This Batman and Superman Story Is Still One Of The World's Finest's Best

Batman and Superman have teamed up on many occasions to fight evil, and one of their greatest comic book stories as a duo is the Superman/Batman four-part story, Super/Bat. As DC Comics coalesced into a vast comic book universe (and eventually an even more expansive multiverse), the Dark Knight and the Man of Steel have been essential characters to all things DC. In the comic book world, Superman and Batman collectively are known by the nickname of the World’s Finest, a title accorded to them from their long-running team-up book World Finest Comics. In the early 2000’s, Superman/Batman adapted the World’s Finest concept for modern comic book readers, and told some of the best stories with the two that the world has ever seen.

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One of those is undoubtedly Mike Johnson, Michael Green, and Ralph “Rags” Morales’ Super/Bat, which did the thing that nerds had waited for decades to see – that being, giving Batman Superman’s powers. Far from being a gimmicky one-off storytelling device, Super/Bat uses its plot to tell a truly unforgettable comic book tale with the World’s Finest.

The Story Of Super/Bat

Super/Bat begins with Clark Kent and Bruce Wayne at a museum function in Metropolis, with the villainous Silver Banshee arriving to steal an artifact known as the Cawdor. Superman and Batman attempt to stop Silver Banshee, but are ultimately unsuccessful, with Batman being wounded by one of the museum’s glass cases. Following the museum incident, Superman’s powers are gradually diminishing and eventually vanish, with Batman gradually taking on more and more Kryptonian powers before eventually flying to Superman and declaring “We need to talk.”

Superman then trains Batman in how to use his newfound powers, but the switch has a profound effect on each hero’s psyche. While Superman gets a taste of the “normal life” he’d always secretly yearned for as Clark Kent, the absence of his powers and his ability to use them to help people leaves him increasingly despondent. Meanwhile, Batman is overcome with feeling more powerful than ever to the point of not even needing to sleep anymore, and feeling like he at last has the power to save everyone in the world that he always yearned for, leading to Batman becoming more and more hostile and megalomaniacal in his crime-fighting methods. In the end, it is determined that Superman and Batman were afflicted with a kind of monkey’s paw curse from Silver Bansee, giving each hero their deepest desire but at a terrible price. Witnessing Batman’s descent into madness, which even involves injuring Nightwing at one point, Superman and the rest of the Justice League succeed in returning Batman’s new Krpytonian powers back to Superman, restoring the World’s Finest to their old selves once more.

Super/Bat Nailed The World’s Finest Story The Whole World Was Waiting For

The basic story of Super/Bat is one that sells itself – what if Batman got Superman’s powers? With their decade long alliance and the contrast of Superman’s vast alien powers and Batman’s reliance on human determination, ingenuity, and intellect, a super-powered version of Batman is a story that simply had to happen sooner or later. Like the entire run of Superman/Batman, Super/Bat is packed with stunning artwork, and its specific story really relishes in big, flashy shots of Batman in flight and wielding Kryptonian powers like heat vision and super-strength. Beneath all of that is a deeply powerful character study of the World’s Finest.

Super/Bat is hardly the first, or last, time Superman temporarily lost his powers in the comics, and the story really zeroes in on how the loss of them affects Superman due to his inherent sense of using his powers for purely altruistic purposes. For Superman, his powers don’t define him as a person, but what he does with them gives him a sense of duty and purpose that he ends up feeling stripped of in the story. Super/Bat pays great tribute to the Man of Steel in how much he comes to value what his powers allow him to do for his adoptive world, leaving Superman to never look back once he regains them.

For Batman, his own limitations as a non-superpowered human superhero have always been his biggest hang-up, the ever-committed Dark Knight always wishing he could do more. In suddenly gaining Superman’s powers, Batman has what he has always dreamt of ever since the night of his parent’s murder – a way to save everyone. However, what Batman doesn’t realize is that even Superman can’t be everywhere at once, with Batman thinking he can compensate by ramping up his aggression in a way that he now believes Superman was always holding back on too much. In the end, Batman comes to see how wisdom and responsibility Superman has exercised in how he uses his powers, and that allowing oneself to become intoxicated in metahuman abilities is a recipe for disaster. Batman also comes to learn that he was never coming up short as a superhero for being human, and that his own methods of using his human skill and intellect to their fullest as just as vital an asset to the superhero community as Superman’s physical powers.

Why Super/Bat Deserves More Recognition

Purely on action-heavy level, Super/Bat is an exhilarating read that also acts as a kind of inversion of Batman and Superman’s most famous conflict in Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns. Not only is Batman made into the antagonist, but the power transfer completely flips the dynamic of their roles. Even as the greatest of allies, fans just can’t help but get a kick out of a good Superman-Batman smackdown, and Super/Bat delivers that with their roles and abilities completely flipped, with Batman the physical powerhouse and Superman relying on his brains.

Super/Bat is also one of the most shining examples of Superman/Batman doing what it always did best of deconstructing the World’s Finest and showing as being simultaneously heroic opposites and two sides of the same coin. As a parallel story focused on both characters, Super/Bat never reads as Batman completely overtaking the story even as he gains Superman’s powers, or of Superman becoming the focal point due to the loss of his. The story itself simply wouldn’t work at all without Superman and Batman side-by-side as equally essential characters in a superhero Freaky Friday. Super/Bat dives deep into the core of who Superman and Batman really are in a way that very few other World’s Finest stories have. It just took temporarily handing Superman’s powers over to Batman to show one of the most effective storytelling tools for putting the Man of Steel and the Dark Knight under the microscope. In all, Super/Bat stands not just as a highlight of the phenomenal DC book that was Superman/Batman, but as one of the most profound and thrilling World’s Finest stories ever told, and one that more than deserves be be recognized and revered by comic book readers as exactly that.