The Supermen Dilemma

Very interesting read! You are planning to write a superhero story?

I was never a big fan of the DC Superman Comics series specifically for the reasons you mention. Too much power. Too invulnerable.

That's why Kryptonite had to be worked into the plot. There has to be an Achilles heel

Good post.

You can work natural limitations into powers by being specific about how they work.

Take the ability to create a flame: You can decide that the character's only ability is to to lower the flash point of a material until it catches fire at room temperature. That means the flame is subject to all the normal limitations of fire: It requires oxygen, so your character can't create a flame inside a solid object. It can be doused with water or chemicals. The character can only set fire to materials which are normally flammable, like clothes or wood.

Super powers usually seem invincible because nobody knows how they work. Once you have a detailed mechanism in place, it's much easier to find a counter-measure.

And yet. Superman is the most recognized, and still about the most popular, superhero series of all time. And when he started out, he was far less powerful than the Superman we all know. He couldn't even fly. He could leap tall buildings in a single bound (doing it in two or three bounds wouldn't work very well, though, when you think about it). When he became more powerful, he became more popular.

Nor is Kryptonite his sole weakness. Many of his stories don't involve Kryptonite at all, or mega-powerful villains.

He is appealing because even as powerful as he is,he has some very human frailties. The best stories are about the man, not the demigod.

Definitely! One of the main points in each of his stories is to neutralize his powers or his ability to use those powers in one way or another. But if course that arises from granting him all those powers in the first place.

It's like a person painting himself into a corner and needing to find a way out. So the reader is expecting this. How are Superman's powers going to be limited this time? One of the last DC Superman episodes I read years back when DC had begun to limit Superman's power due to the popularity of Marvel superhero vulnerability competition, had to do with voodoo. He was limited by a voodoo spell and was portrayed fighting supernatural creatures with extreme difficulty. In fact he was swallowed by one of these creatures and couldn't get out of its belly.

To me the DC strategy was so obvious that it was distracting. As if they were desperately seeking a way to compensate for the perhaps reduced readership.


Maybe if Marvel comics hadn't come out with there far more vulnerable heroes such as The Flash, Spiderman, The Fantastic Four, I would have continued to read the Superman DC stories.

But Marvel's super heroes were in far more physical danger, and their personal lives were far more intense precisely because of the superpowers I went over to that area.

Another thing that irks me about Superman is the need to believe that Lois Lane can't tell that Clark Kent is Superman just because Clark Kent wears glasses, hunches his shoulders a little bit and acts goofy.


However, I found the films very enjoyable.

The last superman film portrayed Clark Kent as some kind of obsessive stalker of Lois Lane. It was really creepy. I mean, can you imagine some jerk with x-ray vision constantly spying on you and fantasizing? Ewww! It really ruined Superman for me. I mean, he was supposed to be the good guy, wholesome, farm-bred, and generally counted upon to do the right thing.