DCAU

There's an interesting bit in Eliot S.Maggin's novelization of Kingdom Come, where he postulates that Superman is vulnerable to magic because he doesn't understand it, doesn't grasp what it is. During his fight with Captain (Shazam) Marvel, he does come to understand it, and so becomes resistant (if not outright invulnerable) to it—which, according to Maggin, is why he's able to tear off Captain Marvel's cape when Captain Marvel goes after the bomb.

Edited by Robbery on Mar 22nd 2024 at 11:07:27 AM

That generally makes sense. In most franchises - including the DC universe - regular people generally get magical defenses by learning magic, unless you live in a franchise where the only way to have magic is to be born with it. So for a regular guy the more you know about and understand magic, the more defense you would be able to muster against it.

Superman weakness to magic is more that, where magic is concerned, he's not Superman. He's a regular guy. Everyone is equally weak to magic unless either intrinsically have or learn the defenses they would need to resist it, which in most cases he hasn't. So magic hurts him exactly as much as it would hurt the next guy.

Edited by KnownUnknown on Mar 22nd 2024 at 11:12:03 AM

In the Silver Age, there was a specific explanation for Superman's magical vulnerability—or at least one was given, once. It was that, because magic was practiced on Earth, the average human had some natural defense against it, while on Krypton magic was never practiced and Kryptonians had no natural defense and so were actually more vulnerable to magic than humans. This, in my opinion, reflects the Silver Age's tendency to over-explain things. I much prefer the idea that Superman is simply on the same level as the average person when it comes to magic.

I'm having to skim the discussion for a bit, but I did want to come back to the Silver Banshee mention last page. Her explicitly being changed to non-magical in MAWS (in fact, it was in looking up more about her that I found out that she was magical in the first place) is actually why I brought Superman's relationship to magic up. The electricity thing was also because of Livewire and Parasite.

I actually kind of like that explanation... but it doesn't track with magic not actually being specific to Earth (for example, Thanagarians having anti-magic Nth Metal, is that a property in the Silver Age comics, too?) or Superman still healing or powering through.

Edited by wanderlustwarrior on Mar 22nd 2024 at 3:45:44 AM

Superman being vulnerable to magic was only ever supposed to mean that, if a magic spell turns people into stone or erases their memories or something like that, there's no reason it wouldn't work on Superman the same way it works on everyone else - it's not a physical attack, so being physically invulnerable does nothing to protect against it.

But some writers read that Superman was "vulnerable to magic" and figured it was a specific, power-cancelling weakness like kryptonite or red sun radiation. So you get the occasional yarn where something like a vampire's bite is able to hurt Superman, with the justification "vampires are magic - Superman's vulnerable to magic".

I don't think it was ever meant to only apply to intangible magic stuff. As far as I know, it's always been magic stuff in general.

Though it ended badly for the vampire since Supes is solar powered. It was like drinking liquid sun.

Edited by M84 on Mar 23rd 2024 at 1:12:27 AM

Uncle say Magic must defeat magic!

therefore Superman is magic

It's weird that despite having Justice League, we never got any Crises adaptation.

In the DCAU no, but given how we're on the second Crisis on Infinite Earths adaptation I'm not saying that's a bad thing.

The general idea is that a magic spell that can make rocks explode is obviously very fatal to regular people, but since Superman is more durable than a rock it simply has a greater chance to bruise him compared to conventional explosives. Kingdom Come even suggests that after several more decades of absorbing sunlight his previous "vulnerability" has been heavily negated because he is that much more powerful.

Things that affect people in an indirect manner is also not dismissed by his powers. Magically teleporting him away works the exact same as technology from the Phantom Zone projector.

Edited by EmeraldSource on Mar 23rd 2024 at 12:45:12 PM

IIRC Kingdom Come has him less vulnerable to kryptonite because he's older and more vulnerable, he still accidentally cuts himself on Diana's sword because he's still vulnerable to magic.

The DCAU also remembered that Supes is vulnerable to red sunlight. His powers come from absorbing yellow sunlight, and leaving him under red sunlight long enough makes him effectively a regular person. This came up several times in STAS, twice with the same baddie.

It also showed up again in JLU when Captain Atom sided with Project Cadmus out of loyalty to the USA government. Captain Atom could actually put up a fight against Superman because he started generating red solar radiation, though he still lost.

Edited by M84 on Mar 23rd 2024 at 11:40:29 PM

He's vulnerable to magic at that point in the story. As I said above, in the novelization of Kingdom Come, they say that he becomes invulnerable to magic (or at least less vulnerable to it, and able to overcome it) after his fight with Captain Marvel—specifically at the point where he manages to force Captain Marvel to change back into Billy Batson.

Technically, you could also drain Superman's powers if you kept him in the dark for an extended period. I think the official word on that, though, is that it would take a really long time. I would think that exposure to red solar energy would also take a long time to effect him, but that's not the way that's been been played.

Edited by Robbery on Mar 23rd 2024 at 9:15:16 AM

It is not just being deprived of yellow sunlight at work. Kryptonians evolved on a world that orbited a red sun. In a way, red sunlight basically turns Clark into a “normal” Kryptonian.

