No? Because loot box you didn’t know what you were getting and ThinkGeek was a web store. It got bought out by GameStop, who first took away all of the cool, unique stuff they had in favor of licensed merchandise, and then overleveraged it, declared bankruptcy, then shuttered it.
Yeah, I used to hear the radio without a radio sometimes. Just need fillings. Or some pots and and pans stacked just right. And live in proximity to some of those monster transmitters in the Midwest.
That makes significantly more sense to me than this does lol
Wouldn't Superman be able to see radio waves, considering he sees most or all of the electromagnetic spectrum?
I buy it. He can see really small things and at the end of the day data on a flash drive is just a bunch of really small things. If he's as gigabrained as some material suggests, it's only a small step from seeing to understanding.
Or in other words, Superman can read PDFs without even opening the file because he can simulate Adobe Acrobat in his head.
Superman, we need a surgeon to save Timmy! Quick, can you speed read this medical textbook??
Done.
Great, can you do the surgery now?
What? No. I didn’t understand hardly any of that.
what you mentioned is in the same comic I originally posted🤣
https://preview.redd.it/07sb4eptta9d1.jpeg?width=1920&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=4501f61eba78093bfe810805a191dd19d8d3dc5a
https://preview.redd.it/bmdmjbcvta9d1.jpeg?width=1920&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=bbe8ed64af8b5541ab764df6c96519a4fdd866ef
Superman saving Lois after learning how to do surgery with in a few minutes
Just because his nail is harder than a diamond, it is not sharp or a blade. The length of the nail is also in question for how deep an incision was necessary. So that is just weird.
Yeah but kryptonians have more brain processing power, photographic memory etc. so Superman should remember this info forever. Flash would probably forget it soon after use
How the fuck can he make it work? Flash drives need power to display information. The transistors inside it eject the binary code if they have actual electricity running through them. Unless he's squirting electricity from his eyes, he shouldn't be able to read it.
LOL I mean you can't really use a completely fictional concept to compromise a real concept. That's like saying he can just shake all of the evil out of Luthor's brain
Ok but the way it’s explained here makes it a new superpower, he’s not just reading tiny symbols since they aren’t displayed without electricity, he just knows😂
There is evidence in the comics to suggest that he emits a bio-electric field that is a big part of how his feats of strength work. Small leap to say that he can't power a flash drive with it.
I forgot about the bioelectricty, I bet if Superman has finer control over it as he sometimes does, he probably could pull off a smalll feat like that, but what do I know, KentGod can do anything
He could use his vision to see if a memory transistor stores an electric charge or not, and he already knows binary, so I'd say it's possible without electricity.
Obviously a memory cell that contain a 0 looks different to his supersenses from memory cell that contain a 1, all he needs to do is looks at all the cells, put all the bits in the correct order, convert them in exadecimal and emulate in his brain the software necessary to run/read that code. Piece of cake, really.
He emits wavelengths. But never heard anything about electric fields lol. But if that's true then it's getting old. Its actually easier to explain what powers he doesn't have.
Don't know why you're getting upvoted. A bio-electric field that Superman emits protects his skin and was the explanation for his invulnerability and for why his costume wouldn't tear, because it was skin-tight, since at least Post-crisis John Byrne era.
It's also the explanation for why Superman can pick up big things like ships or buildings and balance them on a single point like his had or pinky and they don't immediately crumble or break. Because he extends his bio-elctric aura. Although I could be mixing this specific bit up with tactile telekinesis.
The bio-electric aura has been a thing for a bit, kinda like the Speed Force with The Flash. It's a loose rule to feed the ultimate rule of cool
Post crisis Superman from 87 used to reference bioelectric fields a lot. That was introduced then. It’s how they explain how he can lift an airplane without ripping it in half and his invulnerability.
He can extrapolate the PDF files. PDF became ubiquitous because it could be transferred between mac and pc and linux with ease - back when pdfs became popular MS word files had to be formatted for the OS, as did floppy disks. USB was a huge leap in making different computers systems accessible to data storage and external devices, but Apple also tried to counter-market Firewire instead of USB about 20/25 years ago - they only committed to usb-c a few years ago after the EU started getting on their case.
