“Normal” in this sense meaning at his usual, everyday power levels, not impacted by exterior enhancements or deficits.
The weakest I can remember is in the “Batman: The Dark Knight Returns” where Batman is beating up Superman with city electricity, Sidewinder missiles and acid and an atomic bomb almost kills him.
The strongest in the 60’s where he’s flying faster than light and pushing large asteroids around.
Any more extreme examples than these?
When he debuted in the '30s, an ordinary artillery shell could break the big guy’s skin, and his “leap tall buildings in a single bound” catchphrase signified that he couldn’t actually fly. (And he wasn’t yet “faster than a speeding bullet”; it was more like ‘faster than a speeding train, which, honestly, is the only way to compare his leg strength to a locomotive without being completely wrong.’
In a superboy comic he lifted the entire planet.
Mxyzptlk once gave him sneezing powder, and he had to leave earth and go into space, or else his sneeze would destroy the planet.
ETA: That’s how I remember it, anyway. I don’t have a cite.
In The Dark Knight Returns, kryptonite is used against him, which means he’s not at his normal powers. All kryptonite stories have to be ruled out. Otherwise you have to include all the stories in which he’s under a red sun, in the bottle city of Kandor, affected by red or white or rainbow or pink or periwinkle or chameleon kryptonite, or the other gimmicks writers have used to make him more mortal. Besides, the comic isn’t canon. It’s essentially an imaginary story.
The true range is exactly as TOWP said, an arc from the first stories to the planet-juggling days of the Silver Age.
I remember reading a story (it would have been around 1970) where Superman needed some really strong earplugs for some reason. So he flew to the sun and grabbed two handfuls of the sun and then compressed them down to make superdense earplugs. I remember even as a kid I thought it was unlikely Superman could fly into the sun like that.
This is the single most absurdly powerful moment that I can think of (not counting something like destroying an entire solar system with a sneeze, which was also depicted). I’m not sure how much raw power is needed to tow 13 or so planets (each inhabited, so at least Mars-sized, I guess) across intergalactic space at supralight speed, but I bet it’s a lot.
His weakest? Heck, start at Action #1, because it went nuts almost from the start.
Bryan Ekers: Zut! You win! I’d never seen that’n!
I seem to recall that you could still tickle him with a missile till 1942 or so.
Yeah- Action Comics 1 is Superman at his weakest. He was only a very, very strong guy back then (strong enough to leap over a building, but that’s about that)
Silver Age Supes, under editor Mort Weisinger, was all about making the character nearly omnipotent, and the stories were not even particularly action-oriented, more fanciful funny tales about a demi-god and the girl who kept chasing after him.
Wow. I never saw this before. My goodness, that just assumes that our hero is, in fact, a deity level entity that just happens to look human. But, I must say, that my first take on that was “how does the chain connect all of those planets?”
Yes, I know we aren’t supposed to ask those kind of questions, but Gagundathar at age 12 would have. Wouldn’t the chain have melted in the molten cores? And what kind of material… oh wait, Kryptonian material. OK. That solves that.
I was thinking the same thing.
Wasn’t it just ***lucky ***that Krypton had an entirely different periodic table than Earth?
That’s an awesome image. I particularly like how Superman is bragging to himself how he’s saving billions billions! of lives by towing the planets from a dying a galaxy. Wouldn’t they all freeze to death while being towed across open space? Does this all end up with him thinking, “Oops. Well, I tried”? And how does a whole galaxy die anyway?
He pulled the Earth out of orbit here. Hard to top that!
But he’s done it. The scene Brian linked where he’s toting a baker’s dozen of planets is probably the biggest topper, but he’s also moved suns. Only one at a time, though, at least that I can remember reading. (And with a lot more ease than he’s displaying in that cover! Pre-Crisis Superman shouldn’t be straining that hard for something as simple as moving one Earth-sized planet!)
And he could time travel under his own power easily enough to make it a regular thing when he was a member of the Legion of Superheroes.
Nah. Look at the panel’s caption, “One day in deep space.” Superman obviously zipped out there with his giant tow chain, hooked all the planets together and towed them across the universe so fast they didn’t have time to lose their surface heat. All the billions of inhabitants had to suffer through, was a longer than average night.
Got me beat.
For some reason my brain went towards invulnerability instead of strength…
I remember a comic from late 1960s or possibly early 70s in which a “thing” from 1,000,000 A.D. time-travels and lands on earth; it’s a shape-shifter that takes on the characteristics of whatever it mimics and of course it mimics Superman upon encountering him. Lots of panels of them bashing each other ineffectually with steel girders and whatnot, apparently equally matched, until Superman tricks the thing into following him to ground zero of a planned nuclear test (cue mushroom cloud panel), which vaporizes the thing but doesn’t muss Superman’s hair.
If we’re talking about the movies, he managed to reverse the rotation of the Earth in Superman I. He also moved the moon to create an eclipse in Superman IV.
That’s not even Superman, it’s Superboy.
No. He accelerated himself to faster than light speed, and we see the Earth’s rotation slow and reverse because time is first stopping and then running backwards for Superman. It then slows and returns to normal rotation as he slows to subliminal velocity. Reversing the rotation of the Earth wouldn’t have done anything helpful. As an extra hint, we hear his mother reminding him that he is forbidden to change history (which he’s about to disregard).