Red sunlight is a Logical Weakness after it was said that his powers come from absorbing yellow sunlight on Earth. Originally the explanation for Superman was all Kryptonians were like that but it became implausible that all were killed off so they said Krypton orbits a red giant where they were akin to humans in strength. Thus he was a solar battery and red sunlight cuts off the source, and you could sedate him with Kryptonite and then lock him in a room with red sunlight to drain his reserves. It wasn't until I believe about 2010 the comics said Earth's entire ecosphere contributes to his powers including gravity and atmosphere, which Man of Steel adapted for their depiction of Kryptonian powers and possible weak points.

Granted, he's powerful on most other worlds too. It's really just Krypton itself or worlds very similar to Krypton that orbit red suns where he's "normal".

Between this, Kryptonite itself being irradiated bits of Krypton, and Doomsday being either created on Krypton (in the original comics) or an altered clone of Superman himself (DCAU origin)...Superman's greatest weakness is his own native world.

Edited by M84 on Mar 24th 2024 at 4:31:09 PM

Funnily enough in early stories all Kryptonians were naturally superpowered even on their planet, and they had to come up with reasons why only Superman (and some others) escaped.

Initially, Superman's vulnerability to kryptonite was explained as being "due to the fact that the polarity of the electrical contact between the Man of Steel and his native soil has been reversed by the explosion of the planet, the effect of the formerly beneficial kryptonite has become negative."

iirc blue suns buff him even more or sth

x10 ahh right, I keep forgetting Crisis on IE was the crisis crossover at that point.

X5 Actually, having Superman's powers stem from Earth's yellow sun and lesser gravity is the Silver and Bronze age explanation of his powers—or at least one of them. The idea was that his strength, invulnerability, and flight came from Earth's lesser gravity, and his sensory powers and heat vision and such came from the yellow sun. There's a DC Comics Presents story from the early 80's where the villain IQ screws with the sun, and half of Superman's powers go haywire. Even then, though, they weren't especially consistent about it, and having Earth's lesser gravity be the cause of Superman's cosmic-level strength and invulnerability never seemed particularly satisfying—Superman was, for instance, a galactically known hero, so how'd he maintain the same power levels all over the universe? I don't know how they might be explaining things now, but having the yellow sun be the sole source of his powers has been a thing since Byrne, at least, and maybe a little before (I remember an episode of The New Super Powers Team where he was at half-power because he was under and orange sun). There were a few stories where he had different powers under different colored suns.

I've always generally disliked the use of Red Sun radiation as, like, an instant Kryptonite for Clark. Imo, it should only work to a crippling degree in a situation where his access to the Yellow Sun is cut off, like that episode of Superman The Animated Series (or that other episode of Justice League).

But someone - like - using a weapon powered by Red Sun radiation or something suddenly turning Superman into an invalid never jived with me, especially in situations where he's still on Earth and is still absorbing Yellow Sun radiation all the time.

It feels like an exaggeration, in the same sense as those occasional stories that exaggerate his "weakness" to magic to the point where anyone using magic around him at all suddenly removes his powers or something.

Edited by KnownUnknown on Mar 24th 2024 at 10:18:26 AM

Yeah, I agree with that. If he absorbs solar radiation, then sudden exposure to red solar radiation shouldn't instantly render him powerless—while exposure would diminish his powers, actually removing his powers should take time.

I once heard Kryptonite described as driving the yellow solar energy out of Superman's cells and replacing it with it's own poisonous radiation (I think it was Grant Morrison). This is why, while exposure to it is crippling and painful for Superman, it doesn't kill him instantly—when it completely drives out the solar energy, it'll kill him. Logically, I think red solar energy ought to be like painless, non-lethal Kryptonite for him.

I suppose, though, for these things to work as weaknesses in the stories, they have to work more quickly than they probably ought to. He really ought to take longer to recover from exposure to Kryptonite, too, but he usually recovers instantaneous. Guess his cells can reabsorb solar energy really quickly.

Edited by Robbery on Mar 24th 2024 at 10:26:40 AM

You just reminded me of this fight from The Batman, which features such a scenario with Black Mask.

Sionis goes, "Your powers have been temporarily cut," and the initial implication is that Supes is severed from accessing his powers. Except in practice, it just seems like he was just weakened. He still has his flight and durability, but less effective. So "cut" in half is probably what he meant...(0:43)

Me, I've never liked the red sunlight weakness.

It was necessary in the Silver & Bronze Age, when Superman could fly across the universe on a whim and couldn't be hurt even by a supernova going off - you needed some explanation for why the Kryptonians on Krypton (1) could be killed by something as trifling as an exploding planet, and (2) couldn't just fly away to another planet.

But in most other continuities, in both the comics and in adaptations, Superman can't fly to other planets under their own power, and isn't so strong that they can survive the explosion of the planet they're on. So keeping the "red sunlight depowers Kryptonians" thing just seems like an unnecessary complication - it'd be so much simpler and neater to say that, on Krypton, everyone could fly through the air, see through walls, and lift a hundred tons over their head.