Pre-Crisis Superman Overview

[Endless Mike]

Action Comics #77

Notes:

- The opening narration says that Superman moves earth and ocean literally in this issue. SPOILER: He doesn't. Still some nice feats.
- I'm not sure if it's official, but it sort of seems like he can fly in this comic. Although he clearly seems to be leaping in many panels.

Feat Catalogue:

- Travels to an apartment in Metropolis (unknown distance) in seconds
- "Streaks at blinding speed" to a steel plant in the Midwest (unknown timeframe)
- Picks up a huge steel plant (and the rock under it) and carries it to the mountains to hide it, without damaging it or hurting anyone inside. It's described as "an acre of land and buildings containing thousands of tons of machinery", and he says he could do it faster but he doesn't want to risk spilling any molten metal or injuring anyone
- Travels from the Midwest far out over the Atlantic, again seemingly in a short time
- Swims at super speed around an ocean liner, creating a whirlpool that almost capsizes it
- Swims, pulling a bunch of lifeboats full of all of the passengers on the ocean liner, to shore in under 12 minutes, when the liner itself would have taken 12 hours to reach the shore
- Off-panel, moves the steel mill back to its original position. No explanation for how he dealt with the power lines and plumbing that would have had doubtless been severed when he moved it, though.

Spoiler: This is fairly impressive

Weirdness:

- The Prankster's scheme in this issue is to print up counterfeit newspapers in order to trick people out of their money. In other words, he was making use of Fake News 70+ years before the term caught on.

Superdickery:

- Messes with a steel plant and an ocean liner when there had to be an easier way to trick the Prankster

Power Tracker:

- We're back to High Meta Level, with feats to match.

Action Comics #78

Notes:

Feat Catalogue:

- Pushes a car down the streets, navigating it to the police station, against the attempts of the drivers to control it
- Paints a mural at super speed
- Cooks food for 30 people at super speed, including cooking two steaks with heat from friction by swinging them around in the air
- Moves faster than the eye can see, in a room full of people, to physically spin the blades of a fan much faster than they could normally spin (enough to cause a huge wind to blow through the room), and returns to his original position before anyone notices anything
- Does the same to multiple fans on opposite sides of the room at once

Weirdness:

- A supporting character, meant to be an Eastern European chef, has a rather stereotypical accent, which is kind of cringy
- Unintentionally hilarious dialogue: "Sergei's queer, but he wouldn't leave a hunk of meat around like this!"

Superdickery:

Power Tracker:

- High Meta Level, again.

Action Comics #79

Notes:

- The villain of this issue, the conman J. Wilbur Wolfingham, first appeared in Superman #26, which I might cover eventually.

Feat Catalogue:

- Digs underground through some hills and uses his X-ray vision to scan a large area in order to determine that there's no gold there (he says there isn't an ounce of gold within 10 miles)
- Creates a whirlwind strong enough to divert a large thunderstorm, and the narration even says he alters the wind directions of an entire section of the country
- Intercepts a bolt of lightning before it hits a building (the narration actually says he moves FTL here... not sure about that, but it's certainly at least a lightning timing feat)
- Races from the western US to Metropolis "like a human meteor" (these analogies seem to keep forgetting the fact that he's not human...)
- Carries a train with no locomotive down the tracks at super speed, overtaking another train moving at 90 mph, and passes it by jumping over it, taking the rest of the train with him
- When he used his X-ray vision to scan the ground earlier, he also found rich silver deposits

Spoiler: This is probably one of the most impressive pages I've covered so far

Weirdness:

Superdickery:

Power Tracker:

- We've had lightspeed claims before, but I believe this is our first FTL claim. I don't buy it, but it's more credible than any of the previous ones, as we do see him lightning timing as a result. So for now, he's still High Meta Level.

Action Comics #80

Notes:

- This is the first time in this title (Action Comics) where Superman faces a foe who is unequivocally more powerful than he is
- This isn't actually Mr. Mxyzptlk's first appearance. He previously appeared in Superman #30, and is returning now due to popular reader demand. So I think this is his second appearance, as I can't find any appearances between that comic and this one.
- Back then, his name was actually spelled Mr. Mxyztplk, before it was changed to its current form
- As would be expected from this Golden Age comic, Mxy appears in his Golden Age design. He would later get a major redesign during the Silver Age. However, when the character was included in Superman: The Animated Series in the 90s, they decided to use the Golden Age design (or at least a very similar one) for some reason, possibly because it was easier to animate. That was also my very first introduction to the character, so I have always had a fondness for that design (also it doesn't hurt that he was voiced by the brilliant Gilbert Gottfried - R.I.P.)
- As shown by Galan007 on KMC (https://www.killermovies.com/forums/f98/t677702.html), Mxy's nature as a higher dimensional being who transcends the multiverse, and his fourth-wall breaking properties, have led to the retcon that every version of him that has appeared is actually the exact same character, much like the Multiversal Singularities that used to be a thing in the Transformers franchise. Although I'm unsure about the Smallville version, as he was just a human with mind control powers. I'll have to ask Galan about that.

Feat Catalogue:

- Stops a runaway train and fixes the broken train track
- Jumps into a huge wave caused by an overflowing river, creating a vacuum that reverses the flow of the water, sending thousands of tons of water back to the riverbed

Feat Catalogue (non-Superman):

- Mxy causes the following things to happen:
* Clark's alarm clock says it's 7 AM, and he arrives at work at what he thinks is 8, but it's actually 11. Could be time manipulation, or just messing with his clock.
* Alters the story Clark wrote in the paper to make it nonsensical
* Replaces his hat with Lois' hat
* Causes him to take Lois to a pet store instead of a restaurant
* Makes him spill his coffee (he claims someone pushed his arm, but the force that did it was invisible)
* Makes the table he and Clark are sitting at appear on the ceiling, inverting gravity (and turning the comic panel itself upside-down)
* Disappears when Superman tries to grab him
* Makes Lois' typewriter talk
* Causes Lois' chair to fling her off it, and a trash can to fly onto her head
* Causes a wind to blow through the Daily Planet offices, spreading papers everywhere
* The narration says he moves with the speed of a bullet
* Alters the events of a movie being broadcast in a theater, talking to the movie characters and making them obey him
* Brings the movie characters to life, causing them to walk out of the screen
* Breaks a train track
* Reverses the flow of the Metropolis river, causing it to flood the city
* Causes another newspaper to print a poem supposedly by Clark, insulting Lois and Perry White
- Mxy also threatens to 'turn the whole world upside-down'. What exactly he means by this, we don't find out.

Spoiler: Unfortunately, the comic reader program I'm using doesn't have an invert option

Weirdness:

- Clark invites Lois to see a movie with him. The name of this movie is "Rogue's March". It turns out there was an actual movie with that name, but it was released in 1953, 8 years after this comic was published. Either it's a coincidence, or it was based on some earlier work that existed in 1945.

Superdickery:

Power Tracker:

- Not much has changed, still High Meta Level.

 

[Endless Mike]

Action Comics #81

Notes:

- It's apparently public knowledge that Clark Kent has a way to get in touch with Superman.

Feat Catalogue:

- Superman builds an amusement park at super speed in under a day, including creating an artificial island to place it on
- Sees a cable car on a sky ride starting to fall, and rushes off behind a stand and changes to Superman faster than anyone can see, then catches it before it hits the ground
- Takes care of multiple sabotage incidents around the entire amusement part simultaneously at super speed. This includes:
* Putting out a fire on a boat by spinning at super speed to create a vortex of water
* Stopping a runaway miniature train (and catching the saboteurs)
* Catching an out-of-control Ferris wheel
* Stopping a 50-foot wooden clown from falling over (and catching the saboteur again)
* Catching the criminal ringleader
It was implied that he did all of this at speeds faster than the eye could track.
- Helps a man play the role of Santa by carrying the sleigh he's riding on through the sky. There was a bag of toys, but there was no indication of how many he delivered to how many locations, though. Considering this was just a normal (albeit rich) guy, this isn't an actual Santa Clause delivery speed feat.

Spoiler: Building the park

Spoiler: Saving the park

Weirdness:

- Lois disguises herself as a little girl... and it's apparently effective. Superman needed X-ray vision to see through it.

Superdickery:

Power Tracker:

- Still High Meta Level.

Action Comics #82

Notes:

Feat Catalogue:

- Changes into his costume and jumps up into the air so fast as to appear as only "an indistinct blur" to the people watching below
- Dives underground and digs up dirt and rocks from the bottom of a river to plug a leaking dike
- No-sells an industrial drill aimed at his chest
- Catches two falling workers (faster than the speed of sound, according to the narration. It also says he's "swifter than fate", whatever that's supposed to mean)
- Builds part of a dam at super speed

Weirdness:

- Superman is shown fighting a giant bird on the cover. This has nothing to do with the story, of course.
- At one point a man falls 500 feet into a river and survives. This is treated as unremarkable.
- The plot of this issue is essentially a Scooby-Doo episode, with a criminal dressing as a monster to scare people and cover up his crimes. The Scooby-Doo franchise would not actually be created until 24 years after this comic was published.

Spoiler: And he would have gotten away with it too, if it wasn't for that meddling Kryptonian

Superdickery:

Power Tracker:

- Nothing notable here, so still High Meta Level.

Action Comics #83

Notes:

Feat Catalogue:

- Sees a piano about to fall on two guys, changes into his Superman costume, catches it, and carries it back up to where it fell from, all at a speed too fast to be seen. The narration describes it as a "lightning movement" and "with electric swiftness". We already have confirmed lightning-timing feats at this point, so I'm not doubting it.
- Disarms a thug, throws him around the room, throws various objects at him, and lifts another thug's car up and spins it around, all so fast that he can't be seen

Weirdness:

- Last issue we get a Scooby-Doo plot, now the old falling piano gag... this is turning into more of a cartoon than a comic book

Superdickery:

- Decides to mess with a guy who falsely believes he has magic powers by reinforcing his delusions.

Spoiler: Just giving himself more work for the sake of a prank

Power Tracker:

- No change from High Meta Level.

Action Comics #84

Notes:

Feat Catalogue:

- Pulls a tugboat back to shore with a cable, against the force of its engines

Weirdness:

Superdickery:

- Rips a tire off of a random car in order to catch a robber... when there were plenty of other ways to catch him without causing property damage

Power Tracker:

- Almost no notable feats in this issue, so still High Meta Level.

 

[Endless Mike]

Action Comics #85

Notes:

- We get the disclaimer about this comic "reflecting the sensibilities and language of its time" again. Hoo boy.
- It's stated that Toyman escaped from prison, but not explained how. An early example of the 'prisons with revolving doors' trope that would become so common in superhero comics

Feat Catalogue:

- Travels from Metropolis to a boat (stated to be 20 miles offshore) in what seemed to be only a few minutes (enough time for Toyman to get onboard and plant a bomb in the hold, but not much more)
- Picks up and carries a large damaged ship 20 miles to shore
- Sees perfectly fine in a completely dark room
- Puts out a fire at super speed by smothering the flaming decorations with his arms
- Sees through a cloud of smoke from a locomotive that was obscuring the engineer's vision
- Holds up a broken bridge support so a train can safely pass over it
- Narration says he races with the speed of a bullet as he overtakes the train
- Digs underground through a hill and up through the floor of Toyman's hideout

Feat Catalogue (non-Superman):

- Toyman builds a fleet of radio - controlled toy ships that sail 20 miles offshore to intercept a freighter, and fire shells containing sleeping gas to incapacitate the crew
- At least one of these ships doubles as a submarine that he used to escape
- Toyman also has a miniature flamethrower that he uses to start a fire as a distraction
- Toyman builds another army of radio-controlled toy soldiers and cannons, which are equipped with oxyacetylene flamethrowers that melt through a steel train bridge support
- Builds some remote-controlled stereotypical looking Native American archers with poison - tipped arrows

Weirdness:

- Some old-fashion sexism, with the same mouse trope. This must have been what the disclaimer was warning us about.

Spoiler: Another page that probably wouldn't fly today

Superdickery:

- Abandons Lois after she's captured by Toyman (although he comes back to rescue her later)

Power Tracker:

- High Meta Level, still.

Action Comics #86

Notes:

- For some reason, the copy I have of this issue is included in the same individual file as issue #85. There's also a separate file with another copy of issue #86.
- The cover features Superman burying what is presumably supposed to be Hideki Tojo in a pile of war bonds. Kind of funny. I think this cover was also on Superdickery.
- We have the disclaimer again, probably because of the cover
- The opening narration is also deliberately ambiguous about whether this story actually occurred or not. In the end, it turns out it was just a story from a book Lois was reading.

Feat Catalogue:

- Every feat in this issue was part of a storybook and didn't actually happen. Too bad, since there were some nice ones.

Weirdness:

- This story is apparently about Superman fighting an evil wizard, but in the end it's revealed that it was just a story she was reading from an old book, and imagining that Superman was the mysterious hero mentioned in it

Superdickery:

Power Tracker:

- As there were no actual feats or showings in this issue, he's still High Meta Level.

Action Comics #87

Notes:

Feat Catalogue:

- Puts down a large truck he was carrying and changes back to Clark Kent "quicker than a wink", according to the narration
- Travels from a different state to Metropolis (no distance given, but the trip there in a truck took over 10 hours), then travels to Washington D.C., cross-references a guy's fingerprints with the FBI archives, travels to 'Smalltown, U.S.A.' (a precursor to Smallville?) to interview a guy, and then returns to his starting point, all in under 30 minutes
- Quickly makes a giant snowball (stated to weigh 2 tons) and throws it at an escaping car, knocking it over

Weirdness:

- Suspicion is cast on a rookie trucker when he is given the opportunity to shoot at some retreating hijackers and doesn't do so. The only two possibilities initially raised are that either he was in cahoots with them, or he had no idea how to use a gun. The possibility that he was a pacifist who didn't want to take a human life was never considered until near the end of the story.

Superdickery:

Power Tracker:

- A nice if unquantifiable speed feat, but nothing to push him past High Meta Level yet.

