Sounds like you had a really old comic. When he debuted in 1938, Superman didn’t fly, he jumped. That’s where “able to leap tall buildings in a single bound” came from. When Fleisher Studios produced their famous Superman animated shorts in the '40s, they had trouble animating Superman jumping around without making him look goofy. The decided to just have him fly, instead, and the change worked its way back into the comics. By 1943, the jumping thing was entirely discarded in favor of flying.
Probably has something to do with the way he doesn’t fall through the air when he’s flying, despite being notably denser than the atmosphere.
He is telekinetic. When John Byrne rebooted the character in 1986, he described his flight as a telekinetic field surrounding his body. He could also extend this field around objects by touching them, which is how he could do things like catch a falling airplane without just punching a Superman-shaped hole in it. This was, IIRC, on top of his super strength - he wasn’t just lifting things with his mind, he still was physically exerting himself.
She didn’t cut it, she unraveled it and knitted it into a suit. At least, she did in the Silver Age. In Byrne’s reboot, Ma Kent made the suit out of normal Earth materials - it was that “telekinetic forcefield” that prevented it from being damaged by most attacks.
Nowadays, the suit is Kryptonian battle-armor, and doesn’t have anything to do with Ma Kent.
If he or any other Kryptonian on Earth’s physique was shaped by how much physical effort they put out to function like with a human, they’d all look like emaciated scarecrows. Animated skeletons, practically. Forget abs; the fact that he has visible muscles at all shows that something abnormal is going on.
I just wish to note that most animals on Earth get a muscled physique without having to work out. That is a human adaptation, to bulk up when needed and food is abundant, and to lose mass when it is not.
There are a number of people out there with impressive physiques claiming you, too, can achieve the same using your own bodyweight as part of the exercise. Lots and lots of reps required. As noted, that’s not a time problem for Supes. It’s called “prisoner’s workout”, the notion being you can do this to get/stay in shape in a space the size of a prison cell with no equipment needed.
Or Kryptonian’s have very little sub-cutaneous body fat.
Superdog has fur, so you wouldn’t see his muscles.
A lot! A LOT of blankets, space is cold, donchya know?
The version of the story that I read Ma Kent unraveled the blankets, with young Supes cutting when needed with his heat vision. As for sewing… she was able to thread the needle between the individual threads that made up the blanket, which must have had a fairly loose weave to allow that with mere human strength.
Meh - he’s an alien. What’s going on with him may be perfectly normal for his species.
There’s an explanation for that from the comic books. Superman can manipulate the muscles in his face to make himself look different enough from Clark Kent to not be recognized. He uses that power to impersonate other people, as well. I assume he can do the same thing with his abs.
Rather than body weight, I was thinking isometrics. Push against himself to counteract the super strength. The trick would be developing the control needed to push in exactly the right way to achieve the desired physique.
Then he just does them at super-speed. A quick round of 100,000 reps every morning.
Obviously he brought them over in pieces and assembled them in place.
Mr. Incredible had a similar issue and he trained lifted in old railyards by lifting train cars with chains and stuff. But he’s also a good example of someone super strong who let themselves go, I guess.
You could also ponder why his junk isn’t showing in a skin-tight suit, or if he can go back in time by flying around Earth super fast, does this apply to the whole universe?
Heh, I remember another explanation offered up when I was a kid actively reading Superman comics-- so this would be maybe early / mid 70s. It went something like this-- Superman had always wondered why nobody recognized him as Clark Kent. But then he discovered that the lenses of the glasses he wore as CK focused his super vision in such a way that he had been unconsciously hypnotizing people into seeing him differently as Clark Kent-- wimpier, with softer features-- not such a chiseled face.
Right, the classic “superhero” outfit was derived from that of old time circus acrobats/strongmen — though forgetting that those would only wear their capes for marching in and would take them off before performing. Because Edna was right.
In Byrne’s 80’s series Lois does comment that Clark’s for-show home gym set-up does not seem sufficient for him to be so built up.
Superhero physiques are idealizations of the human form, and some artists make the style choice to take this idealization to expressionistic extremes. Never mind how in practice many of their “costumes” be they male or female would only be really possible as bodypaint, to boot. (But yeah, no visible junk line. A very tight superjockstrap/cup under there. Frank Thorne once mocked this in one of his indie works with some old-time superheroes dropping their pants and the heroine going “What??? No schvontzers???”)
As mentioned, Supes with a sort of extreme bulked and cut bodybuilder physique is an artifact of comics after the rise of bodybuilding itself, before that he was often portrayed as just a strong athletic guy by whatever the decade’s standards.
When I was a kid and the B&W Adventures of Superman with George Reeves was on TV my Dad, ever an irreverent thinker, commented to us kids that Superman’s superhero costume must be nothing but a full-body tattoo and a cape.
The real answer is, of course, that comic book artists originally just draw everyone the same, all the boys jacked and all the girls busty, with different colored hair and costumes. So, factually, Zod does have the same physique:
But, if we ignore that, I’d lean towards a theory that, since the Kryptonians are more technologically advanced, they’ve engineered themselves to be naturally fit.
Humans are low on muscle, in principle, because we have high myostatin. In general, our biology prefers sending calories to maintain our organs, then to build fat stores, and then to bonus stuff like growing fingernails and muscle as a third option in a land of plenty.
Kryptonians would just need to flip that ordering or build in a smarter system that caps out fat stores at a particular body fat percentage.
So we might hypothesize that Superman’s muscle mass is largely a function of his calorie intake.
The “Why doesn’t Lois recognize him?” isn’t nearly as big a deal as it’s made out to be. I mean, look at the better actors who’ve played him, like Christopher Reeves. Reeves’ Clark Kent doesn’t really look like his Superman, even though they’re the same actor. He just, well, acts, with different posture, facial expressions, and so on. A normal, non-meta Earth human can do this. Why can’t a Kryptonian?