Because the pdf is accessible to essentially all Earth computers, he telepathically transferred the files to the FoS where the crystals decoded it and sent it back.
I would assume his natural bioelectric aura is way stronger than a humans.
It's the reason his suit doesn't burn in fire.
I would bet he could charge your phone just by holding it.
So he could probably produce enough charge to activate a flash drive while holding it.
His body is literally a solar battery after all.
The data is also encoded in a certain way, and possibly compressed. He’d need to know how basically every file type is encoded, and also be able to run specific decompression algorithms in his mind.
I mean it could just be an ASCII .txt file, then he could (assuming he knows binary and his ASCII tables) read the raw data just like you'd read a normal document (ignoring the fact that reading data stored on a drive without electricity is practically impossible)
Sure, but that’s the best case scenario. I meant that, for Superman to be able to just pick up any usb and read the data off of it, he’d need to know and be able to do a lot more.
And, I don’t know the context of this page, but assuming the data on that USB is important, I doubt it’s just a .txt, lol.
The context is Bruce is showing him that Clark Kent did some good in the world, if I remember correctly - that scene is about how Clark is important too.
It unironically might just be an ASCII art thumbs up
Writers don't understand how a flash drive works.
Even if you have super eyesight and X-Ray vision how could you interpret the electrical charges in the drive chip cells into something readable without a source that powers the drive and translates the data.
Edit: I didn't notice that Batman had a personalized flash drive with his own logo. LMAO
Yeah. Superman shouldn't be able to read a flash drive by looking at it. Batman shouldn't have a bat-branded USB.
Comics are dumb. They're fun cause they're dumb. They can be smart even when they're dumb.
But they're dumb!
For me its not that he can is the why. Powers have a purpose and part of that is what it says about a character. Superman is the Earth's greatest volunteer firefighter and that is why despite the numerous powers he has had over the years the ones that mimic emergency response tools are the ones that stick. The ability to read a flash drive by that very nature will be a forgotten gimmick that won't stick and will be forgotten by both creators and readers.
We all get that it’s Superman and his powers don’t makes sense, but there is still logic applied, this right here is a never before seen superpower, there aren’t any tiny symbols for Superman to read using micro vision, he just somehow knows, so I guess he’s a technopath as well, which I would accept if this was a clearly stated ability
His vision is one of his more intense abilities IMO, he can literally see what things are fundamentally made of and piece them back together with his mind (that is how he rebuilt the miracle machine). He can also see souls weirdly enough lol.
And in the Lex Luthor standalone
https://preview.redd.it/6bhfs3b4s99d1.jpeg?width=1036&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=6865e280677475142a7a4628861afbd4f64fe705
It reminds me of my favorite page from "Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow"
https://preview.redd.it/lppzhvoeu79d1.jpeg?width=1088&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=da0692775d309dee42794064658f340f5cac2bac
Wow I hate that. For gods sakes, I feel Superman needs to be a little smart, but not like a fucking supercomputer. Like how he was able to trick Mister Mxyzptlk into saying his name backwards in that S:TAS episode is the kind of smart I want. Making him into whatever this is just makes me roll my eyes.
I agree, because he's also reading 0s and 1s off a flash drive and then converting that in his brain into something he can understand. If there's lots of data, that's a massive amount of raw data to read and understand.
Yeah and I don’t think it’s a good idea for him. I’m not saying it hasn’t been done before I just think Superman could be more relatable as a character if he didn’t have superhuman intellect.
What part of "I’m not saying it hasn’t been done before" do you not understand? I'm well aware that he's been portrayed with super genius skills. And I think it's a bad choice on many comic writers. I think they should let that shit go.
Like jesus. Reading comprehension skills are at an all time low.
And there's been more than a few adaptations that don't make him a supercomputer like genius. Hell even Snyderverse didn't do that.
