Headscratchers / Superman vs. the Elite

• This has always bugged me about superhero comics in general when they touch on this topic, but this work especially, since it's part of the main theme: why does everyone act as though it's Superman's job to execute people like Atomic Skull? When a cop apprehends a serial killer, most people won't blame the cop if the killer later escapes and kills again; most will say that's the jury/judge's fault for not having him executed, or the prison's fault for letting him escape. A gun can kill Atomic Skull, so it's not like the state is unable to kill him, and there's no indication that Metropolis doesn't have the death penalty, so why didn't they just execute him, instead of locking him up in a Cardboard Prison and then getting pissy at Supes for not acting as though he was above the law and instead handing over a dangerous criminal to the proper authorities to deal with?
  • Because it's a Superman story, and it's Superman's code that's being analyzed, not the U.S. government, which is clearly so incompotent in the DC universe even they ask why Superman doesn't do their job for them? Also, as much as he skirts around it, Superman and superheroes in general will always reside in a legal grey-area (trespass, break and enter, invasion of privacy, obstruction of justice, assault and battery, numerous registry complications, possesion of illegal weapons, resisting arrest, etc. are all in a month's work for them, and they have been shown willing to rebel against or attack governments they deem tyrranical). As stated below, they don't kill in most situations because of their personal morality, which certainly is open to question.
    • But if the purpose of the story is to analyze Superman's no killing rule, and to include an arc where people are angry at him for not killing someone, wouldn't it make more sense to use a villain who only he can kill (ie. one who can't be apprehended fullstop?) As it is, it gives the impression that people are angry because they wanted Superman to take on the moral responsibility for killing instead of them.
    • No, because the story isn't "Superman vs Unstoppable Villain", it's "Superman vs Less Ethical Superheroes". The whole 'Atomic Skull' issue is a side-plot to Superman's broader conflict with the more questionable morals of the Elite. The conflict stems from the fact that, despite being nominally on the same side, Superman and the Elite have drastically opposing moral codes that fundamentally bring them into conflict.
  • Because Superman is well-known to have power that brings him straight into Physical God territory. Superman could deal with the Atomic Skull in a million different ways, all non-lethal. He could dismember him so that he's just a head and a torso. He could lobotomize him. He could find a way to de-power him (after all, he de-powers The Elite). He could easily and quickly build a cell that doesn't hold him only so long as nothing goes wrong with the thing they've hooked him up to and doesn't use glass. He could do so many different things, but he doesn't. He tosses him in a cell and hopes really hard that the Atomic Skull doesn't escape again and kill more people for shits and giggles. Superman doesn't even try to prevent it, even though he could.
    • ...Except crippling or dismembering him would be even more crueler than killing him, and doing so would be horribly dickish of them to do so. Police Officers don't cripple criminals to stop them breaking out later, and if they did they'd be in serious trouble for doing so. What you and many others are forgetting is that Superman, and other heroes, aren't trying to punish the guilty, they're protecting the innocent. They're just trying to help their community because they can, and don't have any legal sanctioning to do so. The reason they only go as far as apprehending and stopping the criminal is because, legally, that's all they can do.
    • But there's still the question of the depowering, which could have been averted if not for the end of the film showing Superman depowering the Elite.
    • The Atomic Skull is a walking radioactive skeleton. He has no normal body. Depowering him would kill him. This is different from The Elite who were still essentially human save for a few upgrades.
    • Atomic Skull is a stupid choice for a villain in this kind of story anyway. He isn't even remotely human anymore, physically and mentally. In a logically functioning world he wouldn´t fall under human law or would have been sent to the chair a long time ago.
    • Not according to Superman. In Superman's view, Atomic Skull is still a person — a cruel and horrible person, and one with abilities that are beyond most humans, but still a person. Which makes sense, because Superman considers himself to be a person, and this logic would suggest that Superman himself shouldn't fall under human law or human morality or be considered a person. A position which Superman himself fundamentally rejects.
    • There really isn't any reason Superman wouldn't help if asked. He's thrown people into the Phantom Zone before and help destroy missiles. Unless there's something in the comics, Superman's argument doesn't prevent him from fulfilling judgment made at trial. Would he play executioner if requested by a judge? I can see performing brain surgery to stop Manchester Black as no different from a police officer having to shoot an armed robber; it is seen as reasonable force to resolve the situation.
    • Superman doesn't kill, no exceptions. So no, he wouldn't assist with an execution no matter what. Black's powers were the result of a mutation, and removing the abnormality is more akin to corrective surgery than mutilation. The Phantom Zone is also only for criminals who absolutely cannot be stopped in any other way, such as Doomsday or villainous kryptonians. Atomic Skull can easily be contained by civilian authorities, so there's no reason for why they cant simply drain him of his atomic energy completely and kill him that way. Or simply exert enough force to destroy his brain like Black did.
    • And Skull isn't actually a skeleton-his flesh and blood is just invisible.

