Superman has always had an incredible amount of powers. While he initially started with only super strength and durability, he quickly developed other marvelous abilities, such as flight, X-ray vision, super senses, and so much more. He’s been the bastion os super-powered wonder ever since his original appearance, but as awesome as his powers are, they often hide a much darker reality than what’s seen on the surface. Comic books tend to handwave the consequences of these kinds of powers, but sometimes, they explore what it would look like for a real person to be gifted and burdened like Superman is.
Videos by ComicBook.com
His super strength lets him break anything, to the point where he always has to hold back or risk crushing the people around him. His heat vision responds to his emotions, so he must keep his anger in check or burn everything he looks at. However, there’s one aspect of Superman that, when examined under a microscope, is easily the most horrifying of all. Absolute Superman #15 just dove into exactly what kind of hellish experience being able to hear everything on the globe at once would be, making it Superman’s worst and greatest power.
Hearing Everything All At Once
Issue #15 starts with Superman fixing up the Kent farm. He inherited it and wanted to make it a place the family he never had could be proud of, but he was always pulled away when someone in the world started screaming. Even while he was handling one tragedy, another one would crop up, because the world is a massive place with so many things happening, and not even Superman could be everywhere. Still, he tried to be. While holding an erupted dam together, he listened to reports from all around the world of natural disasters, bigotry, and exploitation, deciding which needed his immediate attention. He put the fear of God into Winslow Schott, the Prime Universe’s Toyman, who here was a corrupt businessman profiting from unsafe work conditions.
As Superman told Lana Lang, he couldn’t even sleep because all he heard was the noise of people losing everything. Even while rescuing a ship lost in a storm, he heard a car going over an embankment. He couldn’t do anything, but he had to listen, because turning away was too cruel. He kept charging ahead and solving every situation he could, but no matter how many people he saved, there were always more screaming. Sometimes, he would fly into the stratosphere and just scream, but he could never drown out everything he heard. This is the horrible nature of superhearing, and an incredible truth about Superman’s most underrated power, because despite all of its drawbacks, it’s still one of his most essential ones.
A Hellish Pain Turned To Unlimited Hope
For someone as compassionate as Superman, hearing the constant stream of atrocities around the globe that he can’t deal with is a fate worse than death. He is subject to the never-ending stream of pain and agony that the entire world faces every day, and while everyone else only experiences their little pockets of it, Superman hears it all. This power is horrific, no other way about it, but it also symbolizes everything great about Superman, and especially Absolute Superman.
The Man of Tomorrow is someone who sees humanity at their worst constantly and literally cannot tune it out. Yet, despite how much pain and death he hears, and how much he knows he fails to stop, he still does his best to help everyone. He is a man who tries his best in the face of impossible odds to put out an infinitely respawning amount of fires, but he never lets himself give up, because every single person he hears matters. This same power that hurts him so much is what lets him save as many people as he does. Superman turned an objective curse into the best life-saving ability anyone has ever had, and that right there is the essence of Superman. He found the good in all the bad and will never stop until the world is a safer place.
Absolute Superman #15 is on sale now!
What do you think? Leave a comment in the comment section below and join the conversation on the ComicBook Forums!
Most Viewed
-
Image Courtesy of Prime Video -
Image Courtesy of Netflix