Action Comics #88

Notes:

- Return of the phony magician characters. Apparently these guys were popular enough to be brought back.
- I've posted more scans from this issue than any other so far. Lots of crazy feats in this one.
- It seems to be as of this issue that the covers are starting to actually depict things relevant to the story a lot more often

Feat Catalogue:

- Runs from a private party to a zoo, opens a cage, takes an elephant, and brings it back all in a split second, so fast it looks like it just appeared out of nowhere
- Runs and grabs a tree, uproots it, and puts it in place so fast it looks like it instantly sprouted from the ground (the narration also notes that he uses "incredibly rapid vibrations" to remain invisible - first use of the invisibility via vibration power?)
- Takes the tree and elephant back, again so fast it looks like they just disappeared
- Very impressive speed feat - travels to the North Pole and back (while carrying a guy in a bed for the first trip) in a "time-tick" (which I'm guessing means a second or so). Maybe even worth calcing.
- Retrieves giant boots from a movie prop department, again so fast it looks like they appeared in an instant
- Throws the giant boots seven leagues at a time to get them and their occupants quickly to the North Pole
- Finds a polar bear and a boat, brings them back, moves the guy out of his bed and puts the polar bear near him, and places the phony magicians on the boat, again all so fast it looks like it happens in an instant
- Knocks out the bear at super speed, and moves a glacier
- Pushes the glacier back, again at invisible speeds
- Carries the bed with the guy on it back to his home, in an undefined but again seemingly very fast timeframe
- Throws the boots again to transport the fake magicians back home
- Does the same thing to another sleeping guy on his bed, except this time takes him to the Arabian desert, and returns back before the phony magicians are finished with their conversation
- Carries the phony magicians on a carpet to the same desert
- Takes a baby and places it in the victim's hands so fast no one can see it happen
- Returns the baby to its mother at super speed, and carries the guy he's tormenting from Arabia to Egypt, again so fast he can't perceive it
- Picks up the Giza Sphinx and throws it

Spoiler: This probably should have killed the elephant

Spoiler: We've got both intangibility and invisibility via vibration before heat vision... I never expected that

Spoiler: Some of the most impressive speed feats yet

Spoiler: Kind of worse than just chipping its nose

Weirdness:

Superdickery:

- A conman plans to scare two millionaires out of some of their money to steal it. Instead of stopping them, Superman helps them and then gives the money to charity. It's still stealing...
- Kidnaps a baby as part of the plot to scare one of the millionaires
- Vandalizes the Sphinx

Power Tracker:

- Some pretty insane speed feats this issue* which leads me to believe that some of the lightspeed claims made earlier may not have been hyperbole. Still, I'm waiting for an incontrovertible lightspeed (or close) feat and at least a moon level strength/power/durability feat before I'm willing to give him Low Herald. So for now, still High Meta Level.

 

[Endless Mike]

Action Comics #89

Notes:

Feat Catalogue:

- Not quite sure how to interpret this... Superman moves (vibrates?) at the speed of various wavelengths of light to change the color of roads to gold
- He then does the same in the atmosphere to turn it green, in order to make the moon appear green
- From high up above the clouds, uses his telescopic X-ray vision and super hearing to spy on some criminals in a specific building in the city
- Does the color changing thing again, this time turning a room red
- Disarms some criminals at super speed so it appears as if their guns just disappear
- Does the color thing again, to turn a bank, and then all of Metropolis, blue (temporarily)
- Smashes through a wall, then grabs all of the debris before it hits the ground and repairs the wall

Spoiler: The physics behind this are questionable

Spoiler: Was this really easier than just using the door?

Weirdness:

- After learning how to move at super speed to change the colors of things, Superman seems to get addicted to doing this and uses it as his go-to method for crimefighting in this issue, even though its only real effect is to scare the crooks

Superdickery:

- Turns the entire city blue just to scare some criminals, doubtlessly scaring many innocent people in the process
- Smashes through a wall to enter a building instead of using a door or window (he fixes it afterward, but still)

Power Tracker:

- Not sure if the color feats are quantifiable in terms of speed, but so far he's still High Meta Level.

Action Comics #90

Notes:

Feat Catalogue:

- Grabs all of the editions of the Daily Planet that just hit the newsstands around the city at super speed before anyone can read them
- Digs a tunnel under the ground faster than a falling bottle of nitrogyclerine, going miles underground in thirty seconds so it explodes harmlessly
- Jumps out of the water "with the speed of a rocket", according to the narration
- Travels two miles in a split second
- Covers up a submarine with a tarp and then carries it into the air, making sure to adjust the inertia so the passengers won't suspect anything odd is going on

Spoiler: It probably wasn't necessary to dig quite that deep

Weirdness:

- I'll just point out that, at this point, he is doing tons of things that wouldn't be possible if he couldn't fly, but he still hasn't been officially acknowledged as having the power of flight in any of the comics I've covered yet

Superdickery:

Power Tracker:

- Still High Meta Level.

Action Comics #91

Notes:

- Superman says he's never encountered a real ghost at this point. As I haven't covered all of his appearances up to this point, I don't know if that's true or not, but it very well could be, as, aside from Mr. Mxyzptlk, he hasn't faced many supernatural/paranormal foes in this title so far

Feat Catalogue:

- Travels from Metropolis to Lake Huron in a stated timeframe of under a minute
- Hears a radio message again, just in case you thought they forgot about that power
- Intercepts several bombs dropped from a helicopter and tanks their detonations with no damage, then pulls the helicopter down to the ground
- Pushes a large freighter at super speed through the water, then jumps, carrying it over the locks from Lake Huron to Lake Superior
- Detects the chemical composition of a knockout gas just by breathing it
- Is unaffected by said knockout gas
- A feat perhaps indicating that he doesn't need to air to breathe, as he is locked in what is described as an airtight safe (not very big), and stays there for seemingly hours before deciding to break out, meaning he would have likely run out of oxygen by then if he needed it
- Moves at invisible speed to shore
- No-sells point-blank blasts from artillery cannons that could sink large ships
- Raises a bunch of huge sunken ships from the lake floor, throws/carries them to land, repairs them (using heat from friction to weld the plates together), and pulls and carries them to their destinations

Spoiler: Early indication that he doesn't need to breathe

Spoiler: Decent feat

Weirdness:

- The scene on the cover, with Superman punching a cannon hard enough to cause it to bend and fire its shell backwards, is not only in the comic itself (and yes, the physics of this is very questionable), but we actually see the normal human criminals manning the cannon reacting to the shell while it's in mid-air.

Spoiler: Talking is a free action, indeed

Superdickery:

- Perry White assigns Clark rather than Lois to the piracy story, because he says it's "a man's job". Clark eventually ends up agreeing with said bit of sexism.

Power Tracker:

- Still High Meta Level. He's going to need a lot more than this to get to Low Herald.

Action Comics #92

Notes:

Feat Catalogue:

- Kicks through the floor of a car while he's inside in order to disable it
- Catches Lois after a car crash so gently that she think she just landed on soft ground
- Steals a paper from a guy's pocket and replaces it with a dollar so fast it can't be perceived

Weirdness:

Superdickery:

Power Tracker:

- Not much really went on in this issue, he's still High Meta Level.

 

[Endless Mike]

Action Comics #93

Notes:

- This issue was a Christmas story that also celebrated the end of WWII
- This story was also several pages longer than usual

Feat Catalogue:

- The narration says that Superman rockets more than 1000 miles per hour. But that's honestly unimpressive compared to many of the speed feats he already has at this point.
- Carries a bunch of glider planes with international relief supplies faster than 1000 mph, as the narration said earlier. The sun appears to rise in the west due to their speed and direction.
- Keeps this up, traveling across the entire world, making stops in Alaska, China, Moscow, Holland, France, England, Norway, Venezuela, then back to Metropolis.
- While stopping in Moscow, goes "far to the north" and uproots a large pine tree with one hand, then travels to the radium mines of polar Siberia and extracts the element from hundreds of tons of raw material
- Travels from Siberia to the Bering sea in seconds and gathers ice
- Takes the tree with the radium and ice back to Moscow before the ice melts
- Covers half of Europe in "fleeting seconds", going from Moscow to Holland
- Creates a giant snowball from acres of snow and jumps into the stratosphere while carrying it
- Races southwest at the speed of light (according to the narration), punches the snowball apart, and then races to the far north (again at the speed of light, according to the narration) to collect some Reindeer and bring them back to where he left off in Norway.
- Destroying the snowball high in the atmosphere caused it to snow in Venezuela

Spoiler: More questionable physics, and another lightspeed claim

Weirdness:

- Superman decorates a Christmas tree with radium for a Russian village. Yes, the dangerous radioactive element.

Spoiler: Cancer is the gift that keeps on giving, apparently

Superdickery:

- Gives a Russian village a radioactive Christmas tree. Either even he didn't know how dangerous the stuff was back then, or he's preemptively starting the Cold War
- While dressed up as Santa Clause, goes down a chimney with a fire in it. Why is this dickery? Because he was carrying a kid in his bag when he did it. The kid is apparently unharmed, but he easily could have been.
- Changes into Clark Kent and user super speed to kiss Lois under the mistletoe when she thought she was about to kiss Superman.

Power Tracker:

- We get another lightspeed claim (in fact, 2 in one page), but again, I'm waiting for something more concrete before actually accepting lightspeed. So High Meta Level it is. Still, many of the speed feats in this issue are very impressive, especially crossing half of Europe in seconds.

Action Comics #94

Notes:

Feat Catalogue:

- Superman stops a giant redwood tree from falling and lowers it safely to the ground with one hand
- Welds a bunch of saws together using heat from the friction of his hands (when is he going to get heat vision?)
- Uses the giant saw he created to cut down a bunch of redwood trees at once
- Uses another redwood to catch them all before they fall, then cuts them into logs and makes them into a raft
- Intercepts a bullet fired at close range from very far off. The narration says it's lightspeed again, but my same objection stands. Still pretty fast, though.
- Moves at super speed to create air pressure to contain a flooding river
- Uses boulders to dam up the break in the river and return it to its original course

Spoiler: So many lightspeed claims, so little proof

Weirdness:

- The plot of this issue involves Superman helping a lumber camp cut down redwood trees. That wouldn't exactly fly today, as they're now endangered.

Superdickery:

- As Clark Kent, he is interviewing a pretty girl who happens to own a lumber camp. He goes out of his way to walk past Lois while with her, in order to make her jealous.
- Does the same thing again at the end of the comic

Power Tracker:

- We keep getting these lightspeed claims, and they might even be true at this point, but I'm still waiting for real confirmation. So High Meta Level.

Action Comics #95

Notes:

- For some reason, the copy I have of this one is just a second copy of #94. So I had to find it somewhere else.

Feat Catalogue:

- The Prankster states that "Superman is invulnerable to bullets, explosives, acid, and all other means of destruction". While the last part is obviously hyperbole, I don't recall acid being used against him so far (except that one time by the Ultra-Humanite, but he never actually got to test it against Superman)
- Performs, according to the narration, "a mental feat unparalleled in all history", by using his photographic memory to look back over the previous incidents and find out that the Prankster was behind them, even identifying his fingerprints from memory
- Intercepts bullets fired at the Prankster from multiple directions simultaneously
- Throws a juggler's ball in a calculated way to bounce off multiple objects and knock over a paint can which lands on the Prankster

Spoiler: But can he see why kids love Cinnamon Toast Crunch?

Weirdness:

- One of the criminals in this issue has the name of "Biggie" Small. No relation to the rapper, who wouldn't be born for another 26 years.
- The Prankster's plan in this issue is to mock and ridicule Superman so much, and get the entire city to join in, that he quits for good. Even ignoring the implausibility of this plan succeeding (yet somehow it does... temporarily though), for some reason he never thinks of the most obvious and classic insult to use - saying that he wears his underwear on the outside.

Superdickery:

- When calculating the shot of the ball he threw to knock out the Prankster, it involved rebounding the ball off an innocent stage hand's head, possibly giving him a concussion.

Spoiler: No ambiguity here - he planned to hit that guy on the head

Power Tracker:

- Nothing all that relevant here, so still High Meta Level.

Action Comics #96

Notes:

Feat Catalogue:

- Claims he is invulnerable to gas, and is unaffected by sleeping gas
- Gathers all the scraps of paper from a torn-up novel script that fell out a high window, and pieces them back together in a few minutes in order to read what it originally said

Spoiler: This was supposedly an unfinished novel, but it's shown as just one page for some reason

Weirdness:

Superdickery:

Power Tracker:

- Nothing worth writing home about here, so still High Meta Level.

 

[Endless Mike]

Action Comics #97

Notes:

- The cover (and first page) show Superman levitating in mid-air on his side, indicating that he can fly at this point. However, this scene doesn't seem to have much to do with the story proper.

Feat Catalogue:

- Superman carries the two fake magicians to a magic convention, while remaining invisible (the narration tries to explain how, but again it sounds like a variant of vibrational invisibility to me)
- Somehow tracks the origin of a phone call with his super hearing, and takes the two phony magicians there at super speed while invisible again
- Disables some criminals' guns so fast that no one can see it happen
- Captures and knocks out the criminals, then carries the magicians back to the convention, again while invisible
- Goes and grabs a bus, moving it indoors at invisible speeds (not sure how he got it inside, though)
- Performs more 'magic' while invisible, including getting a horse from somewhere and juggling people
- Uses ventriloquism again, also seemingly imitating one of the magicians' voices
- Moves into another room in the same building, grabs a guy trying to open a safe, and deposits both him and the safe on the stage so fast it seems like he teleported
- Takes the fake magicians back to their office at invisible speed again

Spoiler: Explaining the invisibility via vibration power

Spoiler: We know he can hear radio signals, but how does he hear a landline phone call?

Weirdness:

- Superman decides to check on the two fake magicians that we've seen previously, who are still under the delusion that their powers are real. For some reason, he arrives just in time to hear one of their 'spells' and make it come true. It's not clear if they tried any other 'spells' since Superman last met up with them, but if they did, they were apparently successful without Superman's help. Combined with their debut story, where a lot of their 'spells' came true by sheer coincidence even before Superman got involved, it's possible that these guys actually do have some type of power - manipulating luck and probability, including getting Superman to help them out. Sort of like King from One Punch Man.

Superdickery:

- In order to help carry out 'magic tricks', he abducts a city bus with passengers on it

Power Tracker:

- High Meta Level, same as before.

Action Comics #98

Notes:

- The cover of this issue was also featured on Superdickery

Feat Catalogue:

- Changes into Superman and is above the city "a split second" after being in the Daily Planet office
- Identifies the model of a car by the tracks it left
- "With the speed of a sizzling meteor", searches the countryside for cars matching the type he's looking for and finds many (dialogue possibly implies he searched the entire state, but it's far from clear)
- Carries a car to its destination faster than it could normally get there
- Catches up to a train and travels through every car one second before it hits an obstacle, the narration saying he moves at the speed of light again, then clears out the obstruction before the train hits it

Spoiler: How many more of these claims are we going to get before we get a confirmed lightspeed feat?

Weirdness:

- In the stated time of "one second" before the train hit the rocks, multiple people had time to say multiple sentences. Another 'talking is a free action' instance again.

Superdickery:

- On the cover, he startles a window washer working high up on a skyscraper, seemingly just for fun. Of course it's another cover that has nothing to do with the story, but still.

Power Tracker:

- Nothing new here, still High Meta Level.

Action Comics #99

Notes:

- Clark changes to Superman in a telephone booth this issue, but only by coincidence. He was actually using the phone when he saw Lois falling.
- Another person states that Superman flies in this issue. At this point, I'm 99% certain that he is, in fact, flying.
- Lois willingly kisses Clark at the end of this issue

Spoiler: I think it's safe to say he can fly now

Feat Catalogue:

- Changes to Superman and stops a falling sign before it hits a guy
- Changes to Superman again when he sees Lois falling off a building, and catches her before she hits the ground
- A thrown knife not only bounces off him, but breaks in two
- Picks up and carries a shoddily - built house, catches the inhabitants when the house collapses in mid-air and places them on top of a skyscraper, then catches all of the pieces of the house before it hits the ground
- Eats an incendiary bomb and it goes off in his mouth without harming him

Spoiler: Decent internal durability feat

Weirdness:

- The cover features Superman lying on a golf course, balancing a golf ball on his forehead so a golfer can hit it. This has nothing to do with the story.
- This story features a wooden idol from Malaya (now known as Malaysia) of "Yurg, the god of ill-fortune", which supposedly brings bad luck. There is no such figure in Malaysian mythology. The 'bad luck' is caused by a radio transmitter in the artifact that sends a signal to a cult that worships 'Yurg', so they will try to kill anyone who has the thing. They were apparently hired assassins, but they believed that the static that came from the radios in their turbans is a message from their god. Equal parts racist and WTF.