• In the final battle, Superman pretends to have become Darker and Edgier, just to reveal it as a ruse and his robots saved all civilians from the colateral damage, but what about the property damage? When facing villains in big battles it's unavoidable, but this was a staged battle (at least from Superman's side), so why didn't he have his robots secretly averting it too?
  • It was too public. The robots would have been seen letting everyone know of the ruse and ruining Superman's point. Supes could easily have the robots help clean things up.
  • Every fight between Superman and any super-villain would end in damage like that. There is probably a fund to pay for reconstruction. And Superman would actively help clean up and rebuild to atone for the damage he caused. Also, most of the fight was on the moon and not in a city. Who in the comic-book world cares if the moon is destroyed?
    • Destroying the moon would suck for everyone, what with the massive flooding and all that stuff.
    • To be fair the fight went a little off script for Superman (he probably wanted to beat them on the moon) so the robots and destroyed city was the next best thing. Plus he didn't have a choice, if he looked like he was holding back Manchester would have carried on with his threat to level the city if he come closer.

• How did Lois know who Vera was? Black didn't show her his Backstory. Unless Clark told her about it offscreen.
  • He did.
  • Still pretty surprising that Lois recognized her considering only Supes and the viewer actually saw young Vera. Lois deduced her identity way too quickly, in my opinion.
    • Here's this person who claims to know what's what about Black. Lois has already heard about Vera, the only close family Black's known to have. She is a smart, savvy reporter. She took a shot and ended up guessing right. She did frame it as question.

• In the final battle, why doesn't Manchester Black pull his "telekinetically damage Superman's capillaries" trick again after the first time? It worked remarkably well before.
  • Superman was holding back that time.
  • Also, he's got super-capillaries. Black admits that it was pretty tough to do.
  • Maybe Black was building up to that attack during the entire fight on the moon while his teammates kept Superman distracted so he can focus on setting up his special attack when the time is right. During the second battle, Black is never given enough to just catch his breath and set up the attack again?
  • Something like that would have to be very precise and more complicated than throwing up a wall. Supes was constantly on the move and as pointed out did not give Black enough time to focus.
  • Or to combine the first and third answers, notice how Superman was lying on the ground in front of him the first time, instead of standing up and flash-stepping all over the place. Also, I'm under the impression the Supes was playing up how much that capillary attack hurt him. Even if Black had managed to land that hit a second, Superman might just No-Sell it and smile at Black, ignoring the pain even as tears of blood leak from his eyes...
  • I think Manchester tells Coldcast when he ask to give him another seizure that he was playing them, sure it hurt but this is the guy that takes beating from Doomsday without lost brain cells.