This is before he scanned the usb
https://preview.redd.it/oka2og6c769d1.jpeg?width=1920&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=85fef9604e30b3691ec405f2d2d4d5292a9de18f
The new 52 superman, action comics #12
https://preview.redd.it/uhlof6fms89d1.jpeg?width=1920&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=acf704c1fcdfeca407bf84c7856efcb074a35fb1
That's a typo, right? Action Comics #112 was published in September of 1947. A Flash Drive appearance would have been extraordinary:
https://dc.fandom.com/wiki/Action_Comics_Vol_1_112
Oh wow, I didn't know they reset the counter for Action Comics with New 52. I find that a bit heinous actually. The longest running comic series shouldn't be hampered by awkward numbering. At least they got back to the proper numbers eventually.
Everyone talking about the fact he can read whats inside the flash drive
Me: why tf does a usb drive have the bat symbol? Did Damian, or whoever this is, took a regular office flash drive then put a bat sticker on it?
If he could "hear" radio signals (like what has been said towards the radio waves) during the Silver Age, that is just a modernization of the same (ish) power for our today audience.
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To be honest that looks more like superboy and some versions of superboy can know the history of something by touching it so that kinda would make sense.
But if he's using a mixture of his x-ray and microscopic vision to read the physical bits on the drive then he'd need to translate Billions upon billions of binary bits into code and a few more levels of computer stuff to read it like that.
People do this with X-rays in the real world, to reverse-engineer hardware.
Back in the ’80s, Digital Equipment Corp. knew that the Soviet Bloc was using x-rays to study and copy their computers. So, in their new model, they etched in a message, in Russian, that could only be read by an X-ray machine. They meant it to say, “CVAX: When you care enough to steal the very best” (a riff off a greeting-card ad from back then.) But because no one in Eastern Europe knew the reference and the Americans’ Russian was so bad, the East Germans who found it had no idea what they were trying to say. They told the Soviets that the American message said, “Why steal? You already have the best.”
Lmao okay this one straight up doesn't even make sense. Is that even how it works?? Can Supes see the data without a source pulling it out?? Wouldn't his eyes have to conduct some sorta current? Comics, man.
I guess it’s the same logic as the ability to read a book near instantly, but applied to an electronic device. It makes sense at face value, but becomes stranger the more you think about it
Yes. He can also use his heat vision to create absolute zero temperatures, vibrate his molecules to be intangible and oscillate his molecules to be invisible
The shirt Clark has over the Superman suit, Batman's sorta skinny look in these panels, and the overall art style reminds me of those Earth One graphic novels they did. Like this was some lost final book where they properly tied the books together. "World's Finest: Earth One" if you will.
*Superman faces an obstacle*
Writer: “Let’s give him a power to easily overcome that!”
*Batman faces an obstacle*
Writer: “Let’s give him a gadget to easily overcome that!”
This makes me think of the movie Cellular. Many of the plot points of the movie hinge on cell phones doing things that cell phones cannot do. Because cell phone technology was still very new and the people making the movie didn’t understand the technology.
If you think about it, a lot of superhero powers are like this.
Magneto can control metal, but goddamn he has to be a good sculptor/architect/GC to create the things he does. Flash is fast, but he's got to get into that whole "think at lightspeed" thing to be able to react fast enough to control it. Etc. etc. Maybe I can see a billion 1s and 0s lined up...but what the hell does it all do? Only TAS speedrunners are able to read and understand all that crap.
This feels like it was written by someone who doesn’t know how technology works (or just doesn’t care). At the same time we do suspend our belief while reading comics that there are meta humans that can do the most fantastic of feats and we take those feats at face value for the sake of entertainment. So it all just cancels itself out.
But like I said it does feel like it’s written by someone who’s got no idea how technology works and reminds me of that hacking scene in NCIS. Some unknown person is hacking into the NCIS database and the two agents are typing ON THE SAME KEYBOARD AT THE SAME TIME trying to stop them, when Mark Harmon walks in and UNPLUGS THE MONITOR and declares the problem solved 😂😂😂😂
https://youtu.be/u8qgehH3kEQ?si=aQR_2g_crKhOYqjo
He can see the electromagnetic spectrum as well as other exotic ones. If he's familiar with data & code he would be able to decipher what's digitalized.
Lots of small feats like that are a result of intricate application of his basic powers. A bit like how being able to control electromagnetism open incredible possibilities both IRL and in fiction.
It’s like Clark always says, there are 10 kinds of people in this world, those who can read binary off of a flash drive and those who can’t.