Superdickery:

- Sarcastically makes fun of Lois' tendency to get into trouble while saving her life

Power Tracker:

- Confirmed flight still doesn't boost him above High Meta Level.

Action Comics #100

Notes:

- For the 100th issue, there's nothing really special about this one...

Feat Catalogue:

- While Lois and a detective's backs are turned, he leaves the building at super speed, travels to a wig store a block away, finds a wig that matches his hair and takes it, and returns a split second later before they notice he's gone.
- Apparently Superman's real hair can't be cut, at least not by normal means
- Again evidence that he either needs no or much less air than a normal human, by saying that if he stays in an airtight vault for more than 2 hours and is not unconscious, it will prove he's Superman
- Breaks open a bank vault door with his bare hands, adjusts a clock inside, then seals it back up, apparently so well that no one can tell that it was damaged
- Takes a bath in sulfuric acid and is unharmed
- Spins a metal girder at superspeed with his fingers, creating enough heat from friction to evaporate all of the rain over a crowd
- Flies into the stratosphere (although the art makes it look much higher), to a tropical jungle, and to the Sahara desert, in which he spends several minutes, in order to artificially age a document, and returns home within 10 minutes
- Flies across the Atlantic Ocean (no timeframe though)

Spoiler: I just mentioned acid resistance feats earlier, and now we have one

Spoiler: I'm pretty sure the wind and heat would kill those people

Spoiler: Looks more like the exosphere to me

Weirdness:

- The detective who is trying to uncover Superman's secret identity in this issue devoted himself to this full-time, seven years prior to the story. However, even at this point, he says that he suspected Superman of having a secret identity for years. As this comic was published in 1946, the flashback (assuming equal in-universe and RL progression of time) would take place in 1939, but Superman only appeared the previous year, so how could he have suspected it for "years" at that point?
- The plot involves a brand of perfume that is advertised to 'linger forever', and it is stated that no amount of bathing can remove the smell. That seems like a product not very many people would want to buy.
- Clark foils the detective by writing up a fake will, dated 1936, in which he leaves his personal library to Superman. Except, as I just pointed out, Superman made his first appearance in 1938. Or are we to believe that he has been active in-universe since years before the events of Action Comics #1?

Superdickery:

- Steals a wig from a store, with no indication that he ever returned it. Also, he knew it was going to be cut before he took it.

Power Tracker:

- High Meta Level, still.

 

[Endless Mike]

Action Comics #101

Notes:

- Apparently, Lois Lane is publicly known as "Superman's girlfriend" at this point
- This is the first issue to feature realistic nuclear weapons

Feat Catalogue:

- Flies from a beach to Metropolis in seconds
- Takes apart a skyscraper and puts it back together upside-down
- Destroys a rapier sword by crushing the blade down to the hilt with his hand
- Uses his photographic memory again to recognize where he had seen a guy before
- Is affected by a drug that makes him act crazy, and flies out into an atomic bomb test, but the blast clears his mind and cures him (and he's unharmed by it)
- Takes pictures of a new type of atom bomb going off from close range (one character says he went right into the blast, but the fact that the camera he was holding wasn't damaged makes me doubt that)
- Travels from the Pacific back to Metropolis, seems to be very quickly
- Fixes the car and skyscraper he ruined earlier

Spoiler: Tanking a nuke

Spoiler: Sort of - tanking a stronger nuke

Weirdness:

- Actors in a stage play were using real, sharpened swords that could have killed someone

Superdickery:

- A very great example on the teaser page. Leaving crime unchecked so he can blow bubbles.
- Ignores a drowning man to get a shell from the seafloor instead
- Takes apart a guy's car and then takes apart a skyscraper and reassembles it upside down (he was under the influence of a drug that made him insane for all of these, but still)

Spoiler: Some classic superdickery here

Power Tracker:

- No-selling nuclear blasts is nice, but it still doesn't put him above High Meta Level.

Action Comics #102

Notes:

- This is the first issue I have where the entire comic is printed, including the ads and non-Superman stories. I'll be covering them too, if they have anything relevant.
- Mr. Mxyzptlk's homeworld of Zrfff in the Fifth Dimension is namedropped in this issue

Feat Catalogue:

- Stops the "Emperor Building" (seemingly a Metropolis expy of the Empire State Building) from falling over

Feat Catalogue (non-Superman):

- Mr. Mxyzptlk leads Superman on a wild goose chase in midair and then vanishes
- After reading the story of Aladdin's lamp, he makes a real version of the lamp appear
- When someone touches the lamp, he appears out of a cloud of smoke as a genie
- Mxy uses super breath to knock a guy over
- Changes a woman's clothing to a weird dress
- Makes a farm appear in the middle of the city
- Conjures a yacht out of thin air, falling down from the sky
- Makes a bunch of jewels appear and cover a woman
- Gives a guy a working pair of wings
- Gives another guy the Midas Touch, so everything he touches turns to gold
- Makes the Emperor Building bend and start to fall
- Teleports away when Superman tries to hit him
- Willingly limits himself to a three-dimensional nature
- Turns a bunch of tar into steel

Spoiler: Should have just phrased those wishes a bit better...

Weirdness:

- Mxyzptlk mentions a "seven-dimensional cause-and-effect force". It's unclear if this is a real thing, or just something he made up.

Superdickery:

- Places Lois on top of a skyscraper temporarily, just to be rid of her

Power Tracker:

- No change, still High Meta Level.

Action Comics #103

Notes:

- Superman refers to Metropolis as America's greatest city. Maybe a bit of bias on his part...

Feat Catalogue:

- Digs underground to enter a buried pyramid
- Flies from Central America to Metropolis, gives some ancient people a tour of various contemporary buildings, and flies back, all in half an hour

Weirdness:

- The plot here focuses on a pyramid from a supposedly pre-Mayan civilization, yet it's stated to be only 1000 years old, and the Mayans had a civilization as early as 2000 B.C.
- The ancient people in the pyramid apparently had advanced technology including stasis, an electrical device that magnified light directed at it, and a time machine that could overwrite the entire world and replace it with their own time, yet their most advanced weapons were spears and swords. It was stated that their time machine was built out of materials from Atlantis that couldn't be recreated, though.

Superdickery:

Power Tracker:

- High Meta Level, still.

Action Comics #104

Notes:

- The Prankster's plan here is undone because he falls for a scam by J. Wilbur Wolfingham. One villain inadvertently foiling another - I thought that was fairly clever.

Feat Catalogue:

- Wrecks an amusement park
- Rebuilds said amusement park in a matter of minutes, along with melting and recreating a bunch of candy and mixing it with sugar to make it taste better
- Is unharmed when a giant candy sculpture of himself falls on top of him, then breaks it into pieces

Weirdness:

- The Prankster's plan in this issue was to give the CEO of a candy company the idea to build a candy-themed amusement park, but sabotage it and then build his own to steal his customers. Why he didn't just build his own amusement park by itself without bothering with the other one is never explained.
- Prankster claims that what he did was legal. I think sabotaging a business rival counts as a crime.

Superdickery:

- Wrecks an amusement park, with many people very close by who could be put in danger

Power Tracker:

- Not much to note in this issue, so still High Meta Level.

 

[Endless Mike]

Action Comics #105

Notes:

- I was going to list it under weirdness that Clark Kent automatically assumed Santa Claus was real and went as Superman to the North Pole when he heard he was in danger, but it turns out they have actually met before in a different comic
- Metropolis celebrates its sesquicentennial anniversary in this issue. Since this is meant to take place around Christmas of 1946, I guess that means that Earth-2 Metropolis was founded in 1796.

Feat Catalogue:

- Flies from Metropolis to the North Pole in an unspecified timeframe
- Flies from the North Pole to Mexico in minutes, while carrying an overweight Santa Claus
- Throws boulders into a volcano, causing it to erupt (oddly, the second time he's done this in this title)
- Flies from Mexico to the Golden Gate Bridge in California in an unspecified timeframe
- Carries Santa's sleigh when the reindeer are incapacitated, to deliver presents on Christmas Eve. Many people have already calculated how fast Santa has to be to do this, although I assume with the lesser population in 1946 those numbers wouldn't be as high.

Spoiler: I'm not going to bother running the numbers again for the 1946 world's population, so don't ask

Weirdness:

- DC's Santa Claus apparently trains on a "gymnasium chimney-course" in preparation for Christmas eve
- Santa is apparently vulnerable to a drug that knocked him out and made him twice as fat, despite being an immortal, magical being who is also technically a ghost
- With Santa unable to deliver presents, Superman's first course of action is to try to get him to lose all the weight he gained... via some rather odd methods

Superdickery:

- Bullies Santa Claus while trying to make him lose weight, nearly drowning him, forcing him to run up and down the suspension cables of the Golden Gate Bridge, forcing him to take part in a dance contest, and almost flying him into a meteor.

Spoiler: I'm guessing by 'scaring the weight off of him', he means 'making him shit bricks'

Power Tracker:

- High Meta Level, again.

Action Comics #106

Notes:

- It's shown in this issue that Metropolis is a destination for ships making transatlantic crossings, so it must be on the East Coast of the US (This only applies to the Earth-2 Metropolis, though)
- For (I believe) the first time in this title, Clark's foster parents, the Kents, are mentioned. The narration also says that he was an orphan reared by a kindly couple who found him. That means that, by this point, the part in issue #1 about him growing up in an orphanage has been retconned (it probably happened a while ago in another title)
- It's stated that Clark doesn't know his origins, meaning he doesn't (yet) know that he's from Krypton, or even that he's not from Earth.

Feat Catalogue:

- Hears a radio SOS (I should probably stop noting every time he does this now, it's pretty well-established)
- Picks up a large sinking ship and flies it to safety
- Stops a mine from collapsing after an explosion by just leaning on the walls
- Digs out from almost a mile beneath the Earth, making sure to protect everyone else trapped in the mine as well
- Picks up and carries a castle and the ground beneath it to another town, demolishes the old buildings in the town, and builds new ones at super speed in a matter of minutes

Weirdness:

- In this issue, Clark is mistaken for a British nobleman who was kidnapped as a baby. He proves he's not by finding a photo of the kidnapped baby, who has a star-shaped birthmark on his left shoulder. A relative of Jonathan Joestar, perhaps?

Spoiler: Is that a Jojo reference? 13 years before Hirohiko Araki was born?

Superdickery:

- Breaks into and steals equipment from an air conditioner manufacturing plant to make a machine to clear away fog over London (maybe his super breath wasn't powerful enough to do that at this point? Or he just wanted to be a dick about it)
- Uproots a castle from its original location and moves it, then demolishes a town and rebuilds it, all without getting any kind of permit or even asking first

Power Tracker:

- Nothing too notable, so still High Meta Level.

Action Comics #107

Notes:

- This is the first issue of this title not written by Jerry Siegel and/or Joe Shuster (according to the DC wiki, the previous issue didn't have an author listed, but the Superman story in this issue was written by Don Cameron)

Feat Catalogue:

- Instantly identifies a type of anesthetic gas by smelling it
- Picks up and carries a mansion from Metropolis to a barren sea coast in seconds
- Digs up enough marble to create a fake city and shapes it into blocks in 10 minutes
- Smashes enough limestone to create cement for the city
- Creates the buildings at super speed
- Paints a giant background painting, accurate and detailed enough to fool people into thinking it's real, in seconds (this indicates that the city wasn't a full-size replica of Metropolis, but it did seem pretty big)
- Plants trees, makes furniture, paves streets, creates fake cobwebs and dust, etc. to make the fake city seem real, in a matter of hours. Also applies makeup to himself to make him look older.
- He also constructed the fake city to match up to what would be a believable version of Metropolis in 25 years, including recreating specific buildings
- According to the narration, vanishes so swiftly "that no eye can follow him" (although it could just mean the eyes of the people watching him at the time).
- Demolishes the fake Metropolis, in what seems to be no more than a few seconds

Spoiler: Maybe his most impressive construction feat so far

Spoiler: Followed by one of his most impressive destruction feats

Weirdness:

- At one point, the narration refers to J. Wilbur Wolfingham's mansion as "The house of mystery". The actual DC anthology comic titled "House of Mystery" would not premiere for another 4 years.
- Superman uses makeup to pretend that he has aged 25 years, now appearing to have white hair and wrinkles. Yet in issue #62, he looked the same age 200 years in the future.
- Apparently people in the 1940s thought that, in the far-distant future of 1972, there would be "cars and planes operated by atomic power". I guess they didn't realize how dangerous and impractical that was. Then again, it would have curbed fossil fuel use.

Superdickery:

- Builds an entire fake city to create the illusion of a postapocalyptic future, just to mess with a few millionaires (one of them was Wolfingham, but the others weren't criminals).

Power Tracker:

- Still High Meta Level.

Action Comics #108

Notes:

- For some reason, the program wouldn't save the scan I wanted, so I had to screenshot it instead. I hope it's not the dreaded archive error popping up again.

Feat Catalogue:

- Intercepts a beam from a cyclotron. Research tells me these beams typically travel at around half the speed of light, so considering the distances involved, this might legitimately be lightspeed or higher. I'd have to calc it and it would require some tedious scaling, but I'd say eyeballing it that he easily crossed at least twice the distance the beam did in the same amount of time

Spoiler: First confirmed lightspeed feat?

Weirdness:

Superdickery:

- Traps some criminals in quick-drying cement and threatens to let it harden and suffocate them if they don't answer his questions

Power Tracker:

- Finally a (mostly) confirmed lightspeed feat, but in order to reach Low Herald I'm going to need a moon or higher level destructive/durability feat. So still High Meta Level for now.

 

[Endless Mike]

Action Comics #109

Notes:

- The cover of this one was featured on Superdickery
- The Prankster's plot in this issue is to sabotage all of the paper money printed at the Mint. Except, in real life, the mint does not produce paper money, only coins. Bills are made at the Bureau of Engraving and Printing. The story also seems to imply that there is only one Mint in the US, though even back when this was published, there were several.
- This is the first time in this title that Superman is directly acknowledged to have gone into outer space, even if it looked like he did so several times previously.
- Creating and distributing the gold coins is referred to by the narration as "the most amazing feat of his career". Even at this point, that's arguable.

Feat Catalogue:

- Gathers scrap metal from all over the world and uses it to build a giant tower in Death Valley, then lines it with heat-resistant clay. It's also filled with a vague "system of separators" that separate the gold in the meteors from other elements
- Flies into space and uses a steel beam to smack meteors downward towards the tower he built
- Taking all of the gold from the meteors, he mints it into coins at super speed, then distributes them to all the banks in the country in less than an hour.

