SUPERMAN UNCHAINED #2 --POWER LEVELS AND PRAYERS

[alschroeder3]

I've been VERY impressed as an old Superman fan (anybody remember a letterhack from the seventies and early eighties named Al Schroeder III? That's me.) with Scott Snyder and Jim Lee's SUPERMAN UNCHAINED. Superman is shown as a thinking hero, trying desperately to make the best choices in his vast array of powers in a way that will solve the problem with minimum loss of life.

It's a characterization that jibes with Jerry Siegel, or Elliott Maggin, or whoever you fancy as the best Superman writer. Scott Snyder has started to spin a really special story, and Lee here is excellent.

For instance, in Dubai, Superman is trying to stop the world's highest building from collapsing--a building that has, as Snyder has Clark thinking, "roughly the population of Smallville" about to die in eleven seconds. He considers five or six plans, while being interrupted by a giant construction robot, and finally, after falling into a large pool, hits on a solution...

...While evoking a higher power, literaly praying he doesn't screw up.

I'm going to discuss religious belief, often a touchy subject, and I'm trying not to personalize it either way...just seeing what's right for the character. I hope I can do so without giving offense.

There are some heroes who should never pray. Wolverine, never. Batman? I have trouble seeing it.

But others it sits well with, like Nightcrawler. The Spectre, naturally. And Superman? Midwestern, farm-raised, intensely interested in moral questions? (Of course, many atheists and agnostics are also intensely interested in moral questions, and many atheists/agnostics have been farm-raised and Midwestern.) Still, I'd be more surprised if he wasn't quietly a little religious or at least spiritual. I like that touch, although I would never, repeat, NEVER, want to see him evangelize, which I would find offensive in the extreme, whether it was for the Methodist church that the Kents probably attended, or Rao. I like the brief, "Thank you up there. Thank y--"

Speaking of Batman, later he visits Bruce, who has designed a suit (which looks a lot like the Batman Beyond suit) which can cloak Batman against any part of the electromagnetic spectrum that is seeking him---making him invisible even to Clark. He says he made it when he didn't know Clark very well.

Clark says, "But now you're going to get rid of it, now that you do know me."

Bruce answers, deadpan, ironically, "Of course. Any day now." They later address why he will never do that.

Anyway, they discuss the traces Clark found of his new opponent, the Wraith, and in a way that shows how much power Superman has at his command...and how much more the Wraith has.

"You pull in about one hundred and forty megawatts of solar energy at any given moment--"

Actually---that sounds about right. Except for the fact that there's only a horsepower-and-a-half of power in a square yard of sunlight---maybe Superman has some sort of field that extends into space and captures a lot of the solar energy that spills into space, missing earth...but that's about right considering the immense power he seems to always have on hand. Every moment, another hundred and forty megawatts...

One assumes in moments of realtive inactivity, like when he's Clark, he can store it up to gigawatt or even tetrawatt levels. (Interestingly, the total amount of solar power striking Earth is at estimated at 174 petrawatts--a quadrillion watts.)

It shows Snyder has been thinking how Superman "works". He's done his homework.

But the Wraith can pull in a hundred and SIXTY. Every moment.

There are dozens of lovely touches. Clark tells Lois to be careful, and Lois gives a classic answer,

"Never, Smallville."

There's a confrontation between Superman and Sam Lane that actually was almost believable, not kneejerk beilligerant, the first actual meeting of Superman and the Wraith, Lois endangered thousands of miles away at a time when Superman can't help her, and I won't even go into what Luthor's up to...

Recommended. HIGHLY.

Comments

[captainbellman]

Audrey Hepburn & Marni Nixon sum up my thoughts better than I could.

[superfangirl1]

You got to love Sam Lane's army black hole laser tanks and handgun bullets. It packs a wallop but only stuns superman.

Comic science!

Also that nice Bruce but the real question is Clark power level over 9,000!

(I feel like I ruin the joke somehow)

[jaybee3]

I've met a couple of midwestern Methodists (and I think one writer - was is Maggin? - actually said the Kents were Methodists in the same way Jimmy was a Lutheran and Lois a Catholic by way of background) who are deeply prayerful and spiritual people but they NEVER talk about it and the only way you'd know it was by knowing them well. I can see Clark like that. I never bought the idea (which some writers continued to have into the 90s) that after finding out where he came from he became some huge Rao worshipper (some writers had him saying "Great Rao!" constantly).

Supergirl, on the other hand, having been raised with Rao would be completely believable as someone who would find Earth religions and spirituality strange. I'm not sure if they've explored that side of her.