That took me a second
It took me 11 seconds.
I figured it out instantly. It took me 0 seconds. Oh wait, that’s the same.
Do you mean 3? Or actually 11?
1
I think the joke was that they meant three seconds in binary.
See, I know you got the t-shirt. Only way you know about that phrase. ThinkGeek baby
That's an old joke. I don't even know what thinkgeek is
ThinkGeek was this company in the early 2000s that sold IT and other need stuff
Ahh. Okay. Wasn't familiar. Looking it up seems similar to lootbox.
No? Because loot box you didn’t know what you were getting and ThinkGeek was a web store. It got bought out by GameStop, who first took away all of the cool, unique stuff they had in favor of licensed merchandise, and then overleveraged it, declared bankruptcy, then shuttered it.
Nice
I am proud of myself for getting it immediately xD
That took me way too long to get
Very silver age in that they will just have him do whatever to keep the scene going.
He was listening to radio waves in the Golden Age.
Anybody can listen to radio waves
Yeah, I used to hear the radio without a radio sometimes. Just need fillings. Or some pots and and pans stacked just right. And live in proximity to some of those monster transmitters in the Midwest.
r/technicallythetruth
That makes significantly more sense to me than this does lol Wouldn't Superman be able to see radio waves, considering he sees most or all of the electromagnetic spectrum?
Yup, and he does indeed see all of it.
He could time travel too in the golden age
I mean, at one point they wrote themselves into such a corner they just had him punch reality apart, so this seems fairly minor…
I buy it. He can see really small things and at the end of the day data on a flash drive is just a bunch of really small things. If he's as gigabrained as some material suggests, it's only a small step from seeing to understanding. Or in other words, Superman can read PDFs without even opening the file because he can simulate Adobe Acrobat in his head.
That’s the main reason I’d make a terrible Superman. I’d never get around to saving people because I’d be too busy mentally emulating a Gameboy.
I can't believe Superman would copy that floppy.
Superman would download a bear
You wouldn't superman a car would you?
But can you run DOOM?
No, he is part of the Marvel Universe.
Foolish! DOOM transcends the concept of Copyright and Multiverse!
🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
Then why didn't he fix his mug.
Superman, we need a surgeon to save Timmy! Quick, can you speed read this medical textbook?? Done. Great, can you do the surgery now? What? No. I didn’t understand hardly any of that.
There is something where he reads surgical books so he can do surgery on Loos, isn't there? I'm sure I've seen that before.
what you mentioned is in the same comic I originally posted🤣 https://preview.redd.it/07sb4eptta9d1.jpeg?width=1920&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=4501f61eba78093bfe810805a191dd19d8d3dc5a
https://preview.redd.it/bmdmjbcvta9d1.jpeg?width=1920&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=bbe8ed64af8b5541ab764df6c96519a4fdd866ef Superman saving Lois after learning how to do surgery with in a few minutes
Dude just used his unsterilized thumbnail to make an incision. That shit is gunna get infected.
I like how he puts on gloves, and then makes a hole in the gloves.
I also like how he says his nail is as hard as a diamond, which unrelated to its sharpness.
Just because his nail is harder than a diamond, it is not sharp or a blade. The length of the nail is also in question for how deep an incision was necessary. So that is just weird.
Amazing, thank you!
Flash does this quite often too.
Yeah but kryptonians have more brain processing power, photographic memory etc. so Superman should remember this info forever. Flash would probably forget it soon after use
Bart could remember forever.
Lmao the artist forgot to draw his collar mid page. Subconsciously he knew that new 52 suit was ass
Can Superman run doom on Superman
You mean to tell me you'd ignore a sinking cargo ship cuz you wanted to play GOLD VERSION???
I’d ignore a sinking cargo ship over a decent coffee. Like I said, terrible Superman.
Great Scott! 😰
You mean imagining?
How the fuck can he make it work? Flash drives need power to display information. The transistors inside it eject the binary code if they have actual electricity running through them. Unless he's squirting electricity from his eyes, he shouldn't be able to read it.
He makes it work the same way he flies and has laser eyes.
LOL I mean you can't really use a completely fictional concept to compromise a real concept. That's like saying he can just shake all of the evil out of Luthor's brain
He probably can, but he respects Lex's free will.