Spoiler: Way to unbalance the world economy...

Feat Catalogue (non-Superman):

- The Prankster invents "ink-dissolving gas pellets" which can turn money back into plain bank paper without a trace of what happened
- He also made another gas which can restore the bills to normal

Weirdness:

- The Cover. Just What.
- When paper money becomes worthless, Superman suggests the government issue gold coins instead, only to be told that there isn't enough gold to go around. What's his solution? If you said use silver coins, you probably have some common sense. For Superman's actual solution, see the feat catalogue.

Superdickery:

- I can't top the way the original Superdickery site described the cover, so I'll just quote it:

Minting autonomous coins with his face on them to feel up the Prankster…

That there is some inventive superdickery."

https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/marvel_dc/images/1/18/Action_Comics_Vol_1_109.jpg

Power Tracker:

- High Meta Level. Still waiting for a moon level or higher feat to reach the next level.

Action Comics #110

Notes:

Feat Catalogue:

- Gets in front of bullets after they're fired, looking to have traveled much farther than the bullets did in the same amount of time
- Catches multiple arrows fired at him from close range, with one hand
- Catches a grenade and disassembles it at super speed before it can detonate

Weirdness:

Superdickery:

Power Tracker:

- Not much here, so still High Meta Level.

Action Comics #111

Notes:

- The cover shows Superman as a giant, spinning the Earth on his finger. Unfortunately for power tracker purposes, this is strictly metaphorical and bears no resemblance to anything that actually happens in the comic.
- When Clark and Lois go to see a movie, instead of previews, the theater first shows newsreels on recent events. You might think this would belong in the weirdness section, but before home TVs were commonplace, this was a thing that they actually did.
- There's an advertisement at the end of the Superman story in this issue for both the Superman title, and World's Finest, which is a comic that features Superman and Batman together. I might cover that eventually in this thread, too.

Spoiler: This scene doesn't actually happen, unfortunately

Feat Catalogue:

- Makes the truck he's in fly into the air by just jumping a fraction of an inch off the floor
- Digs clay out of the ground at super speed and makes it into rings which he uses to cover a burning oil well and smother the fire
- An even more solid FTL feat, as he outruns light waves and reaches another planet
- Superman's cape (referred to here as his 'cloak', for some reason) is able to protect a camera he is carrying from the stress of traveling at FTL speeds
- Digs up metals, silica and metallic oxides, uses heat from friction to melt them, and builds a giant, powerful telescope, all in 11 seconds, then films himself saving the oil well from deep space
- Smothers an explosion of dynamite with his body so it does no damage

Spoiler: Another feat where the physics of it are questionable

Spoiler: Faster than a speeding photon

Weirdness:

- The racial slur "Jap" is used, although it was during a WWII flashback, and then by soldiers who fought against the Japanese in WII
- Superman flies to what is described as "a distant planet", 12 seconds ahead of the light that left the Earth just before. Even if we allow 1 minute between the time the light left Earth and the time he departed, no planet is that close. Mars is over 3 light-minutes away from Earth.

Superdickery:

Power Tracker:

- Still High Meta Level, although you can say he's pushing the very upper limit of that rating. His speed is definitely there, but I'm still waiting for that moon+ level feat to graduate him into the herald tiers.

Action Comics #112

Notes:

- This issue makes the repeated mistake of claiming that Mr. Mxyzptlk is from the sixth dimension, rather than the fifth. With the cosmology that DC later established, this is actually a very important distinction.
- A chess match for the world championship between "Bugashlovsky" and "Smith" is featured in this issue. These are fictional players. (Of course there are many real chess players with the surname 'Smith', but you know what I mean). Although, interestingly, when I researched who the real world champion was at the time this comic was published, it turned out that there wasn't one! The previous champion, Alexander Alekhine, had died in 1946, and Mikhail Botvinnik would win the world championship tournament in 1948.
- After Superman tricks Mxyzptlk into saying his name backwards, he says that he can't come back for at least a month. This time limit would often change, but as it was later revealed to just be a game Mxy himself set up, that makes sense

Feat Catalogue:

- Mr. Mxyzptlk claims that Superman hurt his fingers, although he could have just been joking
- Moves the castle Mxy moved to Metropolis to the suburbs (suburbs of what city is the question, as it was moved to another square on the chessboard, which was the size of the entire US mainland)
- Plays tug-of-war with Mxy over the castle, although there's no real indication the latter was actually trying
- Flies around the US and gathers up all of Mxy's giant chess pieces, then returns them to their proper locations
- Easily defeats a giant bank robber with a giant machine gun, transformed by Mxy
- After hitting the giant robber, he turns back to normal size (this might just be a peculiar effect of Mxy's powers, though)
- He presumably does this to all of the other 'pawns' created by Mxy as well
- Creates a giant chess set and pieces (not as big as the ones Mxy used, though)

Spoiler: I wonder how powerful that gun would be?

Spoiler: I bet a certain person would claim these are multiversal strength feats...

Feat Catalogue (non-Superman):

- Mr. Myxzptlk causes the text on many of the signs on streets and buildings in Metropolis to become upside-down
- He causes full-grown trees to grow through the asphalt of city streets overnight
- Catches a large fish from out of a manhole (he probably made the fish appear)
- Creates a flying carpet
- Creates a propeller on top of his hat to fly, and carries two people into the sky
- Places the two people on top of a cloud, making it solid so they can stand on it
- Travels to England in seconds
- Creates a giant pair of tongs to steal a castle and bring it to the US. The people inside don't notice anything happening, even as it's flying at super speed.
- Takes a giant statue from Paris, a smaller statue from Metropolis, and various other landmarks from around the world to use as chess pieces.
- Stretches his hands out and makes them giant-sized, then teleports himself and some crooks away
- Creates a giant filter in the sky that projects a chessboard on to the US Mainland
- Remotely manipulates the chess pieces across the US
- For pawns, makes bank robbers into giants, along with their weapons

Spoiler: When Mxy steals an English castle it's bad, but when Superman does it it's fine...

Weirdness:

- It's a Mxy issue, of course it's weird. You can probably tell by everything in the feat catalogues.

Superdickery:

Power Tracker:

- High Meta Level. You know what it will take to reach the next tier.

 

[Endless Mike]

Action Comics #113

Notes:

Feat Catalogue:

- Hypnotizes himself in order to psychologically reduce his powers to average human levels for a day. I could see how this could prevent him from using super strength and speed, but I don't see how it could lower his durability, though.
- He also hypnotized himself into erasing his own memory of doing so. Not the best idea.
- After being arrested on false pretenses, tricks the prison guards by making it look like he started escaping, then escapes for real
- Dives on a dynamite bomb and tanks the explosion, as his hypnosis wore off just at that moment. But again, I don't see how it could have affected his durability in the first place.
- Rebuilds a demolished house at super speed

Spoiler: I see no way this could possibly go wrong...

Spoiler: Have to be crafty without super powers

Weirdness:

- Superman decides to hypnotize himself to lose his powers for a day, just to sate his curiosity, without considering that he might be needed. Also, we haven't yet had a single crossover with another superhero in this title, so it's not like they're all around to pick up the slack, either.
- When powerless, he tricks the prison guards by ripping part of his costume and using it to cover a bar in the window. But if the costume is super durable, and he has no super strength, then how did he rip it? Or is it just the cape that's super durable at this point?

Superdickery:

- I'd count endangering the public by deliberating losing his powers, if that didn't put him in danger too

Power Tracker:

- High Meta Level at the beginning and end of the issue. Low Street Level when he had no powers.

Action Comics #114

Notes:

Feat Catalogue:

- Throws coins at super speed into a public telephone's coin return slot, to make it look like it malfunctioned and they came out accidentally.
- Saves Lois from being surrounded by barrels and a pool of burning oil by creating a vacuum to absorb the fire before it can touch her
- Drags a metal statue along the sidewalk fast enough to create sparks so bright they are blinding and can substitute for a camera flash at night

Weirdness:

- A guy finds a $1000.00 bill on the ground. Yes, they did use to make those. Today, that would be equivalent to almost $13,000.00.

Superdickery:

Power Tracker:

- High Meta Level. Not much to say.

Action Comics #115

Notes:

- This is the second time in this title that it's been brought up that Superman's X-ray vision can't see through lead.

Feat Catalogue:

- Disguises himself as a gangster, including changing his facial features
- Performs the old 'squeezing a lump of coal into a diamond' trick. Somehow the diamond is a perfectly symmetrical and cut gemstone, as well.
- Starts a fire and spins at super speed in the air to create the illusion of a tornado
- Writes a message in the sky with the smoke from the fire

Spoiler: Another rarely-used power

Spoiler: Even Marvel would later make fun of the scientific implausibility of this

Weirdness:

- When looking for stolen gemstones, he says it's impossible for him to search every square inch of an area composed of about 20 farms. That seems a bit inconsistent with issue #79 when he proved there was no gold underground in a large region.

Superdickery:

- Panics a bunch of farmers by creating a fake tornado.

Power Tracker:

- High Meta Level. Same old, same old.

Action Comics #116

Notes:

Feat Catalogue:

- Flies from the Arctic to the tropics, at one point passing between two people fighting and knocking them both out, but it happened so fast everyone thought they knocked each other out
- On the same flight, flies over a sailing ship and causes a wind to appear to fill its sails
- Uproots a tropical island from the sea and carries it to the Arctic
- Digs an underground cave below a hot spring, and creates a tunnel through a mountain to the top
- Gathers a bunch of trees felled by a storm and flies them to the Arctic
- Flies from the Arctic to Metropolis in seconds
- Carries a bus full of people from Metropolis to the Arctic
- Breaks off mountain faces and sharpens and polishes the rock to form giant mirrors surrounding a valley
- Flies at super speed to create a vacuum to draw water up to the mountainside mirrors, where it freezes into lenses

Weirdness:

Superdickery:

- Fakes his death in order to hide his secret identity, and doesn't bother to reveal he's alive until at least several hours later
- Destroys a small coral reef and the habitats of many ocean animals in order to move an island

Power Tracker:

- Still High Meta Level.

 

[Endless Mike]

Action Comics #117

Notes:

Feat Catalogue:

- Cuts down a lot of trees with his bare hands, chops them into planks in a few seconds, and builds a giant boat
- Probably his best super breath feat yet, he moves a large bank of clouds over a town
- Spins at super speed to pull cold air down from the upper atmosphere into the clouds, in order to make them snow

Spoiler: It's no solar system, but the breath feats are getting up there

Weirdness:

- When a river overflows and floods several towns in a valley, does Superman stop the flood? No, he builds a boat for the purpose of having a Christmas party onboard.

Superdickery:

- See the weirdness section

Power Tracker:

- High Meta Level, again.

Action Comics #118

Notes:

- Sergeant Casey, a Metropolis cop who was a recurring character up until now, makes his last appearance in this issue (at least in this title, according to the DC wiki)

Feat Catalogue:

- Hits a hole in one on a golf course on his first try
- Makes himself invisible with super speed
- Moves out of the way of a car so fast it looked like he disappeared like a ghost
- Blocks a dynamite explosion with his body, protecting someone nearby
- Rips open a safe
- Carries himself, Lois, and another guy inside a window and past two criminals so fast they can't be perceived
- Makes himself invisible again, then slowly fades into visibility, creating the illusion that he's a ghost
- Is unharmed by a shock from an electric chair, then somehow managed to trick the doctors into thinking he was dead

Weirdness:

- A narrative caption insists that ghosts don't exist. But this is the DC universe... where at least two of their superheroes (Deadman and the Spectre) are ghosts.

Superdickery:

- Despite knowing Lois is locked in a safe, it seems that he waits until the very last instant before she runs out of air to save her

Power Tracker:

- I'm running out of ways to restate High Meta Level.

Action Comics #119

Notes:

- I think this is the first time that we get the classic scene of Superman using a telephone booth to change into his costume, without any gimmicks or weird circumstances involved, just the iconic change.

Feat Catalogue:

- Spins around in the air above a helicopter at super speed to cancel out the lift from its rotor
- Catches a falling car with what the narration describes as "a lightning-swift swoop"
- Controls his muscle size to look like he doesn't fit in the Superman costume
- Follows a helicopter while remaining invisible
- Claps his hands loud enough to create the sound of an explosion
- Lifts a helicopter hangar
- Flies to Metropolis, carrying a helicopter, in seconds (although the distance is unknown, aside from being "outside the city")
- Sprays paint remover into a cloud, then spins a helicopter rotor at super speed to push the cloud into the path of a group of helicopters, which causes their paint to disappear (makes very little sense, but ok)
- Spins the rotor again to push multiple thunderclouds around to follow a helicopter and force it to land

Spoiler: Another body control power

Weirdness:

- The plot here involves Lois forcing Clark to pretend to be Superman in order to trick some crooks, and Clark has to figure out how to catch them without letting anyone see him using any of his powers

Superdickery:

- Lies to Lois about an out-of-town story in order to get rid of her. It doesn't work, though.

Power Tracker:

- High Meta Level. Can we get some outer space feats soon, please?

Action Comics #120

Notes:

Feat Catalogue:

- Signs a bunch of autographs at super speed
- Jumps between two planes so fast that he doesn't appear on the camera recording it
- Swims up Niagara Falls while spinning at super speed, creating enough heat to boil a lot of the water and form a huge amount of steam so he can't be filmed again
- Uses super breath to disperse the steam afterwards
- Deliberately overexposes and ruins the film in a movie camera using his X-ray vision

Weirdness:

- Another wacky plot, where Superman is tricked into signing a contract to do movie stunts

Superdickery:

- Ruins all of the stunts he's supposed to do, just to mess with the director (although the director did trick him into signing up in the first place)

Power Tracker:

- Still High Meta Level. You expected something else?

 

[Endless Mike]

Action Comics #121

Notes:

- This issue features a contest of strength between Superman and "Atlas" (really just an imposter, using tricks). If you want to see Superman go against someone with real super strength empowered by the gods of classical mythology, check my Zha-Vam thread.
- There was an advertisement at the end of the Superman story in this issue for Superman #53, which was an issue to celebrate the character's tenth anniversary. Amazing to think that we're now not that far from the 100th anniversary.

Feat Catalogue:

- Pulls 10 locomotives at once against the force of their engines
- Throws a large ship from one side of Metropolis to the other
- Tears down a condemned skyscraper
- Uses a dock pier to create waves in a lake big enough to stop a sea plane before it takes off
- Uproots a bunch of trees and uses them to plug the holes in a dam

Weirdness:

Superdickery:

- Rips up a dock to catch the villain

Power Tracker:

- High Meta Level, no change in this issue.