• Superman invokes Beware the Superman to prove why their actions of scaring enemy into submission with such methods are wrong and it works. But does this count as hypocrisy on Superman's part and ultimately proves The Elite's right? The reason it worked is by virtue of using fear and scaring them straight.
  • The point Superman was trying to make was that it's horrible and terrifying to use such inhumane actions on other people, even if you're their enemy. In a sense, he seemingly treated the Elite EXACTLY as they had been treating bad guys up to this point. Or to put it in simpler terms: "You can dish it out, but you can't take it."
    • You have to appreciate a Superman who knows how to use Superdickery for good.
  • The Elite weren't even going to stop at using fear and intimidation to uphold the law, that's Batmans schtick, they were literally going to murder every criminal they came across until all of them were gone. What do you think Black meant when he talked about wiping the globe clean?
  • On a deeper level, it showed how twisted Might Makes Right is- Superman isn't beloved just because he's got superpowers out the wazoo, it's because he's kind enough to not use 'em to hurt people. Under the Elite's rule of killing anyone who displeased them (including political figures), the world would basically have to kowtow to their will and just hope not to piss them off. Superman turns the tables, his powers making him the supreme authority on all of Earth by Manchester's logic, and showed people that having an unstoppable, all-seeing figure who murders you the second you get out of line isn't as appealing as the Elite made it sound. You don't realize just how scary it is until you see it from someone like Superman, who's usually just so warm and friendly.
  • The problems here is even if Superman was trying to make a point, it's still hypocrisy on his part because he talks about how two wrongs don't make a right, but he still scared them into submission and performed a different form of Might Makes Right by forcibly taking away The Elite's powers and going on about how his way is the right way. Putting aside The Elite's actions, it seems Superman won't tolerate other forms of morality other than his own.
    • "Putting the Elite's actions aside" is a rather silly thing to request of us in this case, considering that the whole moral debate hinges on the Elite's actions. You might as well argue "putting aside the actions of the man who killed your grandmother, it's wrong for you to demand that he be locked up against his will for the rest of his life because locking people up against their will is wrong and two wrongs don't make a right, and if you've previously argued people shouldn't be locked up for life against their will you're a hypocrite". You're demanding that we ignore some pretty important context just to try and prove some moral absolutist point that makes him out to be a hypocrite. Of course Superman's not going to tolerate someone else's morality when that other person's morality argues that "killing people just to prove a point and scare people into doing the right thing = a-okay moral behaviour". Because a pretty big part of Superman's moral code is that he is opposed to both killing people and using fear and violence as a way of enforcing his moral code. It wouldn't even be a moral debate if Superman was willing to tolerate that particular form of morality.
    • And even if we concede that it is a form of hypocrisy, fact is sometimes you have to do things that are otherwise against your moral code because a greater good demands it. Superman clearly thinks the relatively mild hypocrisy of using his powers to scare and torment people into acting the way he wants them to when he normally wouldn't is outweighed by the greater evil of letting those same people freely go around bullying and killing whoever they want. Notice how it turns out that he was still holding back; in short, there's still a line he wasn't willing to cross. Also, Superman's demonstration is temporary in order to teach a lesson; he explicitly makes it clear that he's not going to be like that all the time from now on, he's just briefly taking the gloves off to make the point about why it is a very very good thing that he's not the kind of person who defaults to taking the gloves off. In short, Superman has moral values but he's not a moral absolutist, and is willing to bend his principles slightly if doing so will serve a greater good while doing as little harm as possible.
    • In short, you're essentially asking Superman to display Intolerable Tolerance by passively tolerating what he views as an intolerable moral code that is itself rather intolerant.
  • I think you could argue that once The Elite took it on themselves to murder heads of state with no sanction from the United Nations or any world authority, then later showed they were willing to blow up a city to get even with Superman, they could be counted as criminals and needed to be reeled in.
  • Superman took away Manchester's powers permanently. Something that he thinks is wrong to do to someone like Atomic Skull. He comes off very hypocritical in that regard.
    • In the original comic book even the lobotomy thing was a ruse to scare the crap out of Black. Superman had just given a temporary concussion to Black's brain anomaly so that it would shut down his powers only while the police locked him up properly.
    • As mentioned above, Atomic Skull is a skeleton/corpse kept alive by radiation. Taking his powers away would kill him.
  • My main problem is how Superman fought the Elite to prove his point that excessive violence is terrifying. If anything he should have used excessive force on a real villain like Atomic Skull who has no good side to him.
    • Atomic Skull wasn't the one who needed the lesson about how excessive violence is a terrifying method of enforcing vigilante justice, though. What you seem to be saying here is that "Superman should have treated Atomic Skull the same way the Elite treated Atomic Skull" which, however you look at it, is missing the point entirely.
  • Because he knew deep down, they were not evil. They were just misguided and needed to be shown the right way. In fact, Coldcast joined a branch of the Justice League down the line in the comics.
  • It's also arguably as much a demonstration for the people of Metropolis / the world who started clamouring for Superman to be more like the Elite as for the Elite themselves. Superman may not like doing it, but he feels the world needs to be sent a message — that message being "Okay, so you want me to stop being nice and dorky? You want me to abandon my "old-fashioned" moral code and act with ruthless, lethal efficiency towards my enemies with no interest in potential collateral damage or the lives of the little people? You think that's going to be cooler? Alrighty then! Here's a little taster of what that really means. Not so cool now, is it?" And the only way for him to send that message with the efficiency it needs to be sent with is for him to temporarily take the gloves off, even if it goes against how he normally acts. Actions speak louder than words, and sometimes people need a good sharp shock to remind them why things they may be taking for granted should be like that.
  • No, it doesn't, because he's not doing so because he believes that doing so is actually right despite claiming otherwise. He still believes using such tactics is wrong, but the point he's trying to make is not just "fear and terror tactics are bad", his point is "fear and terror tactics are bad, and here's why they're bad." It's the same reason Calvin's mom lets Calvin smoke a cigarette he finds in one Calvin and Hobbes strip despite very much not wanting him to take up smoking; it's a demonstration of why it's not a good idea.