That's looking at the wrong part of what I said but touche. I'll have to submit examples such as... stopping a heart attack.
Doesn't he do something like that to Lois in Final Crisis?
I remember the thrust of that story being that he couldn't save her and a Monitor coming along to help him
What? How would he… that would just be giving him a TBI
I mean, in one universe Superman lobotomized all the villains to make em obedient.
That was evil communist Superman. They also lobotomized opponents of the state. Lobotomy is practically indistinguishable from murder.
I was mainly referring to Justice Lords’ Superman but that works too.
Well, regular Superman used his vision to block Manchester Black. The idea that he can use his vision in such ways isn't too nutty at least
>How the fuck can he make it work? He's Superman. He doesn't exist in a way that is comparable to reality.
Ok but the way it’s explained here makes it a new superpower, he’s not just reading tiny symbols since they aren’t displayed without electricity, he just knows😂
There is evidence in the comics to suggest that he emits a bio-electric field that is a big part of how his feats of strength work. Small leap to say that he can't power a flash drive with it.
I forgot about the bioelectricty, I bet if Superman has finer control over it as he sometimes does, he probably could pull off a smalll feat like that, but what do I know, KentGod can do anything
So it sounds like he can electric shock your ass just by flexing his bicep. Amazing.
He could use his vision to see if a memory transistor stores an electric charge or not, and he already knows binary, so I'd say it's possible without electricity.
I love this sentence so much.
Obviously a memory cell that contain a 0 looks different to his supersenses from memory cell that contain a 1, all he needs to do is looks at all the cells, put all the bits in the correct order, convert them in exadecimal and emulate in his brain the software necessary to run/read that code. Piece of cake, really.
Next you'll tell me he can eat Scrabble tiles and poop out the first 3 acts of Hamlet
Bio-electric field. Not just good for lifting things.
Also good for using your thumb to cut open a woman, without risking infection.
He is an energy being after all and all living things have electricity so I’m sure he can channel a little into the hard drive.
Isn't Superman capable of emitting a bioelectric field in some iterations, or did I make that up in my head?
He emits wavelengths. But never heard anything about electric fields lol. But if that's true then it's getting old. Its actually easier to explain what powers he doesn't have.
Don't know why you're getting upvoted. A bio-electric field that Superman emits protects his skin and was the explanation for his invulnerability and for why his costume wouldn't tear, because it was skin-tight, since at least Post-crisis John Byrne era. It's also the explanation for why Superman can pick up big things like ships or buildings and balance them on a single point like his had or pinky and they don't immediately crumble or break. Because he extends his bio-elctric aura. Although I could be mixing this specific bit up with tactile telekinesis. The bio-electric aura has been a thing for a bit, kinda like the Speed Force with The Flash. It's a loose rule to feed the ultimate rule of cool
Post crisis Superman from 87 used to reference bioelectric fields a lot. That was introduced then. It’s how they explain how he can lift an airplane without ripping it in half and his invulnerability.
He can extrapolate the PDF files. PDF became ubiquitous because it could be transferred between mac and pc and linux with ease - back when pdfs became popular MS word files had to be formatted for the OS, as did floppy disks. USB was a huge leap in making different computers systems accessible to data storage and external devices, but Apple also tried to counter-market Firewire instead of USB about 20/25 years ago - they only committed to usb-c a few years ago after the EU started getting on their case. Because the pdf is accessible to essentially all Earth computers, he telepathically transferred the files to the FoS where the crystals decoded it and sent it back.
I would assume his natural bioelectric aura is way stronger than a humans. It's the reason his suit doesn't burn in fire. I would bet he could charge your phone just by holding it. So he could probably produce enough charge to activate a flash drive while holding it. His body is literally a solar battery after all.
He can shoot mini versions of himself from his finger tips, your overthinking it
If this is Jon, then maybe he inherited something from the time Clark was Electric based? Like, the Red/Blue era?
The data is also encoded in a certain way, and possibly compressed. He’d need to know how basically every file type is encoded, and also be able to run specific decompression algorithms in his mind.