Action Comics #122

Notes:

Feat Catalogue:

- Hears Lois over a loudspeaker, echoing off the clouds, from many miles away from Metropolis
- Pushes over a huge boulder to start a landslide and stop a flood
- Builds a giant bellows out of roof panels, cloth hangings, and a steel chimney
- Flies up into the high stratosphere to fill the bellows with cold air
- Digs up a large mass of silicate sand, and uses pressure to heat it into glass and form it into a sphere
- Uses his super breath to turn the glass into a giant X-ray tube
- Lifts a steel bar out of cement, that a wrecking company's strongest cranes couldn't
- Bends the bar into a horseshoe
- Slaps the motor of an electromagnet, providing it with enough force to keep it spinning for hours

Weirdness:

- The cover has the tagline "Superman super - stars in the super - perils of 'The Super - Sideshow'". Think they used the word "super" enough?
- This story involves a circus freakshow, that has people with actual superpowers, including breathing fire, climbing walls like Spider-Man, and stretching like Mr. Fantastic.

Superdickery:

- Rips up a roof and chimney pipe to make a giant bellows. Also "borrows" cloth hangings from a museum (probably without returning them).
- Blasts a bunch of attendees of the side show with X-rays, enough to make their skeletons glow in the dark. He says it won't harm them since it's only for a short time, but somehow I doubt that
- Tricks Lois into a glass case and exhibits her as a circus freak, labeled "the most reckless, stubborn, and trouble-hunting girl in the world"

Spoiler: No justifying context here, he's just being a dick

Power Tracker:

- High Meta Level, par for the course.

Action Comics #123

Notes:

- The scene on the cover actually happens in the comic
- The plot of this issue involved a bunch of criminal leaders trying to come up with different ways to kill Superman. If you're wondering why they didn't think of using Kryptonite, it's because it didn't exist yet (at least not in the comics - it would be introduced the following year. However, it had appeared on the radio show by this point).

Feat Catalogue:

- A bunch of crime bosses meet on boats far out at sea, because they claim that Superman will find them with his X-ray vision if they meet anywhere in Metropolis
- Diamond - tipped drills, attached to the front of a car, shatter when they crash into him
- Is struck by lightning and says it tickles (he also might have intercepted the lightning bolt, but it's unclear)
- Is unharmed by a bazooka
- A harpoon bounces off his chest
- Unharmed by a flamethrower
- A steamroller deforms and breaks when it is run over him
- Destroys 2 giant robots
- Is unharmed by vibrations from a tuning fork that previously destroyed a statue made of "the hardest of steels"
- After bullets are fired at Lois from close range, he digs a tunnel underground and emerges below her, carrying her to safety before the bullets hit her
- Picks up and carries an entire island from international waters to Lake Erie
- Built a tiny camera that fit in a ring (back when this was written, this would be considered sci-fi technology)

Spoiler: One of his best strength feats so far

Weirdness:

- A volcanic eruption creates a new island, seemingly in minutes. This island already has vegetation on it somehow, and is also perfectly safe to land and walk on, right after it forms. What.
- Somehow, a generic criminal boss gets his hands on two giant robots to attack Superman with

Superdickery:

- Superman is suggested to be constantly searching all of Metropolis with his X-ray vision. Obviously this holds very bad implications for people's privacy.
- Goes to a weightlifting convention just to show off and make all of the other weightlifters feel inferior
- Swings an elephant around by its tail... animal abuse again

Power Tracker:

- The island feat is nice, but it still doesn't put him above High Meta Level.

Action Comics #124

Notes:

- Fort Knox is mentioned by name in this comic. What happened to "Fort Blox" from issue #63?

Feat Catalogue:

- Flies into deep space and tanks the explosion of an unstable atomic power generator, which both dialogue and narration stated to be capable of destroying (or at least devastating) the Earth.
- Becomes irradiated to the point where animals and plants burst into flame just by getting near him, but is himself unharmed by the radiation
- Using a spare cable from a suspension bridge, flies up into the clouds, creates a lasso a mile long, and uses it to grab an armored car that was being hijacked and takes it to the police station
- Collapses two abandoned buildings by singing from high up in the sky
- Travels from Metropolis to the Rocky Mountains in seconds
- Drills into the side of a mountain to mine lead
- Makes the lead into a suit in a minute, in order to safely contain his radioactivity
- Possibly(?) sees through lead with his X-ray vision, although it could just be a writer oversight

Spoiler: Questionable science aside, I think this finally puts him in the Low Herald category

Spoiler: In case you thought Final Crisis was the first time he did this

Spoiler: But you can't see through lead...

Weirdness:

- This was written and published before the first nuclear power generators were built in real life, so some of it can be excused, but some of the things they got wrong:
* Nuclear power plants can't explode like atom bombs. They can melt down, but that's different.
* An explosion in space won't create a mushroom cloud because that shape is formed due to the properties of the atmosphere
* An exploding nuclear power generator certainly can't destroy the world
- The narration says he flew into interstellar space, although the Earth is still clearly visible
- Superman sings to destroy buildings. Really.
- Superman makes a suit of lead to prevent his radioactivity from harming others. He says he can't put eye holes in the suit because radiation would leak out, so the suit is completely solid. He claims he'll be able to see with his X-ray vision - except it's already been established that his X-ray vision can't see through lead.
- The lead suit somehow absorbs all of the dangerous radiation in his body, returning him back to normal. No idea how that's supposed to work.

Superdickery:

- Various criminals try to take advantage of Superman's radioactive status by taking hostages with them when they commit crimes, and Superman himself thinks that he can't attempt to stop them because he would endanger the hostages. The implication being, of course, that he would be more than willing to let the criminals suffer a horrible death by radiation if they didn't have hostages
- Steals a spare cable from a suspension bridge, telling himself that no one will mind if he borrows it.

Power Tracker:

- I could be skeptical and say that the feat was hyperbole because a real atomic pile couldn't be that powerful, but a real atomic pile wouldn't explode in the first place like this one did, and the narration does say that the explosion "almost rocks the solar system", so I think this is at least a moon-level blast, and thus enough to push him into the Low Herald Level tier.

 

[Endless Mike]

Action Comics #125

Notes:

Feat Catalogue:

- Sees a 'meteor' through the window, changes to Superman, and intercepts it before it hits the Daily Planet building (the narration says he moved "with the swiftness of light", which, as we know, is now believable)
- Catches the 'meteor' (about the diameter of his body) and throws it out to sea
- Spins at super speed underwater in a reservoir, sending water at high pressure through pipes to fountains in the city, causing them to spray out much more water than usual and put out several large fires
- Identifies phosphoric acid from the smell
- Digs underground and creates a localized earthquake to overturn Luthor's car
- Projects his voice over Metropolis so everyone in the city can hear him
- Fixes the split in the Earth he caused
- Whistles at a frequency too high for the human ear to hear, but with a power that causes a tower to collapse
- Repairs the tower, at the speed of light, according to the narration
- Returns to his original position and changes back into Clark Kent in the time it takes Lois and the others to turn around

Feat Catalogue (non-Superman):

- Lex Luthor builds a "rocket-gun" that fires a fake meteor at the Daily Planet, which was apparently moving fast enough that Superman couldn't tell the difference between it and a real meteor
- The gun also fires a giant phosphorous bomb that sets part of the city on fire

Weirdness:

- A crazy hermit claiming to be 'the modern Nostradamus' comes into the Daily Planet and predicts a meteor will hit tomorrow. They take him at his word for some reason and make it the front page story.
- The hermit is given a job as a weatherman at the newspaper at the end of the issue, despite having no qualifications for the job

Superdickery:

- Creates an artificial earthquake and tears up a road and some buildings, just to scare Luthor. He says he fixed it later, but there had to still be damage remaining.
- Destroys a tower just so he can prevent it from collapsing and fix it as part of a scheme to protect his secret identity

Power Tracker:

- Nothing here to discount his newly-acquired Low Herald Level status.

Action Comics #126

Notes:

- Superman breaks into the governor's home to present evidence that a man on death row is innocent. He did this very same thing in issue #1.
- At one point, the narration refers to Superman as "the world's mightiest mortal" - again, stealing a tagline from another superhero. One that was being published concurrently with this, as well.
- Home television was considered a new, futuristic thing at the time, so this story used that as a plot hook

Feat Catalogue:

- Uses his photographic memory to recall that someone was smoking a cigarette in a picture
- Uses microscopic vision to identify the components of sleeping gas on a sponge
- Blocks and breaks a poison stiletto (the villain said it would be able to kill him, but that obviously wasn't true)
- Uses makeup to recreate the villain's disguise in a few minutes

Weirdness:

Superdickery:

- Breaks into the governor's home, again.
- Interrupts a baseball game being broadcast live on TV
- Lets an innocent guy get chloroformed and captured by criminals, so he can record it on TV. Then the criminals load him onto a truck filled with uranium, and Superman does nothing to stop the guy from likely getting radiation poisoning.

Power Tracker:

- Nothing really notable here, so still Low Herald Level.

Action Comics #127

Notes:

- The opening narration says that Superman has never told a lie. Apparently they're not counting all of the times he denied his secret identity.

Feat Catalogue:

- Lifts 603 wooden barrels, takes them into the sky, punches them apart, then reassembles them into a single giant barrel
- Flies from California to Hawaii with the giant barrel in 1 second
- After filling the barrel with 27,143 gallons of rainwater, returns to California in under a minute (probably going slower to avoid spilling any)
- Yells loudly enough to temporarily deafen the audience
- Writes with chalk on a blackboard so fast that the blackboard melts from friction
- Uses telescopic X-ray vision to see inside of Lois' apartment in Metropolis from a studio in California
- Flies from California to Metropolis and cleans Lois' apartment (which had been torn apart and wrecked by a bunch of intruders), then returns to California, all in 30 seconds

Weirdness:

- The entire premise of this issue is Superman appearing on the radio (later to become TV) show Truth or Consequences, which was very popular at the time. The host, Ralph Edwards, is even credited as the villain of this story on the DC wiki.
- The unit of "one square acre" is mentioned. Acres are already square area.
- Ralph Edwards sends people to break into Lois' apartment and mess it up, for the sake of his game show. I'm pretty sure that's illegal.

Superdickery:

- Temporarily deafens the studio audience of a radio show by yelling loudly, on purpose, so they can't hear him

Power Tracker:

- Low Herald Level. Expect this to remain the same for a while, unless the feats start to ramp up a lot faster than before.

Action Comics #128

Notes:

Feat Catalogue:

- Visits the captains of the best football teams in the state and asks them all to lend him players for a game, all in 30 minutes
- Leaves the audience of a football game and places his hat and glasses on a dummy as he changes into Superman and appears on the field, all too fast for Lois or anyone else in the crowd to perceive

Weirdness:

Superdickery:

- Kicks a little kid on the intro page. The narration even lampshades this.

Power Tracker:

- Low Herald Level, again.

 

[Endless Mike]

Action Comics #129

Notes:

- This issue features a defrosted caveman (or at least, someone claiming to be one). Didn't we do this gimmick already, in issue #44?
- There's an advertisement in this one for the first issue of the then-new Superboy title. I do plan to eventually cover that as well.

Feat Catalogue:

- Flies from Metropolis to the North Atlantic in a seemingly short but unspecified timeframe
- Pushes an iceberg away from a ship so it won't collide with it
- Smashes the iceberg to pieces
- Puts a car back together at super speed after a "caveman" ripped it apart (yeah...)
- Takes giant model dinosaurs from a natural history museum and uses steel cables to manipulate them like puppets
- Destroys two more icebergs by smashing them together

Weirdness:

- Oh boy, where to even begin. This one is a lot weirder and more Silver Age-y than the last caveman story we had. First of all, a movie studio made a deal with a bunch of anthropologists where they would plant a bunch of caveman dummies in the ice and let the scientists discover them, in order to promote the studio, and in return they would pay for a new laboratory for the scientists. The scientists saw no problem with this plan.
- When Superman found one of the dummies and took it to the scientists (which they weren't expecting to happen), they somehow had a trained circus strongman waiting in their laboratory, ready to substitute for the dummy in order to play the role of the caveman.
- Said circus strongman apparently had actual super strength, with Superman declaring he had the strength of a dozen men. He also broke through a solid wall, tore a door off its hinges, jumped down onto a car going down the street from a building wall, and tore the car apart with his bare hands.
- Also, no one seemed suspicious that the 'caveman' spoke English.
- The 'caveman' also climbed a sign and ate a lightbulb from it, pretending to think it was fruit. That's commitment to the part.
- Also, even though it was the movie studio's idea, no one initially raised any questions about the supposed reanimated caveman being given a part in a movie
- There was also the commonly-repeated claim that cavemen and dinosaurs coexisted (although in the DCU, you never know)
- The actor played the role so well that he began to believe he was a real caveman at one point.
- And finally, throughout the story there was the frighteningly sexist narrative that Lois (and many other women) wanted to be treated brutally like a stereotypical caveman would treat women (conking them over the head with a club and dragging them by the hair, etc.)

Spoiler: Yikes. Although there are apparently female fans of "Gor"...

Superdickery:

- Terrifies the public by manipulating giant dinosaur models, making them appear real
- He says the museum let him 'borrow' the models, but they probably didn't give permission to damage them like he seemingly did.

Power Tracker:

- Nothing here to change the Low Herald Level classification.

Action Comics #130

Notes:

Feat Catalogue:

- Another bullet timing feat, as he blocks fire from two different machine guns firing on a hostage simultaneously from opposite directions. The narration says he can outfly the fastest bullet, and even that he is in two places at once (although the latter claim seems like hyperbole)
- Breaks through a wall to intercept a thrown stick of dynamite, and flies it into the sky where it detonates harmlessly, as he tanks the explosion
- Tears apart an old wrecked sailing ship, repairs it, and puts it back together, making it seaworthy, in minutes

Spoiler: Not impressive compared to his FTL feats, but good reactions

Weirdness:

- The villains in this issue are pirates who have a submarine disguised as an octopus. Really. Even the characters in the story admit it's far-fetched.

Superdickery:

Power Tracker:

- Still Low Herald Level.

Action Comics #131

Notes:

- In this issue, Clark is temporarily fired from the Daily Planet, and tries to get a job at other newspapers, including the Daily Bugle (not the one run by J. Jonah Jameson)
- We see Superman's speed have an unintended consequence here, as he accidentally creates a small tornado that lifts a bunch of feathers from a mattress in a garbage dump to interfere with his photography
- Superman being phased into the fourth dimension by Luthor's "atom scrambler" may be an early version of the Phantom Zone concept.


Feat Catalogue:

- Changes into Superman so fast Lois can't see it happening
- Intercepts a ricocheting bullet before it hits Lois
- Easily rips open an armored car
- Sees some barrels of ball bearings falling off a truck, and, before they hit the road, flies off and takes a chamber from a concrete mixer and returns, and uses it to collect all of the ball bearings
- Sees power lines falling on a building, then rushes off to his apartment to grab a camera and returns before they fall all the way
- Repairs the power lines while using super speed to film himself doing so
- Accidentally creates a tornado
- Flies from Luthor's base (location unspecified, but hinted to be fairly distant) to the Daily Planet in seconds
- While rendered invisible and intangible, he can still manipulate electric fields, enough to type a message on an electric typewriter
- Reshapes Luthor's "atom scrambler" machine into a metal ball and chain links

Feat Catalogue (non-Superman):

- Lex Luthor invents an "atom scrambler", which is essentially a teleportation device that can grab anything from anywhere in the world and teleport it to the device's location, if the target has a special receiver planted on it. He demonstrates it by teleporting a dog from 2000 miles away.
- The device can also teleport things away from its location, as he teleports two henchmen to California
- Accidentally teleporting Superman, he keeps him scrambled "in the 4th dimension", rendering him intangible, and then also invisible

**

- Lois Lane had an ammonia bomb disguised as a tube of lipstick. What.