[thanekos]

The Wraith?

Good thing I didn't put money on Ultraman.

(Hey, with Owlman and Volthoom..)

[fredneil.livejournal.com]

Wouldn't a suit that was cloaked against any part of the electromagnetic spectrum just leave a blank Batman-shaped area in the middle of whatever Clark was looking at?

[theflames]

lol, "Now you'll get rid of it, now that you know me".

Why would Superman ever expect that of anyone? That's just idiotic.

[big_daddy_d]

*Sees Batman Beyond suit and remembers Jason Todd's suit he took from Nightwing* It begins...O.O

[icon_uk]

Never a huge fan of trying to be specific about power levels like that, it's fine for D&D, but this is comics, Superman will be as strong, or weak, as the story demands in order for him to win.

Plus if he's pulling in solar energy at that rate shouldn't be basically look like Sunspot of the New Mutants, a walking silhouette as all the light hitting his body is being metabolised or whatever the term would be?

[alexanderlucard]

Superman's adoptive parents are either Episcopalian or Jewish depending on the writer. NPR just did an hour long show on Superman yesterday that I listened to while in traffic. I knew Siegel and Shuster were Jewish and that Kal-El is meant to be a play on the Hebrew phrase "Voice of God," but due to the Midwestern Kansas bible belt aspect, I always assumed he had some Christian upbringing. It appears that much like Ben Grimm who Stan lee meant to be Jewish, writers post the original creators either didn't know or purposely overlooked this aspect of him.

[shadowpsykie]

Clark being religious, but not being a zealot works for me.

[drexer]

Ok, so I flipped through this issue and assuming I didn't miss anything in my quick read there's quite a bit I find annoying with this analysis.

First of all, the idea of the writing as anything special. It's not, it's average at best and I saw nothing that approaches it to great Superman writers like Waid or Morrisson. One could argue that the story didn't quite have any moments that worked to that advantage but that too is Snyder's responsability. Even more so the biggest moment of dissonance for me was when Superman apparently considered killing part of the people in the tower to save the rest, that just screams of character dissonance to me. That and the stilted self-conversation really made me feel like this was some other character.

Regarding the energy conversation, first of all I have to say that defining values so cleanly just takes me out of the story due to their possible innacuracy; much like the previous issue, they should not quantify things which fall apart completely if you know a bit about the facts.

Here it's annoying that a 14.29% more powerful character is treated with so much reverence and then it's annoying because those values just don't make sense.

I'm doing those calculations using the values from the Wikipedia page for the Solar constant(as I do not know the accuracy of your 1.5 horsepower number), which contains the value of 1.361 kW/m^2 for the upper atmosphere of the Earth(let's assume that Superman spends quite some time up there for simplification's sake).

Now, the thing is that if we look at the Solar Spectrum we can see that for wavelengths over 700nm(infrared) we've got pretty much the full tail of the Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution. As we know that Kryptonians had no power under a red sun, we'll assume Clark can't absorb those higher wavelengths so we'll cut some 30% of his energy absortion as an underguess. This makes it so that for him to absorb 140MJ of power per second he then has to absord the energy correspondet of:

A=140*10^6 [W] / 0.70*1.361*10^3 [W/m^2] =147*10^3 [m^2]

This is 0.147 square kilometers of terrain which is quite a bit if we're assuming that he's absorbing this energy from the space around him(which makes sense as I'm not quite seeing him absorbing ludicrous quantities of energy kilometers away), specially because this assumes he's absorbing the full extent of this solar radiation which surrounds him, this would be the equivalent of him casting a full dark circular shadow with 216 meters of radius around him which makes little to no sense.

That's the problem with saying Snyder 'made his homework', this kind of things only draws a lot of attention to those details and breaks the suspension of disbelief. I just can't see him absorbing the equivalent of a tenth of the Hiroshima nuclear bomb in energy in just half a day.

[jlbarnett]

I personally find this to be really lousy story telling and I feel they're making the US military borderline war criminals. Superman's characterization is decent. But everything around him is pretty terrible.

So this guy hides since 1945 then a little fight against Superman and suddenly he pops up out to take him on?

And the money they must be spending on these weapons...

[robinzegblu]

This may actually wash the bad taste of "For Tomorrow" out of my mouth. I always hated that Lee's Superman was the default image for merchandise when he'd drawn one of the worst Superman stories in recent memory. Of course, since Superman's costume has changed, the image of Classic!Jim Lee Superman may be forever tainted for me.