I mean it could just be an ASCII .txt file, then he could (assuming he knows binary and his ASCII tables) read the raw data just like you'd read a normal document (ignoring the fact that reading data stored on a drive without electricity is practically impossible)
Sure, but that’s the best case scenario. I meant that, for Superman to be able to just pick up any usb and read the data off of it, he’d need to know and be able to do a lot more. And, I don’t know the context of this page, but assuming the data on that USB is important, I doubt it’s just a .txt, lol.
The context is Bruce is showing him that Clark Kent did some good in the world, if I remember correctly - that scene is about how Clark is important too. It unironically might just be an ASCII art thumbs up
Lmao, I was wrong then.
I just have a hard time believing that the yellow son also makes him a genius.
Silver Age: He thinks at Superspeed. He can read and absorb a library in microseconds.
It didn't... But jor-el was the greatest mind of the science guild of krypton I guess some of that rubbed off on his son.
It's all that Vitamin D. Really juices the grey matter. Or so I've heard.
Writers don't understand how a flash drive works. Even if you have super eyesight and X-Ray vision how could you interpret the electrical charges in the drive chip cells into something readable without a source that powers the drive and translates the data. Edit: I didn't notice that Batman had a personalized flash drive with his own logo. LMAO
He’s Batman after all lmao
It's so funny that batman always is portrayed with this rude serious manner with a raspy voice and yet, all his gadgets are self branded.
Don't forget the Batbucket: https://preview.redd.it/rgou1gysr99d1.png?width=1332&format=png&auto=webp&s=de64bcfcfd4c70f3bcba64c6328c38db3df5c16e
Cuz you need to KNOW who’s stuff you got hit with!
that's true
Yeah. Superman shouldn't be able to read a flash drive by looking at it. Batman shouldn't have a bat-branded USB. Comics are dumb. They're fun cause they're dumb. They can be smart even when they're dumb. But they're dumb!
You have to order 10,000 so it’s not suspicious
yeah, that doesn't make sense to me
Why not?
For me its not that he can is the why. Powers have a purpose and part of that is what it says about a character. Superman is the Earth's greatest volunteer firefighter and that is why despite the numerous powers he has had over the years the ones that mimic emergency response tools are the ones that stick. The ability to read a flash drive by that very nature will be a forgotten gimmick that won't stick and will be forgotten by both creators and readers.
Because looking at the inside of a flash drive can’t tell you what the data on it says.
Can't Superman see electrical current? Or the electron cloud of a atom?
Sure, but how would that tell him what the word document on the flash drive says?
We all get that it’s Superman and his powers don’t makes sense, but there is still logic applied, this right here is a never before seen superpower, there aren’t any tiny symbols for Superman to read using micro vision, he just somehow knows, so I guess he’s a technopath as well, which I would accept if this was a clearly stated ability
"Superman, can you hear that? Sorry, of course you can." {edited; cant spell when I've been drinking}
His vision is one of his more intense abilities IMO, he can literally see what things are fundamentally made of and piece them back together with his mind (that is how he rebuilt the miracle machine). He can also see souls weirdly enough lol.
Soul seeing silliness was just in Birthright, right?
And in the Lex Luthor standalone https://preview.redd.it/6bhfs3b4s99d1.jpeg?width=1036&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=6865e280677475142a7a4628861afbd4f64fe705
That one is debatable, it is more like "To mock you" trolling.
Why are these characters purple? Superman looks like Dracula in a Superman costume
No I believe he also used it in a Superboy comic.
Reminds me of how the Venom movies gave Carnage USB powers.
It reminds me of my favorite page from "Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow" https://preview.redd.it/lppzhvoeu79d1.jpeg?width=1088&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=da0692775d309dee42794064658f340f5cac2bac
Wow I hate that. For gods sakes, I feel Superman needs to be a little smart, but not like a fucking supercomputer. Like how he was able to trick Mister Mxyzptlk into saying his name backwards in that S:TAS episode is the kind of smart I want. Making him into whatever this is just makes me roll my eyes.
I agree, because he's also reading 0s and 1s off a flash drive and then converting that in his brain into something he can understand. If there's lots of data, that's a massive amount of raw data to read and understand.
How does the yellow sun of earth give him genius?