• What the hell is with Lois talking about the deaths on the train from Black's origin like it was just another of their "kill the bad guy" moments? He didn't even know he HAD his powers then! It's nowhere near his fault! Are Lois and Clark really that black and white?
  • I guess it was meant to show how callous Black is about collateral damage. Those people were a fair price so that his sister didn't have to die. A nobler person would have felt remorse that it happened and remind themselves that with power Comes Great Responsibility.
  • Plus, I'm pretty sure the point was how he didn't tell Supes about the train deaths. Either way, it hardly negated his other actions, but yeah, it did seem kinda judgmental of them.
  • To be entirely fair to Lois and Clark, it's not like Manchester Black has given them much reason to trust him or his good intentions by this point. Okay, they're kind of leaping to the wrong conclusion on that one, but they still have plenty of reason to think the worst of him. It's sort of a Crying Wolf situation.
  • And heck, even in the most favourable interpretation of that event he still willingly caused the deaths of a large amount of people just to save one individual who he happened to care about, and didn't exactly show much remorse for having done so. It's not exactly something you'd throw a parade in his honor to celebrate. Even if Lois and Clark are mistaking exactly how malevolent and intentional Black's actions were, it's still pretty compelling evidence in their "Manchester Black doesn't give a shit about killing innocent people if he feels it's in his interests to do so" folder.

• So, at the end of the film, Supes informs Black that his team is having their powers removed prior to being sent to a prison. That's all well and good and it makes sense for Menagerie and Coldcast, but the Hat's powers are magical in nature. How do you remove the ability and talent's necessary to do powerful magic like that?
  • Heh... Well, Hat's powers mainly seem to come from his... well... hat, and a series of enchanted trinkets. Maybe Supes just confiscated those.
    • The better question is how the Christ Supes is supposed to have depowered Coldcast. Okay, radiotherapy Black's brain tumor thing, kill Menagerie's symbiotes, take away Hat's hat, but what does Coldcast have to target?
    • In the comics, instead of lobotomizing Black to depower him, they gave him ant-psionic drugs. Maybe they'd have something similar for Coldcast.