Spoiler: This is a pretty good invention, TBH

Spoiler: I guess this is a normal thing for a reporter to have...?

Weirdness:

- Lois' aforementioned lipstick bomb

Superdickery:

- Destroys Luthor's atom scrambler device, saying it's too dangerous to exist. Except he probably knows how to build another one anyway, and a working model could be of great interest to more ethical scientists.

Power Tracker:

- He couldn't escape from or reverse the effects of the atom scrambler on his own, but that still doesn't stop him from being Low Herald Level.

Action Comics #132

Notes:

- This issue had the archive error, so I got my scans from a different source
- Superman travels through time for the first time (in this title)
- Clark's foster father is named in this issue as Silas Kent, not Jonathan Kent. Blame it on Earth-2/hypertime shenanigans, I guess.
- The time travel in this issue seems to work on a predestination model, as Clark reads about his exploits as Superman in the past before going back in time and performing them

Feat Catalogue:

- Changes to Superman and stops a runaway car, seemingly before it can go more than a few feet
- Uses his super breath to push a woman out of the way of a bullet before it hits her (again, realistically this would kill her just as surely as the bullet, but what are you gonna do)
- Grabs a half dollar coin, creates a dent in it with his thumb, and places it in his pocket, all too fast for a watching newsboy to see
- Uses his X-ray vision to read part of an old document that had been erased
- Builds a fortress to protect his family members, who are being targeted by an assassin
- Travels back in time by flying at 'cosmic speed', from 1949 to 1878
- Travels further back in time, to 1824
- Pulls a barge down a river, faster than 100 horses could
- Travels back to 1779
- Stokes a fire with his super breath, while creating shoes for 100 horses with his super strength
- Interesting limitation, apparently he can't take a note with him from the past into the future as it would alter history (although I bet this restriction will be forgotten in future issues)
- Copies a note written by George Washington into rock behind a waterfall using his finger, and somehow determines by the rate of erosion the moment, down to a few minutes, where there will be a rockslide that reveals it 170 years later.
- Travels back to the present

Spoiler: How many people would die if powers like this had realistic consequences?

Spoiler: Let's do the time warp again!

Spoiler: He can't take the physical note to the future, but he can take his memory of what it says?

Spoiler: Somehow this is even less plausible than the time travel

Weirdness:

- While in the past, disguises himself with a fake mustache. Why he felt the need to do this, when no one would know who he was in the past, or why he felt the mustache alone was enough, is a mystery.
- Traveling further into the past, he the adopts muttonchops, supposedly to blend in (yet he's still wearing his costume). I have a feeling he was just doing this to try out different facial hair styles.
- In the year 1779, he dons a wig

Superdickery:

Power Tracker:

- Such casual and controlled time travel is a great power, one that many Herald tier characters don't have. But in terms of overall stats he's still Low Herald Level.

 

[Endless Mike]

Action Comics #133

Notes:

- In this issue, Metropolis has a centennial celebration. But didn't they have a sesquicentennial back in issue #105?

Feat Catalogue:

- Uses some kind of glow-in-the-dark material to write huge letters in the sky at night (considering how blase they were about such things back then, it may have been radioactive...)
- Smashes a solid slab of marble and, in seconds, reshapes each chunk into precise shapes in order to build a miniature replica of Metropolis.
- Uses X-ray vision to see an erupting volcano in Asia Minor from Metropolis
- Digs through the center of an erupting volcano, then digs a tunnel to a nearby lake, bringing the water in to cool the volcano (see note in Superdickery section)
- Best (somewhat) quantifiable speed feat yet, he travels thousands of light-years and back within minutes
- While thousands of light-years away from Earth, he is somehow able to see (and hear(?)) people from that distance in the past
- Digs up the ruins of ancient Troy and carries them to Metropolis and then back

Spoiler: But sound doesn't... this isn't even... GAH!

Weirdness:

- Awkward line: "Why, you're professor Lurie, the famous woman scientist!" I like how they have to specifically point out that she's a woman.
- A contest is held to find "the world's most perfect girl" to match Superman. They do this by drawing an idealized body figure outline and trying to find a woman who most exactly matches those measurements. Somehow I doubt this would fly today.
- Even though it turns out to be a fraud, a scientist demonstrates a time machine with the intention of bringing a "perfect woman" from the past. No one is at all alarmed at the prospect of messing with history for the sake of a cheap publicity stunt.
- Same as with the fake caveman before, no one questions the fact that "Helen of Troy" speaks English.
- She even states "You brought me back from the year 1183 B.C." - and no one other than Superman is tipped off that she's a fraud by this
- Superman travels faster than light into deep space to see and hear historical figures from thousands of years ago. While I could chalk up his ability to hear things in space to his nebulously-defined super hearing, the weirdest part is that he somehow records the sound with a mundane recording device...
- It is treated as if Troy was Helen's home city, rather than the place she was kidnapped and taken to
- Also, she refers to the gods by their Roman names, even though in the time she was supposedly from, they would have used the Greek names

Superdickery:

- If Superman had tried that maneuver with the volcano in real life, it would have had the opposite effect - the water would become steam and cause a dangerous explosive eruption.
- Instantly falls for the fake "Helen of Troy" and tries everything he can to win her favor. He says he was just trying to expose her scheme, but he had no qualms about making Lois feel jealous.
- Vandalizes an archaeological site for the purpose of impressing a woman (or pretending to... either way he still vandalized it)

Power Tracker:

- A back-of-the-envelope calc for the FTL feat gives at least tens of millions of times c, which is speed enough to qualify for mid or even high herald, but in terms of overall stats he's still Low Herald Level.

Action Comics #134

Notes:

- In this issue, Metropolis is shown to be 1000 miles away from the fictional town of Powder Valley (there is a real Powder Valley in Pennsylvania, but this one is stated to be in the American west)

Feat Catalogue:

- Finds discarded railroad tracks and, within seconds, bends them into different shapes in order to assemble a perfect replica of the printing press used by the newspapers in the city
- Uses X-ray vision to speed read a huge pile of letters in maybe around a second (Perry and Lois said it would take them a week to read all of them)
- Using a precise application of super breath, blows the pile of letters on the desk into the air so that 3 specific ones land right in front of Perry.
- Digs a large circular room underground while being pursued by a herd of stampeding cattle, in order to lead them in circles so they tire themselves out and can be returned safely to the ranch they came from
- Finds an underground stream and digs a hole into it to create a fountain on the surface in seconds

Weirdness:

- A cowboy rides into downtown Metropolis on a horse, ties his horse to a column in the lobby, and when a bellhop tells him he can't do that, he threatens the guy with a revolver. He faces absolutely no repercussions for this.
- At one point, the narration says that Superman twirls "the largest lasso ever handled by man", yet the art makes it look normal sized (certainly not as big as the one made of steel cable that he used to catch an armored car in issue #124)

Superdickery:

- Chastises Lois for getting herself into trouble as he's rescuing her from a stampeding herd of cattle (and she was only in danger that time because the rocks collapsed under her, so it wasn't even her fault)

Power Tracker:

- Still Low Herald Level.

Action Comics #135

Notes:

- This issue features a traffic safety PSA involving Superman as one of the many ads

Feat Catalogue:

- Stops a speeding train from crashing into a wall by bracing it with his body
- Uses his microscopic vision to see that a "petrified" human still has pores in their skin
- In a split second, grabs two long metal girders and uses them to stop a drawbridge from closing as a ship passes under it
- Carefully examines thousands of geological maps in one minute
- Escapes from behind a door in a split second before an electric tripwire is activated, moving too fast to be seen
- Carves realistic statues of various criminals at super speed

Weirdness:

- A scientist demonstrates his "petrifying gas" by turning a dog into stone in front of Lois and another reporter. They never object to or even mention the ethics of this.
- The plot involves a criminal scientist extorting money by threatening to petrify people with a fake petrifying gas, when he really kidnaps them and replaces them with lifelike statues. Except he somehow manages to sneak the statues in to moving vehicles in seconds without anyone seeing, and know what positions the "petrified" people would have been in.

Superdickery:

Power Tracker:

- Nothing too notable here, so Low Herald Level, as expected.

Action Comics #136

Notes:

Feat Catalogue:

- Lifts a bridge so construction workers can put a new pier underneath it
- Lifts and carries a large ship out of the water with one hand
- Throws a shot put into space
- Paints a giant picture of himself on a rock face in one minute
- Pushes over a condemned building with his pinky finger
- Constructs a building in 10 minutes
- Lifts a mountain and places it back down backwards (the art makes it look a lot smaller than it probably is, though)
- Compresses a huge chunk of iron ore with his bare hands, creating heat in order to separate the iron from it, then forms it into an iron bar and bends it into a horseshoe shape
- Pulls a large metal ball and chain away, against the force of a giant electromagnet he created (which he claimed to be the strongest magnet in the world, and later attracted a swarm of meteors to it, away from Metropolis)
- Yells so loudly it causes his voice to echo in a valley for days, causing people to desert the area
- Sees a group of tens of thousands of meteors heading for Metropolis from days away. He said he could have intercepted them while they were still in space, but some might get through.
- Takes a large boiler and uses it to create a giant cloud of smoke over Metropolis
- Flies miles away from Metropolis in under a second
- Intercepts a bunch of meteors before they hit Lois (they were stated to be capable of wiping out Metropolis if they hit, so city level durability feat?)

Spoiler: Stopping meteors. Also, a sexist narrator

Weirdness:

- The narration attributes Lois investigating the magnet to her "feminine curiosity". Yeesh.

Superdickery:

- The entire premise of this story is Superman acting like a vain glory hound, showing off to try to get media attention. This was part of a plan to try to hide the fact that a bunch of meteors were going to hit Metropolis, but he certainly could have come up with a less douchey way to do it.
- Also, that smokescreen he created probably gave lots of people breathing problems.

Power Tracker:

- Not being confident he could stop all the meteors is a bit of a low-end, but he's still Low Herald Level.

 

[Endless Mike]

Action Comics #137

Notes:

- I'm pretty sure there's no such thing in real life as a "V3 Rocket", as shown in this comic. There was a V3 gun developed by the Nazis as a successor to the V2 rocket, though.
- The cover on this one is very misleading. It implies that Lois will get superpowers, but what actually happens is that a bunch of thugs deliberately shoot blanks at her as part of their boss' scheme, hence why she is unhurt by the bullets.

Feat Catalogue:

- Flies from Metropolis to "Newtown" (distance unknown) in a seeming instant
- Starts a controlled earthquake by rhythmically punching the ground, opening a pre-existing fissure in order to rescue a trapped miner. He somehow did this in a way to ensure that the already-collapsing mine wouldn't collapse any more.
- Flies from Metropolis to somewhere in the ocean, in what the narration describes as "a lightning flight"
- Creates frictional heat by rubbing a steel cable at super speed, making a submarine it's attached to so hot that an octopus lets go of it
- Intercepts a lightning bolt before it hits a guy
- Flies up (faster than light, according to the narration) to intercept a V3 rocket, and breaks it open
- Rescues a guy from the rocket, catches the falling rocket and throws it past escape velocity, then catches the guy before he falls to the ground.
- Uses microscopic vision to identify and match the fingerprints on an object with those of a known criminal
- Uses super breath to shake a house so much it throws the people inside off of their feet, and they think it's a tornado
- Picks up said house and flies it into the air, then returns it to its original position
- Intercepts a bullet aimed at another guy before it hits him

Spoiler: Throwing a rocket into space

Weirdness:

- A crime boss' plan is to trick a witness into thinking he has a magic ring that makes him invulnerable so he'll take crazy risks and kill himself. This would have actually worked if Superman had not intervened.
- Lois gets her hands on the ring and believes it's real at the end of the story.

Superdickery:

Power Tracker:

- Low Herald Level, no change here.

Action Comics #138

Notes:

- Superman finds some T-Rex fossils in an area near Metropolis. In real life, they lived in what is now the western US, when Metropolis is strongly implied to be in the eastern US. But I'll not quibble about it.

Feat Catalogue:

- Prevents the steel structure of a partially-completed skyscraper (made out of inferior, weak steel) from collapsing
- Forms some steel pipes into a funnel to make a hydraulic water jet
- Flies into space, grabs a meteor, and pushes it to Earth where it lands in a swamp
- Uses super breath to blow away the steam created by the meteor hitting the swamp
- Another use of super breath, brings a bunch of thunderclouds together
- Turns coal into diamond by squeezing it, in a split second, while hidden by a lightning strike
- Lifts a building, angling it to reflect sunlight on the diamonds he created
- Digs a trench through a small peninsula, turning it into an island

Weirdness:

Superdickery:

- Decides to help a young amateur reporter get better stories than Lois, just to show her up for getting so many good ones
- Lifts a building off its foundations just to reflect some sunlight
- There was a farm on the peninsula he turned into an island. Now the people who live there will need a boat to travel anywhere.

Power Tracker:

- Nothing really notable here, so still Low Herald Level.

Action Comics #139

Notes:

- Clark claims that his job as a reporter gives him a hundred underworld and police contacts that can help him fight crime
- The narration says that the founders of Metropolis were around "centuries ago". I thought it was 150, then later only 100 years?
- There's a PSA in this issue featuring Green Arrow

Feat Catalogue:

- Eats and swallows a bunch of bullets
- Uses super breath to push the wall of a collapsing building back up, and then rebuilds it brick by brick in 1 second
- Throws a cannonball faster than the cannon that was designed to fire it could
- Tracks an escaping criminal in an armored car with his telescopic X-ray vision
- Uses intense X-ray vision to set a bridge on fire (seemingly the first appearance of heat vision in this title, even if it's not referred to as such)
- Uses ventriloquism to make a balloon of himself seem to talk

Spoiler: Heat vision? About time

Weirdness:

- Metropolis has a wax museum with a statue of Superman. In this issue, Clark Kent gets a statue too. Nobody makes the connection of how similar their features are.

Superdickery:

- Bullies Perry into giving him a raise, even lifting him by his shirt with one hand

Power Tracker:

- Still Low Herald Level.