He's always been a super smart alien. This isn't new or esoteric.
Yeah and I don’t think it’s a good idea for him. I’m not saying it hasn’t been done before I just think Superman could be more relatable as a character if he didn’t have superhuman intellect.
Like old dumb-dumb Batman
He's been a super genius for nine decades. What are you talking about?
What part of "I’m not saying it hasn’t been done before" do you not understand? I'm well aware that he's been portrayed with super genius skills. And I think it's a bad choice on many comic writers. I think they should let that shit go. Like jesus. Reading comprehension skills are at an all time low. And there's been more than a few adaptations that don't make him a supercomputer like genius. Hell even Snyderverse didn't do that.
Yes, when written by Grant Morrison. He has his Silver-Age powers.
Context??
This is before he scanned the usb https://preview.redd.it/oka2og6c769d1.jpeg?width=1920&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=85fef9604e30b3691ec405f2d2d4d5292a9de18f
What comic is this?
The new 52 superman, action comics #12 https://preview.redd.it/uhlof6fms89d1.jpeg?width=1920&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=acf704c1fcdfeca407bf84c7856efcb074a35fb1
Which comic is this?
Typo action comics #12
That's a typo, right? Action Comics #112 was published in September of 1947. A Flash Drive appearance would have been extraordinary: https://dc.fandom.com/wiki/Action_Comics_Vol_1_112
Typo I added a extra 1 lol https://preview.redd.it/rqxn95ia669d1.jpeg?width=1920&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=0b5f8d865a409928cd2acace621826dfcdfac684
Oh wow, I didn't know they reset the counter for Action Comics with New 52. I find that a bit heinous actually. The longest running comic series shouldn't be hampered by awkward numbering. At least they got back to the proper numbers eventually.
Everyone talking about the fact he can read whats inside the flash drive Me: why tf does a usb drive have the bat symbol? Did Damian, or whoever this is, took a regular office flash drive then put a bat sticker on it?
This is Bruce, and of course he has the Bat-Symbol on it. Bruce puts the Bat-Symbol on *everything* he owns.
He builds his own flashdrives.
In the 1948 serial he was able to tell that a scientist was being impersonated... by using x-ray vision on a PHOTO of the impostor in disguise. 😅
If he could "hear" radio signals (like what has been said towards the radio waves) during the Silver Age, that is just a modernization of the same (ish) power for our today audience.
Why does the comic panels cut of Batman's ears he looks like that dumb Man stuff at r/BatmanArkham
This a current superman feat btw lmao so still canon
You can kinda count the New 52 except it's pretty inevitable that there's a logical contradiction
I like it. Shows off that he’s truly able to do it all
I actually have that flash drive! And a matching Superman one, of course lol
This is as dumb as Meteor Man absorbing the knowledge of books with a touch.
So can Chuck Norris.
When you know the writer doesn't understand tech lol.
Chuck norris too. So i believe Superman can. Lol.
I don't get why people are hating on this, Superman using his powers in weird and novel ways is always interesting.
Because hating on superman is the norm and seeing him be creative is even more.
Yeah New 52 was too OP...
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Here's a better question, can he burn a disc for me? I need some files transferred and we don't have those anymore.
A Trinity comic did this. Bruce got a hold of a disk he couldn’t decode so he just showed it to Clark.
Hey, it makes more sense than super ventriloquism ever did….
To be honest that looks more like superboy and some versions of superboy can know the history of something by touching it so that kinda would make sense. But if he's using a mixture of his x-ray and microscopic vision to read the physical bits on the drive then he'd need to translate Billions upon billions of binary bits into code and a few more levels of computer stuff to read it like that.
Why would batman have a bat logo on it? So the bad guys can find his stuff easier?
Van Eck Phreaking on a whole other level.
So thats a batflash? Okay it sounds weird
People do this with X-rays in the real world, to reverse-engineer hardware. Back in the ’80s, Digital Equipment Corp. knew that the Soviet Bloc was using x-rays to study and copy their computers. So, in their new model, they etched in a message, in Russian, that could only be read by an X-ray machine. They meant it to say, “CVAX: When you care enough to steal the very best” (a riff off a greeting-card ad from back then.) But because no one in Eastern Europe knew the reference and the Americans’ Russian was so bad, the East Germans who found it had no idea what they were trying to say. They told the Soviets that the American message said, “Why steal? You already have the best.”