• Superman taking off his cape and covering Atomic Skull's body with it - instead of any of the bodies of the innocent people Atomic Skull just killed for fun on the ground literally feet away - is just completely indefensible, out-of-character and absurd. He's not against killing villains because he loves them or something, it's because he believes in having a fair legal system run by a civilized public instead of individuals using might to make right.
  • To be fair the victim's corpse didn't look like someone will piss on it. Atomic Skull might had been desecrated if Supe didn't stepped in.
  • Considering what Atomic Skull was, and that Supes seems to have a costume Made of Indestructium, there may have been a pragmatic reason for wrapping a radioactive corpse inside that cape until proper containment could be found.
  • I think Clark was probably bothered by the fact that Atomic Skull was just publicly executed to the sound of roaring applause. The people he killed would all be mourned by their families and loved ones, but no one was going to mourn a monster. It was less out of respect or affection for Atomic Skull and more to show that for all he did, he was still a person.
  • Also to reinforce Clark's belief that death, and particularly murder, is nothing to celebrate. Even if the person being murdered is themselves evil.

• What the hell did the Elite plan to do? I mean, even if they would have managed to kill Supes, did they really think that they could just take over the world and shape it as it fits to them? They were still DOZENS of Superheroes on Earth, some of them even more powerful than Clark (Martian Manhunter, Flash). Whatever they planned to do, it was doomed to fail.
  • First the plan at that particular step was clearly take down Superman and everybody else will fall in line. Which many of the heroes very well might have and worse many villains may very well have joined them. I can easily see Luthor approaching them. Sinestro would fit in rather well with their philosophy as well. Like a lot of comic villain plots however it's usually not best to think past whatever they were presently working on. Almost all plans have some what do you plan to do when the heroes/villains next door decide they don't love your plan hiccup in them.
  • Maybe they've been reading The Authority and think it'll work out the way it does in that comic. If the author's on your side and makes sure anyone who opposes you is secretly evil, things have a way of working out.
  • Also, if I recall correctly, the film seemed to imply that Manchester Black had some sort of personality disorder which made him narcissistic, slightly lacking in the empathy department, and a teeny bit megalomaniacal. I don't think he was an outright sociopath, but he at least had tendencies here and there. The rest of the Elite were little more than low-level thugs personality-wise. Such people usually have big ideas and a lot of grandiose plans, but rarely have either the stability or the foresight necessary to maintain those plans in the long-term.
  • Surely it's pretty simple (at least from their POV); Superman's the Big Guy, the world's strongest, most powerful hero. So if they can destroy Superman, they can destroy anyone.

• Do the Elite think they can whoop anyone who stands in their way? What if Darkseid or Brainiac shows up?
  • As the above example shows, The Elite is a group of petty criminals and Black is a narcissist. It's pretty obvious they were bound to fail.
  • They would probably be marginally better suited to deal with Darkseid or Brainiac than the normal DC world. Presumably if the Elite had won all super powered beings would be under their control and could be used in an organized offensive against any invaders. As bad ass as Darksied and Brainiac are they wouldn't last long against the combine might of the Justice League in a straight fight and the Elite would probably command whatever Justice League equivalent they set up and it would likely also have a fair amount of DC baddies in it as well. It's hard to imagine anything being a legit threat when Lex Luthor and Batman are on the same team.
    • Even if they kill Superman, I seriously doubt Wonder Woman, Green Lantern, Flash, and the others would bow before the Elite. They would rather die than surrender to them. If an "evil" Superman can defeat the Elite, imagine a pissed off Wonder Woman coming after them for killing her comrade/ex-lover/friend. Another problem is dealing with other super hero teams. How can 5 villains handle thousands of super heroes(some who also have telekinesis) coming at them at once?
    • Most of this is addressed in an earlier headscratcher, this one dealing with two specific intergalactic threats. Which while as stated they'd probably be marginally better suited to fight they probably hadn't really thought beyond the step they were at. Superman is often treated as the Lynch Pin, take him down and the rest of Earth or even the Universe will fall. DC doesn't really have a lot of Super Hero teams that could take one someone who defeated Superman and if they beat Superman they should be able to take Wonder Woman, and likely Green Lantern. This is also assuming it's just them and that no heroes come over to their side and no villains decide to help them either. An Elite lead Injustice League could fairly easily keep most of the world in check. Also Superman vs the Elite never gets as far as Death Note does on the subject but a world without crime or war is tempting. And the Elite would probably have been happy to fight natural disasters when they popped up. A lot of regular people would probably support them.
    • There's an old piece of wisdom about how you should never get complacent with yourself because there will always be someone stronger, smarter, more skilled, etc. Seems to be a good fit for this topic.

