocked up on a trained space-monster with giant fighting robots, for crying out loud! Let’s explore some options here!
They haven’t really used Truth to explore anything interesting. They nerfed his power, but then they nerfed his villain level anyway, so the dynamic is pretty much exactly the same. If he had had to fight Mongul, we would have had something interesting.
Taking away his power and having him fight crooks, or having “Cpt A.” power and fighting low-level metas, isn’t really a big deal. He’s a hero, was it really a question worth asking?
And here’s one of my favourite child-hood stories, which is another example of what I’m talking about, but with a fully powered Superman (well, Superboy).
SUPERBOY 102:
And skipping ahead to the end like a good spoiler:
And here’s a neat one, where Superman faces off against 8 super-powered criminals in a Western show-down.
(I also remember a story where he took on Zod and two henchies, using his powers to out-wit them, etc, but I haven’t come across it yet.)
Super-strength and all those powers are not that interesting in themselves, as fantastic as Mightiest Man in the Universe is, his powers are utterly one-dimensional if utilised suchly. Superman’s most important heroic attribute is his phenomenal ingenuity, that’s what makes his stories and his activity compelling. That’s what makes him the greatest, above and beyond just having the hardest punch (and don’t get me wrong – I love a sweet karate-beam-god-chop as much as anyone – but that’s just the muscle without the man). As Deadman puts it:
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