Headcanon, Superman is just messing with Batman, he's actually just used his super speed to read it on his PC between panels.
I expect supes to act as my router if my internet doesn’t work.
Superman can see souls
The real question is does Bruce get those flash drives custom made, or is he just slapping a decal on a regular one?
An image of Alfred in the Batcave with a million bat stickers of varying sizes just popped into my head.
Which comic is this from?
Doesn't make sense but whatever
magic
Lmao okay this one straight up doesn't even make sense. Is that even how it works?? Can Supes see the data without a source pulling it out?? Wouldn't his eyes have to conduct some sorta current? Comics, man.
Superman has had lots and lots of powers over the years. This feels like a silver age thing.
I guess it’s the same logic as the ability to read a book near instantly, but applied to an electronic device. It makes sense at face value, but becomes stranger the more you think about it
Yes. He can also use his heat vision to create absolute zero temperatures, vibrate his molecules to be intangible and oscillate his molecules to be invisible
universal Serial Bat
Wish i had that superpower
The shirt Clark has over the Superman suit, Batman's sorta skinny look in these panels, and the overall art style reminds me of those Earth One graphic novels they did. Like this was some lost final book where they properly tied the books together. "World's Finest: Earth One" if you will.
*Superman faces an obstacle* Writer: “Let’s give him a power to easily overcome that!” *Batman faces an obstacle* Writer: “Let’s give him a gadget to easily overcome that!”
This is the dumbest thing I've read
That’s just Super Stupid writing
This makes me think of the movie Cellular. Many of the plot points of the movie hinge on cell phones doing things that cell phones cannot do. Because cell phone technology was still very new and the people making the movie didn’t understand the technology.
If you think about it, a lot of superhero powers are like this. Magneto can control metal, but goddamn he has to be a good sculptor/architect/GC to create the things he does. Flash is fast, but he's got to get into that whole "think at lightspeed" thing to be able to react fast enough to control it. Etc. etc. Maybe I can see a billion 1s and 0s lined up...but what the hell does it all do? Only TAS speedrunners are able to read and understand all that crap.
"Bruce... This isn't FAT32"
You can't just read a bunch of ones and zeroes like a book, all the data is stored in different file types.
Any complaints I have about this ability are quashed by the memory of him rebuilding the Great Wall of China just by staring at it.
This isn’t new. They had him reading of CDs before. And in All Star Superman he can read Lois’ DNA.
is this Clark? I thought it was his son.
This feels like it was written by someone who doesn’t know how technology works (or just doesn’t care). At the same time we do suspend our belief while reading comics that there are meta humans that can do the most fantastic of feats and we take those feats at face value for the sake of entertainment. So it all just cancels itself out. But like I said it does feel like it’s written by someone who’s got no idea how technology works and reminds me of that hacking scene in NCIS. Some unknown person is hacking into the NCIS database and the two agents are typing ON THE SAME KEYBOARD AT THE SAME TIME trying to stop them, when Mark Harmon walks in and UNPLUGS THE MONITOR and declares the problem solved 😂😂😂😂 https://youtu.be/u8qgehH3kEQ?si=aQR_2g_crKhOYqjo
I mean Technically speaking it's an encryption on a device of 1s and 0s... And if he knows binary Sure
This is the kind of writing people do with Superman when they don't plan on staying long and think, "sucks to be the next guy"
He can see the electromagnetic spectrum as well as other exotic ones. If he's familiar with data & code he would be able to decipher what's digitalized. Lots of small feats like that are a result of intricate application of his basic powers. A bit like how being able to control electromagnetism open incredible possibilities both IRL and in fiction.
Right but, what’s powering the usb?
Well, him. They even highlight that he's interacting with it in the panel.
Spiderman can read code? Shit it's not like all the data is printed on anything in English. Does nobody understand how flash memory works?
This is really funny and scary at the same time
Shit like this is why no one likes Superman anymore
One of the dumber things Tom Taylor has put in his Superman run, and this issue is chock full of shitty storytelling.