• Near the end of the movie, Black threatens to level Metropolis if Superman comes after him and Coldcast. So when Superman shows up, seemingly carries Coldcast into space, and shows making it obvious he's going to kill Black, why doesn't he follow through?
  • If you had freaking Superman in front of you, and he suddenly stopped being his boy-scout self? You really think you'd have a chance to even try?
  • Because he just saw Supe doing a sonic boom that partially levelled the street. As far as Black was concerned, Superman no longer cares if Black destroys Metropolis, so threatening to destroy it is an empty gesture. That's probably why Superman had the robots ready, so he can pretend he doesn't care if he blow up the street.
  • It was a bluff in the first place. If Superman was willing to attack then blowing up the city afterwards certainly wouldn't stop him, so there was no point in actually following through.

• So around the middle of the movie, The Elite are interrogating the other two terrorists who attacked the train. They refuse to talk, so they have Menagerie sic parasites on them to torture them. Why the hell would a metahuman team whose leader can read minds resort to torture? Even if they had no desire to show the terrorists mercy, surely doing that eye-bleedy Mind Rape thing that Superman stopped Black from completely doing to the other two terrorists would have been more effective?
  • They probably figured they'd get the answer either way, and this way was cooler. Black's just kind of an asshole.
  • It could be that Menagerie is a sadist and Black was indulging her. Good for team morale and all that, and it's not like he cares what happens to them.

• Coldcast's neutrino blast knocks out a city full of innocent people in a failed attempt to KO a few terrorists. We clearly see a number of cars crashing as a result, and there were likely far more we didn't see, along with people getting a great number of injuries and likely fatalities from people who were walking and their momentum when they were knocked out caused them to fall forward. Injuries likely led to more dead people since there was no way of calling emergency respondents since they would be out cold as well. Yet Superman doesn't bring this up? Why? It feels like the only reason it isn't is because if he brought up the Elite's blatant disregard for innocent people caught in the crossfire of their actions would destroy any leg the Elite's argument had to stand on right there.
  • Because they clearly don't care that much. Their whole modus operandi is "We do whatever's necessary to stop the bad guy." As far as they're concerned, innocent casualties are sometimes necessary to stop the bad guy. They're callous, reckless and trigger-happy, that's a pretty big part of the whole reason Superman has a problem with them.

• In the final battle, Superman pretends to have become Darker and Edgier and uses his robots to avert causalities. Fine. But at one point The Elite use their teleportation to move the entire fight to a populated city, and Superman has no way to predict this or to know which city they'd choose. That means that he has to be able to deploy his robots to prevent casualties near-instantly to any city in the world. If he can do that, why do any villain attacks cause casualties ever? Why doesn't he just have his robots do this in every single fight? The Elite are clearly not weak - they're capable of taking on serious opponents who have caused casualties in the past - so if Superman is able to use robots to toy with them this easily, without any risk of casualties (and was certain enough that he could to this that he was willing to take the risk of a fight just to prove a point), then... why do casualties ever occur in any fight anywhere?
  • Come now; Superman's no dummy. That move was neither wholly unforeseeable nor unexpected, nor was the city that the Elite chose completely random and unpredictable. If you seriously, genuinely think that Superman didn't at least suspect that the Elite (a) might try to move the fight to an inhabited city in order to use his hesitation to cause innocent casualties against him and (b) wouldn't choose Metropolis, the single city on Earth that Superman is most closely associated with, as the city to hold hostage, then I know of a lovely bridge property that's recently come on the market you might be interested in. While things might have gotten a bit dicier had the Elite randomly chosen, say, London or Addis Ababa or Hanoi (though in that case it's likely that Superman would simply drop the pretense if there was no other way), if there is one city on DC Earth that Superman would have been almost 100% certain the Elite would try to use as a card against him and that it might be worth stationing a few clean-up robots around just in case, it is Metropolis.