Every week, at our regular DC superhero RPG, at the end of game, we have our weekly aurgument about who would win in a fight: Superman or Captain Marvel. The crux of the aurgment is usually about superman’s weakness (or simple lack of protection) to magic. One guy adamantly belives that Captain marvel, being magic powered, and created when Billy invokes the wizards name, is MADE of magic. That being said, Supes has no protects, and should get knocked down quick like.
There are of course also arguments about their strengths, speeds, toughness, and intellegence.
So, what say you all? Who wins? The man of steel, or the world’s mightiest mortal?
Supes, by a nose. For at least one writing team’s interpretation of this battle, see the excellent graphic novel *Kingdom Come * …
Arguments for a factual answer?
Well, Superman’s much-lauded vulnerability to magic is, as apparently some of your friends note, not so much a crippling weakness as it is the fact that he loses one of his layers of protection against magic. He stills takes hits from magical bolts of energy that would pulp Batman, though.
Secondly… CM made of magic? That’s a new one on me. A fist is a fist, whether or not the muscles behind it are magically enhanced, from my point of view.
Nextly, while they’re both big softies with a Boy Scout outlook, Supes has a tiny bit more of a dark side than CM.
Lastly… Superman has seniority. He should win. All the Wisdom of Solomon in the world can’t make up for good old-fashioned combat experience.
I seem to recall a Supes vs Big Red Cheese story where CM laid Superman out by calling out his magic word and blitzing Superman with the magic lightning bolt…
As of the last time I read comice regularly, the “weakness to magic” thing was somewhat retconned out. Superman was vulnerable to magical attack in the same way anyone else would be (i.e. a spell to turn him into a pig or a carrot would work) but he could absorb a lot more punishment (better able, as noted, to stand up to a magical force bolt than Batman).
I’d give the victory to Superman based not only on a broader base of experience but also a wider range of attack options. He could keep away from CM’s fists and zap him from a distance with heat vision until the Big Red Cheese turned into fondue.
That would be Kingdom Come, already mentioned. Note that, although DC at one point considered making Kingdom Come continuity the “official future” of the DC Universe, it has been classified by TPTB as Elseworlds instead.
This has always been the way his vulnerability to magic works: his powers are based on (comic book) physics, so there’s nothing about them that inherently protects him against magic. As for whether his invulnerability protects him from magically-caused physical damage or not, it varies by the writer (and also makes for a nice run-on sentence).
I have to disagree. If we go by Kingdom Come as being representative of their relative power, CM comes out ahead on speed. He’s got the speed of Mercury, after all, which in Kingdom Come is fast enough to dodge lightning. Superman is merely faster than a speeding bullet (and not faster than a lightning bolt). Moreover, in (relatively) recent continuity (specifically, Grant Morrison’s JLA run), it appears that Captain Marvel can sucker punch Superman, not only because he’s faster (again), but also because apparently the strength of Hercules falls under Superman’s vulnerability to magic. Furthermore, the wisdom of Solomon probably outweighs Superman’s combat experience. If we assume they’re about equal in other areas, Superman doesn’t have a chance.
And second, the heat vision thing can be countered by taking the fight underground, underwater, or indoors, all of which limit the utility of a ranged attack.
And while Supes is jaunting off to the Sun, you think Marvel’s gonna be sitting around? Heck no! Supes will never clear the atmosphere.
So, Grant Morrison considers the Strength of Atlas a magical attack? I think that automatically makes it bunk. I LOVE me some Morrison on a weird comic (Doom patrol), a precident set in a ‘normal’ comic by Grant should automatically be reversed
th ONLY reason supes won in “kingdom come” was because captail marvel didnt “Really” want to beat him. He was under evil mind control and stuff and over came it enough to LET superman win.
No, never read KC. This would have been a regular old off the rack comic book, somewhere around 1983 or so. Definitely pre-Crisis.
Although now that I come to think about it, I don’t think CM took out Supes in this fashion. I think it was Black Adam, who had somehow harnessed the magic lightning into some sort of energy barrier. The story involved CM being brought from Earth-S to battle Black Adam, but there was a Billy Batson on Earth-1 who had to invoke the magic word for CM to manifest. The Earth-1 version of Uncle Dudley, calling on his encyclopedic knowledge of Fawcett comics history, tricked Black Adam into saying “Shazam!” and turning back into the easily-defeated Toth-Adam.
My take has always been that while Supie is vulnerable to magic spells, his powers are effective against the physical havoc the magic brings. For example, if a magician suddenly waved a dam to collapse, Superman would still be able to change the course of the mighty river. If a magical steel bar suddenly appeared, Superman could still bend it in his bare hands. You get the idea.
Assuming Superman’s yellow-sun-and-whatever-other-justification-the writers-are-using powers were equal to CM’s magically granted powers, it would be a fair fight.
Some Pre-Crisis encounters:
[ul][li]Captain Marvel handily defeats the golden age Superman (All-Star Squadron#36)[/li][li]Superman trades blows with Black Adam (Captain Marvel’s equal in power), and decides the battle could go on for days as they are too “equally matched” (DC Comics Presents Annual#3, and Adam was defeated when the Earth-1 Billy Batson tricked him, not the Earth-1 Dudley)[/li][li]Superman goes toe-to-toe with “Captain Thunder”, a Captain Marvel equivalent (at the time DC had the rights to CM, but for some reason used a knockoff for this story) in Superman#276. The battles are inconclusive, but Thunder notes to himself that Supes is exceptionally powerful.[/ul][/li]
Post-Crisis, there was a story in which Superman was possessed by the mystical villian Eclipso and beat Marvel nearly to death. Put simply, whichever character has the upper hand is determined by the needs of the story.
Marvel can knock Superman out, but he really needs to take Supes by surprise to do it. That’s what happened in JLA a few years ago. In another story they were shaking hands and each tried to squeeze the other’s hand in a friendly/macho way. Ultimately it was Marvel who said “ouch.”
All things being equal I’d give it to Superman just because we’ve rarely seen him really cut loose, and on those occasions when he has he’s been able to take out, well, Darkseid for one.
Mad Magazine already answered this 40 years ago:
Superduperman realized that he could not ever really beat Captain Marbles, so he ducked a roundhouse punch from the Captain that came back and knocked the Captain’s head off.
Superman wins, because if all else fails he can take Captain Marvel to court. And any comic book historian can tell you that Superman has better lawyers:
I thought at first this might be a thread about the tv shows. Ironically, they’re on one after the other every Friday night on the TV Land Kitschen, and like the characters themselves, the shows are pretty much equal in quality/entertainment value.
Recall that Marvel is actually a 12-year-old kid wearing a man’s body.
Superman, showing the uncharacteristic shrewdness that tends to pop up only when he’s really in a jam, lets Marvel chase him into a… (ahem) “adult products”… store.
Paralyzed with a mix of intense embarrassment and hormonal fascination, Marvel forgets all about the fight.
