Superman's forgotten powers: the strange abilities DC made disappear

Why did Superman have so many powers?

Today, the list of his abilities is relatively stable: strength, flight, resilience, vision, breath, heightened senses. But it wasn't always that way. For several decades, Superman accumulated powers at a dizzying pace, sometimes invented for the needs of a single episode.

This inflation is explained by the production context of the era:

• The stories were short and self-contained : a problem had to be solved in a few pages
• The publishing pace was intense, pushing toward permanent invention
• The target audience was young, and internal logic mattered less than imagination
• No strict continuity framed the character yet

The result: a hero capable of almost anything, whose abilities went far beyond those listed in our guide to Superman's powers. This period, often called the Silver Age, is detailed in our article on Superman through the eras.

One name explains much of this power creep: Mort Weisinger, the editor in charge of the Superman titles throughout the Silver Age. His method was to gather his writers and wring ideas out of them until a sellable story came out for the following month. Under that regime, a power isn't a characteristic of the character: it's a disposable tool, invented on page 8 to resolve page 11.

It's also worth understanding that the hero's spec sheet was never fixed, not even for his most obvious abilities. In Action Comics #1, in 1938, Superman doesn't fly: he leaps. Flight came to him from outside the comics, from the cartoons produced by the Fleischer studios starting in September 1941. The animators found the leap ridiculous on screen and asked the publisher for permission to make him fly; the publisher said yes, and the comics followed.

In other words, adding powers wasn't an accidental drift: it was the normal way the house worked, and flight itself came out of it.

The strangest powers of the Silver Age

Some of these abilities have become legendary among readers, often for their improbable side. Here are a few of the most cited:

• Super-ventriloquism : the ability to project his voice over very long distances, including through space, to fool an opponent
• Super-hypnosis : a mental power allowing him to influence others, often used to protect his secret identity
• The mini-Supermen : in some stories, he could project small versions of himself from his hands to carry out tasks in his place — a trick that comes from Superman #125, dated November 1958
• Super-sewing : capable of making his own costumes at superhuman speed, with perfect precision
• Superhuman memory and calculation : ultra-fast reading and complete recall of information

These powers aren't fan inventions: they really do appear in the publications of the era. They attest to a conception of the character very different from today's — an almost magical hero, for whom no situation was unsolvable.

It's also worth remembering that the Superman of the very first years was far more limited: he leaped rather than flew, and his resilience had clear bounds. The escalation therefore came later, driven by permanent one-upmanship. In a few decades, the character went from a man capable of prodigious leaps to a near-omnipotent being — a shift that his power of flight illustrates perfectly.

Superman #125: the full story of the mini-Superman

The mini-Superman isn't a message-board rumor: it's the entire subject of "Superman's New Power!", in Superman #125, dated November 1958, written by Jerry Coleman and drawn by Wayne Boring and Stan Kaye. After crossing paths with an alien ship, Superman loses everything — except flight and invulnerability. In their place, his hands project rainbow beams, out of which comes a miniature version of himself, dubbed the Proxy, who has exactly the powers he has just lost.

The story doesn't stop at the gimmick, and that's what makes it so enjoyable: Superman grows jealous of his own double, who collects the press's congratulations in his stead. Then, when criminals try to kill him with a fragment of kryptonite, it's the Proxy who sacrifices himself by hurling the stone into the ocean. Everything is set up and settled in a single issue — and the power disappears with it.

Super-ventriloquism, for its part, lasted much longer. You can see it at work as early as Superman #62, in 1950, and it is named in black and white in Action Comics #276, in May 1961, when Clark uses it to discreetly slip orders to Supergirl. Thirty-six years of service for a power nobody knows about anymore.

The amnesia kiss: the most controversial power

It's without a doubt the most debated ability in the entire mythology, and the best known to the general public thanks to the movies. In Superman II, the hero erases Lois Lane's memory with a simple kiss, in order to protect his secret identity.

The device has caused a lot of ink to flow:

• It has no justification in the established Kryptonian logic
• It poses an obvious ethical problem : erasing someone's memories without their consent
• It contradicts the image of a hero who respects others

In the comics, comparable mechanisms have existed, generally attached to super-hypnosis rather than a kiss. Whatever the version, this power gradually disappeared — and few modern writers would want to reintroduce it.