Action Comics #140

Notes:

- This issue is dated January 1950, so we've officially left the 1940s behind
- Superman says that there were 92 elements known to man in this issue. Even when this was published, that wasn't the case - there were 97. Today, there are 118.
- Superman's X-ray vision is noted to have properties that normal X-rays don't
- There's a PSA featuring Superboy in this comic

Spoiler: His X-ray vision doesn't work like normal X-rays (as if we didn't know that already)

Feat Catalogue:

- Shouts loud enough for a pilot in an airplane high in the sky to hear him clearly
- Digs into a rock formation, extracts metal ore, "cold-welds" it, forms it into wires, and builds a giant wire fence enclosing several square miles, within seconds
- Makes branches and a tree trunk into a net before several parachuters can reach the ground, and catches them in it
- Makes sawdust and resin from trees into plastic, and creates a dome to cover the top of the fence in less than a minute
- Breaks through the plastic dome he built, which the narration referred to as "unbreakable" (within quotes). Not sure how durable it was actually supposed to be, though.
- Throws an alien plant into space (it comes right back, though)
- Apparently discovered a new element that he oh-so-creatively calls "Supermanium"
- Somehow isolates each of 93 elements and subjects the plant to all of them, to no avail
- Grabs a bunch of scrap metal and reaches a nearby mountaintop in seconds, where he constructs a giant X-ray machine
- Using the machine to amplify his X-ray vision, combined with normal X-rays, he destroys the plant, which is vulnerable to them

Spoiler: Quite the hyperbole (although the thing is dangerous)

Weirdness:

- Superman battles a hostile extraterrestrial plant in this issue. At one point he says it could "literally chew up the universe", although that seems like pretty obvious hyperbole to me.

Superdickery:

Power Tracker:

- Low Herald Level. Still waiting for some planetary feats.

 

[Endless Mike]

Action Comics #141

Notes:

- This marks the first appearance of kryptonite in this title. It also marks the first appearance of Lex Luthor's synthetic kryptonite, period.
- Kryptonite is referred to as an element in this issue. It sometimes is or isn't, depending on the continuity.
- This issue had the archive error, so sorry about the low quality scans
- There's a PSA in this comic featuring Batman and Robin

Spoiler: Kryptonite. You can wager we'll be seeing a lot of this stuff from now on

Spoiler: This PSA is quite relevant today

Feat Catalogue:

- Travels miles down under the ocean to find a pearl in a giant oyster
- Flies from the bottom of the ocean to the moon in a matter of seconds
- Shatters a glacier in the south pole to get a sample of a chemical inside
- Even while dying from Luthor's synthetic kryptonite, manages to uses his heat vision (still referred to as X-ray vision here) to boil and destroy a test tube filled with acid
- Is unaffected by the blinding red lights of one of Luthor's gadgets
- Takes the front wall off of a bank and then puts it back

Feat Catalogue (non-Superman):

- Lex Luthor builds a car with an extendable mechanical grappling arm that he uses to kidnap Lois as he drives by
- Puts Lois in a room with guns covering the walls, that will automatically fire if Superman gets within 50 yards (you'd figure Superman would still be fast enough to stop them, but maybe he's actually worried about hurting Lois by moving her at super speed for once)
- Creates synthetic kryptonite
- Uses a "supra-red lantern" (no relation to Atrocitus or his Corps) to dazzle and blind all of the guards and employees at a bank
- Has a device that would supposedly let him open a locked bank vault (he never gets a chance to test it, though)
- Built a special Geiger counter to detect kryptonite radiation
- Builds an "expanding bomb", which starts out small enough to fit in a suitcase, but quickly grows larger than a car

Weirdness:

- One of the items Luthor requests Superman to collect is "pollen from the man-eating homocessandi plant deep in the Asiatic jungles". This is apparently a normal thing. It's also in the process of trying to eat a baby elephant when he finds it.

Superdickery:

- In retaliation for kidnapping Lois, Superman nearly kills Luthor by throwing him in front of a plane's propellers

Power Tracker:

- Low Herald Level. Going to need some more planetary+ feats to have a chance of moving up to mid.

Action Comics #142

Notes:

- The opening narration states that kryptonite radiation can paralyze Superman and only Superman. That's because other surviving Kryptonians weren't introduced into continuity yet at this point.
- In the previous issue, the synthetic kryptonite appeared white. Here, it appears in its more traditional green color.
- There's a PSA in this comic featuring Wonder Woman

Feat Catalogue:

- Uses friction to weld a broken water pipe back together
- Spots a pickpocket in a large crowd while fixing a broken lamppost
- Lifts and carries a large building
- While being weakened by the synthetic kryptonite, throws the building he's carrying out towards the sea
- After recovering from the kryptonite, he flies out to sea, where the building has still not landed, and uses super breath to move a navy ship of the way before the building hits it (he says he couldn't reach the building in time to stop it physically... I guess he was still recovering)
- Catches the building from underwater (before it hits the seafloor) and carries it to where he was originally taking it to
- Throws red hot rivets into some criminals' car doors from atop a nearby building, sealing them inside, as well as disabling the cars' windows and wheels
- Uses a steel girder to swat away the chunk of kryptonite launched at him from a bazooka, then does the same thing again when it is fired with more gunpowder at higher speed

Weirdness:

- Superman was apparently scheduled to move a building to a new location. They have him doing menial labor.
- After getting their hands on Luthor's synthetic kryptonite, some criminals just use it to continually fend off Superman while committing crimes. For some reason they never think of using it to actually kill him.

Superdickery:

- Some from Lois this time - she shoves the chunk of kryptonite in Clark's face because she suspects he's Superman. Luckily, its lethality had worn off at that point.

Power Tracker:

- Still Low Herald Level, not much more to say.

Action Comics #143

Notes:

- Lois is shown to live in an apartment with a roommate named Peggy
- There's a PSA featuring Superman in this comic

Feat Catalogue:

- Arranges rockets on the Statue of Liberty "with mathematical precision" and times them to go off at exactly the right moment to present the illusion of the statue's torch holding a bouquet of fiery flowers
- Somehow skywrites a message by creating smoke
- Squeezes another lump of coal into a diamond
- Rearranges railroad tracks to go in a loop, and and uses super breath to get a train car moving around it at 100 mph, all in a split second
- Absorbs an atomic chain reaction from a core of plutonium that could supposedly "wipe out the world"
- Uses X-ray vision to ruin photo negatives again

Spoiler: Not sure about this feat TBH

Weirdness:

- Lois allows herself to be held at gunpoint by a criminal just to try to test Superman's loyalty to her

Superdickery:

- When Lois is pretending to be the woman that Superman is supposedly engaged to, he sees through the disguise with his X-ray vision, but still insults Lois in front of her as if she weren't there
- Tells Lois to her face that he chose another girl over her because he preferred brains over beauty

Power Tracker:

- Is the plutonium thing a planetary durability feat? I doubt it, because even if we take the scientist's words at face value (and there is some precedent for that, with the explosion of the atomic device in issue #124 that 'nearly rocked the solar system'), it was still stated to be a chain reaction so it's possible he just stopped it before it could proceed to that level. It's also possible it could have just been life wiping at maximum extent and not actually planet destroying. I'm not sure how impressive it is really. Anyway he's still Low Herald Level.

Action Comics #144

Notes:

- Clark states that the very first story he wrote for the Daily Planet was about how Superman stopped a racketeering ring
- Most of this issue is told in the form of a flashback
- It's shown that Perry White once spoke at Clark's high school, and got him interested in becoming a reporter
- Jobs that Clark had in Metropolis before becoming a reporter were a taxi driver, a police officer (only collecting tickets at the aquarium, though), and a door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesman
- We see the return of Superman's laboratory, from issue #32

Feat Catalogue:

- Kicks holes through the floor of a taxicab and runs on the street, propelling it faster than it could normally drive
- Stands in front of and stops a speeding armor-plated limousine (also showing that he isn't moved at all when it hits him and wrecks itself)
- Rips the armored limousine apart
- His heart sounds like an anvil when someone listens to it with a stethoscope
- When taking an eye test, accidentally uses his X-ray vision to read the chart in the next room instead of the one he's supposed to read
- Paralyzes an octopus with a punch while underwater
- Moves at super speed so it looks like he left a building through a window, but in reality he slipped behind a curtain and changed back to Clark Kent
- Creates 10 chemicals in his laboratory which, when combined, created a gas that only he could smell, in order to help track down some criminals
- Apparently has a super sense of smell, being able to detect scenes that others can't, from anywhere in the city
- Blocks machinegun bullets with his hand, deflecting them into nearby slot machines (unsure if that last part was intentional, though)

Spoiler: SCIENCE!

Spoiler: Super sense of smell

Weirdness:

- The chemicals and the laboratory probably qualify for this section

Superdickery:

- Ruins a perfectly good taxi
- Paralyzes an aquarium octopus

Power Tracker:

- The flashback takes place at the very beginning of his career in Metropolis, and the Superboy comic had already started at this point, so he probably had a lot of feats from that period better than his very early Action Comics performances, but he did seem relatively slow compared to his usual self here, so I'll downgrade him to High Meta Level for the flashback. For the scenes taking place in the present, he's of course Low Herald Level.

 

[Endless Mike]

Action Comics #145

Notes:

- The cover refers to Superman as "The World's Champion Hero". I wasn't aware there was a championship.

Feat Catalogue:

- Changes into Superman too fast for Lois to see
- Uses heat vision (here still called X-ray vision) to melt a pane of window glass in the split second before a car crashes into it
- Stops a speeding out of control car with one hand
- Somehow repairs the window he melted, off-panel, so it's never explained how he did it
- Crushes a gun in his hand and molds it into a working pair of handcuffs
- Defeats 100 boxers in a row using one hand, having to be careful not to injure them
- His own X-ray vision is reflected directly back at his eyes and it only blinds him for an instant and temporarily annoys him
- Uses super breath to scatter a bale of hay into the air to blind a criminal
- Intercepts a bullet fired at Lois from close range (the distance he started from is unknown, though)

Weirdness:

- A scientist creates a new substance by "uniting protons" by heating them to 25,000 degrees F. That isn't anywhere near hot enough to mess with atomic nuclei.
- Said scientist uses this substance to create a miniature horseshoe with "force-repellent" properties. Seemingly the way it works is that anything moving towards it at any appreciable speed is repelled back with even greater force. He decides to test it by swinging a baseball bat at it and is sent flying across the room.
- He also created a wastebasket with properties that can nullify those of the horseshoe. Really.
- Also, after the horseshoe's power wears off, the scientist who made it forgot how to make another one, and apparently never took any notes on the process.

Supedickery:

- Fully intends to beat a man much weaker than him into unconsciousness. Despite saying how much he was holding back, when his punch was reversed on him by the horseshoe, it was enough to temporarily knock him out. So yeah, he probably would have killed the guy.
- Insults Lois for putting herself in danger because she thought the horseshoe still worked, even though its power wore off

Power Tracker:

- He was overwhelmed by the power of the horseshoe redirecting and multiplying his own strength back at him twice, although in both cases he was unprepared and not expecting it. Still doesn't change him from Low Herald Level.

Action Comics #146

Notes:

Feat Catalogue:

- Easily subdues two lions
- Uses telescopic vision to see that the Metropolis Zoo has room for the lions
- Throws them across town to the zoo (uh... what? See Superdickery section)
- Flies from Metropolis to NYC in an unspecified timeframe, but it's implied to be very quick
- Picks up and lifts a large ship in a split second
- Picks up and lifts the animated Statue of Liberty and places her back on her pedestal
- Flies underwater, thousands of fathoms deep to the ocean floor to find a wrecked ship
- Takes old cannons off of multiple shipwrecks on the seafloor, bends them into the shapes of anchors and chains, and uses them to tie up the animated Statue of Liberty (again, see Superdickery section)
- Catches an animated statue of Lois (thinking it was the real thing) before it hits the ground after being thrown off a building
- Intercepts a giant thrown discus from another animated statue and smashes it to pieces before it can hit a crowd
- Knocks over a giant animated statue of himself
- Repairs a dam at super speed
- Knocks down the statue again, making it fall on the road in order to block Luthor's escape

Feat Catalogue (non-Superman):

- Lex Luthor creates a "life-gun" ray gun that can bring inanimate matter to life. It's hilarious how they try to justify this scientifically.
- With this gun, he brings to life a statue of Stonewall Jackson (complete with his horse), two statues of lions, a statue of a dog, the Statue of Liberty, a statue of Lois Lane, a discus thrower statue, and a giant statue of Superman
- He can also apparently make the statues do what he wants, as he somehow makes the animated Superman statue smash a dam
- The statues turn back to stone once the gun is destroyed

Spoiler: Of course! Don't you know anything about science!?

Weirdness:

- Upon hearing about statues coming to life, Superman's first thought is that it's one of Luthor's inventions behind it. He turns out to be right, but you would think that the more natural assumption would be Myxzptlk, as this kind of thing fits more with his powers and MO than anyone else.
- Luthor apparently climbs the outside of a building and looks through a skylight when following Lois
- Superman somehow knows that Luthor has been using his life-ray gun to bring statues to life, even though he had never actually shown it or explained it to him at that point

Superdickery:

- After subduing two lions, he literally throws them across town to the zoo. Somehow they survive uninjured, but realistically that should have killed them.
- Despite supposedly having such great respect for it, when Luthor brings the Statue of Liberty to life, he responds by chaining it down.

Spoiler: I'm not sure if I should reference Ghostbusters 2, or point out the irony of chaining up the Statue of LIBERTY

Power Tracker:

- Still Low Herald Level

Action Comics #147

Notes:

- There is a PSA featuring Superboy in this issue

Feat Catalogue:

- Digs to reach the city's underground electrical wiring (and fixes the hole later)
- Fixes a sabotaged electric cable by using "super-pressure" to weld it back together, being unharmed by the electric current
- Dives underwater and raises a sunken Viking longboat from the ocean floor
- Uses X-ray vision to determine that a car's breaks are about to fail
- Moves a road underneath a car so it doesn't fall off a cliff during a turn
- Lifts a car over a truck so they don't collide
- Brings an out of control car to a gentle stop before it collides with a train
- Tears down an old factory building and rebuilds it into a set of cottages
- Lifts and carries an old Navy destroyer from the docks into a park
- Uses heat/X-ray vision to fuse a telephone wire which causes the phone to ring
- Uses ventriloquism to fake a phone call from Clark Kent

Weirdness:

- More off-brand copyright avoidance, with "Stacy's" department store
- The premise of this issue involves Clark having to temporarily take the job of writing the romance advise column at the Daily Planet. Yeah, really.

Superdickery:

- Lets a guy drive around a dangerous curve and into many near-collisions with failing breaks and barely saves him, just to scare him into driving more safely
- Forces Lois to take the job as the romance advice columnist at the end of the story, when she doesn't want it any more than he does

Power Tracker:

- Nothing to note here, so still Low Herald Level.

Action Comics #148

Notes:

- Metropolis is stated to be on an island in this issue
- The rule that he can't take anything from the past back to the future with him is still present in this issue. Also, time travel seems to still work on the predestination model.

Feat Catalogue:

- Takes a bunch of giant boulders and uses them to create new land adjacent to the island of Metropolis
- Picks up and moves a skyscraper to the new peninsula he built
- Breaks through the time barrier to travel back to the year 1644
- Digs underground and reshapes a rock at super speed
- Inhales all the smoke from a fire into his nostrils
- Flies at invisible speed into a stormcloud, creates air currents to disperse it, and creates a rainbow
- Weaves vines into ropes in seconds
- Bends trees into bows and uses branches to create giant arrows, then uses super speed to fire multiple arrows at once from them
- Intercepts the same arrows he fired before they hit anything, the narration saying he does so at lightspeed
- Travels back to the present
- Reads through an entire building full of history books, then flies to the Metropolis museum to retrieve an artifact and return to the courtroom, all in under 5 minutes

Spoiler: In case you forgot he could do this...

