In the 50s show with George Reeves, Clark was once rendered unconscious by a hidden piece of Kryptonite. Lois and Jimmy were in the room, and Jimmy tried unsuccessfully to move him; he couldn’t even budge him and said he weighed a ton.
Well, of course, Clark has to be feigning weakness (and blindness, and deafness, and, er… inability-to-flyness and stuff). Putting on a pair of glasses doesn’t turn his powers off – he’s Superman all the time. To pass as a normal human, he has to fake it.
That’s why I’ve always thought the wimpy, awkward Clark made more sense than the more together guy he’s been written as more recently. He’s probably not trying to be a wimp: it’s just impossible for someone who can lift a building to feign the effort appropriate to a normal man, say, shifting an office desk. Or naturally act surprised at someone suddenly bursting through a door (when he’s heard them heading towards it from the far end of the corridor, and could see them through the wall). I don’t care if he does have super-acting powers; all his reactions are going to be slightly off. Possibly not by much – a fraction of a second, maybe – but enough for people around him to notice, even subliminally.
I imagine Clark as someone who’d be sort of awkward to be around, who’d make people uncomfortable for reasons they couldn’t quite put their finger on: “Oh, yeah, Clark – he seems a nice enough guy, I guess, but … does he seem a bit weird to you?”
Everything about him is super, so his skin is super-soft.
Softness can turn ugly in some cases.
Maybe his jokes are super funny too, and he has to tone them down or cause someone to have an aneurysm. If he posted a pun here, you would spit so hard one of your teeth would go through the monitor.
Personally, I don’t even like the concept that he can be de-powered at all. Or at least, the notion that de-powered Superman should be equivalent to a normal human: Why are we the baseline? He’s an alien: All of his powers are just what comes normally to him. Is my ability to read the text on this screen a superpower? It might seem so to a species with less acute vision, but to me, it’s just normal. A trauma or poison or whatever might reduce my visual acuity, but there’s no reason that it would reduce it to exactly the level of some other species, nor that it would also sap my strength, reduce my reflexes, etc., all to the same degree.
I tend to agree, Chronos, but the notion of Kal-El being susceptible to de-powering is too wired into the concept to be dispensed with at this point.
Originally, of course, de-powering wasn’t an issue, because the powered state was his baseline. Kryptonians were natually bad-ass, just liek, say, J’onn J’onzz.
We aren’t the baseline, a red-sun Kryptonian is. Kryptonians under a red sun just happen to be pretty much equivalent to Earth humans. When he gets depowered, what actually happens is he loses the ability to convert yellow-sun energy to run his powers.
Or have they changed that?
Krypton and Kryptonians both keep changing. Originally, IIRC all Kryptonians were 1938 Superman powerful just because they had evolved to higher levels of strenght, speed, etc. than Earth people. There might have also been the mention of higher gravity.
All the yellow sun stuff, and kryptonite, and then various colors of kryptonite, came later.
I don’t actually read any Superman comic books any more, but I get the general impression that a lot of the stuff I remember from my childhood has changed.
Laugh all you want, but I seem to recall an old Superman comic that mentioned him having super-control over all the muscles of his body. So he could probably makes his muscles feel soft to the touch if he wanted to.
Better than his super-ventriloquism powers. (Don’t ask me to explain why Clark (or whoever) can’t speak English).
I recall one comic-book episode of Clark back in Smallville. He needed to be vaccinated, some sort of high-school health requirement, and IIRC he found a doctor so near-sighted he couldn’t tell that the needle broke off on Clark’s arm. That gave him the medical certificate. Then he managed to create some semblance of a vaccination mark by ramming himself into someting hard and pointy at super speed.
It depends on how cute the girl is and how little she’s wearing. 