The issue everyone cites, and what it actually contains

Whenever anyone looks for a comics origin for the amnesia kiss, one issue always comes back: Action Comics #306, dated November 1963, written by Robert Bernstein and drawn by Al Plastino. DC's own official account pointed to this issue as the ancestor of the "magic kiss," seventeen years before the film.

Except that when you reopen the pages in question, you don't find what was announced. Clark does kiss Lois under the mistletoe, during the Daily Planet Christmas party, and she comes away dazed. But no memory is erased: he kisses her very hard, and that's all. CBR's comic book legends fact-checking column, which went through the issue page by page, files the lineage as false.

The amnesia kiss is therefore a movie invention, born on a chaotic shoot: Richard Donner, the original director, had been removed and replaced by Richard Lester, whose markedly lighter tone left other marks on the film.

The lesser-known modern powers

The editorial cleanup didn't make all originality disappear. Recent eras have introduced lesser-known abilities, but ones better integrated into the character's logic.

• The solar flare : introduced in Superman #38, in 2015, it consists of releasing all the accumulated solar energy at once in a devastating blast. The price to pay is heavy: he comes out of it deprived of his powers for about twenty-four hours
• Fine temperature control : beyond the freezing breath and the heat vision, he can precisely dose heat and cold
• Multispectral perception : his X-ray vision comes, depending on the version, with an ability to perceive spectra invisible to the human eye
• Prolonged breath-holding : he can store air and survive in the vacuum of space, which explains his interventions in orbit

These abilities have one thing in common: they all stem from the same source, the energy of the yellow sun. It's this coherence that sets them apart from the inventions of the Silver Age.

The difference in treatment is striking. The solar flare, for example, doesn't come out of nowhere: it stems directly from the established workings of his body, and above all it has a cost. Where the old powers solved problems for free, the modern abilities create new ones. That's the whole difference between a script convenience and a real dramatic device.

Why these powers disappeared

The great sorting happened gradually, with an acceleration during the major editorial overhauls. The goal was clear: make the character interesting to read again.

Three main reasons explain this cleanup:

• The problem of stakes : a hero who has a solution to everything can no longer be put in a tough spot
• Coherence : modern writers wanted every ability to flow logically from the same solar source
• Credibility : the readership has aged and expects stories where the rules are stable

The major relaunches, including the New 52 overhaul, helped refocus the character on a core of legible abilities. Paradoxically, this reduction made him more powerful narratively : by taking away his miracle solutions, his victories were made deserved. It's the same reasoning that makes his invulnerability interesting only because it has limits, or kryptonite indispensable to his stories.

Two cleanups, fifteen years apart

The first dates from 1971. In Superman #233, Denny O'Neil and Curt Swan launch the saga known as "Kryptonite Nevermore": a nuclear accident turns all the kryptonite present on Earth into iron, while a sand double slowly siphons off the hero's power. The intent was openly stated — to bring a character who had become untouchable back to a scale where he could once again find himself in trouble.

The second is the 1986 overhaul. In The Man of Steel, John Byrne redraws the limits one by one:

• no more exceeding the speed of light;
• super-hearing sharply bounded;
• no more moving planets;
• Superboy's career struck from continuity;
• and super-memory removed, explicitly.

It's after this overhaul that super-ventriloquism stops appearing in the regular titles.

A forgotten power can always come back

Removal is never final. In 1978, Superman #330 — "The Master Mesmerizer of Metropolis!", by Martin Pasko and Curt Swan — had finally explained the riddle of the glasses through super-hypnosis: the lenses, cut from a material that came from the Kryptonian rocket, amplify the power and make people perceive Clark as a somewhat limp office worker. That detail slept for nearly fifty years. James Gunn brought it back out for his film released on July 11, 2025, after the writer Tom King reminded him of it, pointing out that the idea was already canon in the comics and had simply fallen into oblivion.

Conclusion

The forgotten powers of Superman tell a fascinating story: that of a character who nearly disappeared under his own abilities. By being able to do everything, he no longer risked anything — and a hero without risk interests no one.

The cleanup carried out by DC is therefore one of the best decisions in its editorial history. By taking away his super-ventriloquism and mini-Supermen, he was given back what really matters: the possibility of failing. And that's precisely what keeps the Man of Steel still worth reading nearly a century after his debut.