Weirdness:

- The premise of this issue is that the land that is now home to Metropolis was sold by American Indians in the past, but an unscrupulous descendant of their tribe uses historical documents to prove that the sale wasn't valid so he can claim ownership of the city and extort the people living there. Superman goes back in time to find out the truth, and it's shown that the Indians were willing to sell the land in exchange for guns so they could make war on other tribes that they had supposedly made peace with. The tribe is also shown to be dishonest and deceitful, faking religious omens and making deals under false pretenses in order to justify their war goals. Meanwhile, the Europeans of the past are shown in a completely positive light, without even a hint of wrongdoing. I trust that I don't need to explain why this is problematic.

Superdickery:

- Wears a stereotypical Indian headdress to a costume ball. Well, this was 1950.

Power Tracker:

- We have the return of his power of time travel, which will become much more frequent when we enter the Silver Age. Still, nothing to change the ranking from Low Herald Level.

 

[Endless Mike]

Action Comics #149

Notes:

- Jor-El's name is spelled with the E in this issue, although the Golden Age version was later retconned, like his son, to be spelled without an E
- Again, it's shown that his X-ray vision can't see through lead. I'll probably stop noting this soon, rather only noting exceptions.
- Superman is shown to have a "secret hideaway", which seems to be the same place as his laboratory which has been seen several times before. It appears to be a normal building. He also has a "special police radio" there.
- There's a PSA featuring Superman in this comic. Interestingly, it's in black and white, as opposed to the rest of the comic, which is in color.

Feat Catalogue:

- Flies from Metropolis to the Himalayas (stated to be 6000 miles away) in moments
- Takes the icy cap off of a mountain and places it in a volcano, trying to stop it from erupting. This would probably have the opposite effect IRL.
- Uses super breath to blow away the steam from the volcano from a village
- Bends a sewer pipe to save someone trapped inside
- Lifts and carries a stack of presents so heavy that it was causing the Daily Planet building to collapse, and flies with it to his hideout
- Sees what's going on in his hideout from a distance with telescopic X-ray vision
- Was apparently working on a chemical formula to develop an experimental smokescreen for the Navy
- Interestingly, he says he can't use his super breath to blow away the chemical fog, as it's heavier than air and would just settle back down again. Seems kind of inconsistent.
- Flies around the fog at super speed, condensing it into a solid, which he then throws into the ocean

Feat Catalogue (non-Superman):

- Kryptonians had technology to record a person's thoughts and memories on discs, which could be projected as holographic images, activated by thought.
- Jor-El is stated to have been the greatest scientist on Krypton

Weirdness:

- Lois sleeps with a giant picture of Superman in front of her bed, and daydreams about him so much she burns her toast for breakfast. Kind of an unhealthy obsession there.
- A device from Krypton, containing records of the planet, crash - lands on Earth. What's weird is that the records were written in English.
- Sexist narration: "And as Lois rushes back to work, a typical woman's scheme is born in her brain!"
- Giant orchids are a plot point in this issue. These plants do exist, but in the comic they are stated to be native to the Himalayas, and sacred to a tribe known as the Hujaks. In reality, there is no such tribe, and the plant is native to Southeast Asia instead.
- This comic shows an active volcano in the Himalayas. That is not accurate.
- The Himalayan natives in this issue speak with rather cringy stereotypical ethnic accents

Superdickery:

- Says that if he didn't have superpowers, he's marry Lois just to keep her out of trouble, but since he has them, he can keep an eye on her from a distance so he doesn't have to

Power Tracker:

- Despite the lower-end breath showing, he's still Low Herald Level.

Action Comics #150

Notes:

- The opening narration states that Superman is "the world's most famous citizen"
- The opening narration states that 6 Superman statues were discovered in places including "atop mountains no man has ever trod". On the very same page, one of the statues is said to have been found "atop the world's highest mountain". This is actually accurate, as Mount Everest was first climbed in 1953, 3 years after this comic was published.
- In the actual comic, three statues are found inside of "Mount Avery", which Superman states to be the highest mountain peak "in these parts". This mountain is fictional. It also apparently lies on the border between two states (although the states in question are never specified).

Feat Catalogue:

- Easily digs 2000 feet underground
- Punches a giant statue, made of some kind of plastic, to pieces
- Flies from Metropolis to the open ocean in an unknown, but implied to be very short, timeframe
- Lifts a wrecked Spanish galleon up from the seafloor to shallower waters
- Swims underwater, carrying another statue of himself, all the way back to Metropolis
- Flies from the Daily Planet to the "Johnstonian Museum" in moments
- Easily lifts and carries a 1000 - ton vault into space and then back
- Smashes a tunnel through a mountain "at lightning speed" in order to remove some statues
- Remains invisible by spinning at super speed
- Flies from Mount Avery back to Metropolis "in the next moment"
- Burrows underground to redirect an oil gusher to an Indian reservation
- While invisible, uses ventriloquism to make it seem like a treasure chest talked
- Travels from the open ocean back to Mount Avery, again "in the next moment"
- Digs another tunnel through the mountain and lets people use it for free

Spoiler: Not super impressive for a Low Herald, but still a pretty decent strength feat

Spoiler: Yet another method of invisibility

Weirdness:

- On the opening narration page, another statue is said to have been found "20,000 leagues under the sea". This is impossible, and a common misconception (the title of the Jules Verne novel meant horizontal distance, as in, they traveled that distance from place to place, while being underwater. It couldn't be vertical distance, as 20,000 leagues is over 80,000 km, far more than the Earth's diameter)
- Cringy, racist dialogue from an American Indian: "Great white paleface is good friend of Indian! Many thanks, Superman! How!"

Superdickery:

- The villain in this issue manipulates Superman without technically doing anything illegal, so he then tricks the guy into attacking what he thinks was one of the statues he made, but was actually the real Superman, just so he can have him arrested for assault and thrown in jail for 2 years.

Power Tracker:

- Still Low Herald Level. Going to need some more planetary or higher feats if he wants to move up.

Action Comics #151

Notes:

- Mr. Myxzptlk is once again correctly stated to be from the fifth dimension in this issue
- There's a PSA in this issue on the effectiveness of vaccines and the World Health Organization. All too relevant today.

Feat Catalogue:

- Stops a streetcar before it hits a fake Lois
- Uses his X-ray vision to overload some electric eye beams and burn them out, although it takes a while (and there are several other, quicker ways he could have escaped from this situation...)
- Uses "super-telescopic vision" to trace a trail of ink droplets through the city
- Spins at super speed to become invisible again
- Crushes a solid iron bar into a pellet too small to see
- Reprograms the machinery inside of the Luthor duplicate so that, instead of obeying the remote control commands it is given, it will attack the location the remote control signals are coming from

Feat Catalogue (non-Superman):

- Mr. Myxzptlk can create lifelike replicas of people out of living plastic
- The replica he creates of Superman can fly and has super strength

**

- Lex Luthor installs machinery in the plastic duplicates so he can make them move and speak by remote control (why Mxy couldn't just do the same with his powers, I have no idea...)
- Luthor modifies a bank's air conditioning system to use air currents to suck paper money up into the vents so he can steal it

**

The Prankster lures Superman into a room surrounded by electric eye beams, which will cause a bomb to detonate and kill innocent people if he crosses them

Weirdness:

- The villains include lead in the plastic doubles they construct so Superman can't identify them with his X-ray vision, but we know he can identify lead as something he can't see through, so wouldn't he be suspicious that what he thought were human beings had a bunch of lead in them?
- Superman builds a device that will record someone's speech and then play it back backwards. In order to try to thwart this, Mxyzptlk says his name backwards, thinking it will come out forwards, not realizing that Superman has disabled the device. But if it did play his voice backwards, how would that count for sending him back to the fifth dimension, as he wouldn't be the one saying it? And even if he said his name backwards and it was replayed forwards, he would have still said it backwards first, so then it would count.

Superdickery:

Power Tracker:

- Low Herald Level, no change yet.

Action Comics #152

Notes:

- There's a PSA featuring Superboy in this comic

Feat Catalogue:

- Superman claims to be invulnerable to any gas. However, a powdered Kryptonite gas manages to render him unconscious, but it wears off within an hour.
- Catches a bunch of objects thrown at near escape velocity (on Venus) and then throws them past that speed into space
- Flies Lois from Venus to Earth fast enough that she can just hold her breath for the trip and be fine

Spoiler: Except you can't actually hold your breath in space...

Weirdness:

- A criminal scientist says that "Superman can't be destroyed by any weapon or force! That's a scientific fact!" Yet later it's shown that he knows of and uses Kryptonite.
- Venus is shown to be inhabited by a race of advanced aliens that look human, as well as having an Earth-like atmosphere and climate

Superdickery:

- Says that he'll teach Lois "a little lesson about female vanity", and pretends that he can't identify her among a bunch of lookalikes, making her think that he'll take one of them back to Earth with him instead
- Threatens to take Lois back to Venus if she causes him trouble again

Power Tracker:

- Low Herald Level, although we are getting more interplanetary feats now.

 

[Endless Mike]

Action Comics #153

Notes:

- The primary villain in this issue is a gangster known as "Kingpin". No, not Wilson Fisk, he's from Marvel and he didn't debut until 16 years later.
- The criminal underworld puts a $100,000.00 bounty on Clark Kent in this issue. That's equivalent to over $1.1 million in today's money.

Feat Catalogue:

- Captures a bunch of escaping criminals by wrapping them up in a metal fence
- Inhales a bunch of deadly gas at super speed before it can kill Lois, and is unharmed by said gas
- Uses telescopic vision to see Lois' reflection in a man's eyes to know that she's tailing him
- Flicks a bullet to destroy a lightbulb on the other side of the room, then takes off his disguise, fills it with rags, and changes into Superman and gets outside without anyone noticing in 1 minute
- Stops his own breath for an hour, without suffering any harm
- Stops his own heart, again without suffering any harm
- Destroys an electrical transformer with his X-ray vision
- Uses telescopic X-ray vision to trigger an alarm at police headquarters from the villains' hideout

Spoiler: If I'm interpreting this right, this is a pretty incredible feat of precision

Weirdness:

- Clark manages to fool Lois with a balloon shaped like Superman. Maybe she's the one who needs glasses.
- Said balloon was held up by an "invisible wire". Not sure if it was meant to be literally invisible like the Ultra-Humanite's car, or just thin enough to seem that way.
- Apparently Superman's ability to hold his own breath for inhuman lengths of time, and even to stop his own heartbeat, is known to the public

Superdickery:

- Vandalizes a fence to catch some criminals

Power Tracker:

- Low Herald Level, no real notable feats here that would change that.

Action Comics #154

Notes:

- Superman says that lead is the only substance his X-ray vision can't penetrate
- I think this is the first time in this title that his ventriloquism has been referred to as 'super-ventriloquism'

Feat Catalogue:

- Smashes some rocks before Lois' parachute can land on them
- Uses "super-microscopic vision" to identify harmful bacteria in a stream of water
- Rearranges rocks to cause a stream to splash against them, which somehow kills the harmful bacteria (what?)
- Uses microscopic vision to tell that the support posts of a log cabin hadn't absorbed enough bacteria to have been in the soil for more than 3 days
- Smells a faint odor of mothballs on the logs used to build the log cabin, because they were shipped in the hold of a ship along with a clothing shipment
- Flies from an unnamed island in the south sea to Metropolis in seconds
- Uses 'super-ventriloquism' to make it seem as if his voice is coming from the inside of a locked vault
- Uses X-ray vision to read an entire room of records in a matter of seconds from a distance
- Builds a shelter at super speed
- Lifts a large wrecked sailing ship and carries it to shore, then repairs the ship off-panel
- Reads the story Lois is typing from a far distance using telescopic vision
- Builds a cabin at super speed, giving it running water by shaping pipes out of clay and baking them with super speed friction (still not using heat vision for some reason)
- Makes paint by crushing red sandstone and mixing it with oil squeezed from shale rock and paints the cabin
- Remodels an entire island precisely, smashing reefs, rearranging rocks, and transplanting trees, then trimming them into exact shapes, in order to fool Lois into thinking that what she saw a few days ago (Superman rescuing the ship and catching the escaped animals) never happened

Spoiler: Apparently just ordinary ventriloquism is no longer good enough

Weirdness:

- The entire premise of this one is crazy. The Daily Planet is sponsoring a contest between Lois and Clark, in which they both have to live by themselves on an uninhabited island for a week, supposedly to prove whether men or women are more resilient and resourceful. They drop them both off on parachutes, without even checking to see if there were dangerous rocks around that they could have landed on (there were).
- Robinson Crusoe is repeatedly spoken of in this issue as if he was a real person, not a character from a book. Although in the DC universe, maybe he was real.
- Superman says that "Besides England, which doesn't export timber, most finished textiles are shipped from Metropolis" - really? Just that one city in the entire world?
- A ship carrying circus animals randomly runs aground on the island
- Lois claims that she won the contest by accepting Superman's help, which proves that women are superior to men because... they can get men to do things for them. Wow, this is like... double-edged sexism against both men and women simultaneously.

Superdickery:

- Some mild sexism from Clark, but there is a lot more sexism from other characters, including Lois
- Grabs a giraffe by the tail and tosses a lion into a cage
- Destroys more coral reefs

Power Tracker:

- Still Low Herald Level

Action Comics #155

Notes:

- Perry White is said to be the president of the Magazine and News Association, which apparently has authority over many different papers and magazines. He's an important guy.
- Superman is apparently fluent in French
- There's a PSA featuring Superman in this issue

Feat Catalogue:

- Swoops down "instantly" and catches a runaway truck by using a crane
- Flies from a photographer's studio to a countess' home (distance unknown) in moments
- Flies from Metropolis out over the ocean in seconds, and then crosses to another country, while building a statue on the way
- Spins a statue so fast that bullets fired at it ricochet off without doing any damage. He also said that it would keep spinning for hours.
- Uses X-ray vision to find the combination of a vault lock
- Moves past some guards at super speed so they can't see him
- Rips apart a drawbridge and uses a segment of it to save a bus and a taxi from falling into the water
- Flies from a park in Metropolis to a suburban - looking home in "a moment"
- Uses his microscopic vision to see the reflection of someone in the eyes of a bird in a photograph
- Speaks to a woman in French

Weirdness:

- An apartment is referred to as a 'flat' in this issue. I thought that term was only used in the UK and a few other countries, not America.
- Superman distracts some foreign guards by building a statue of the dictator of their country with a built-in siren to attract them, and spins it around at super speed. Very strange.

Superdickery:

Power Tracker:

- Low Herald Level. We really need to get some more space stories if we want this to change.

Action Comics #156

Notes:

- At one point, Lois says that it is likely that Luthor owns a company as a front. An early indication of Luthor the businessman, as opposed to the mad scientist?
- This is the first time in this title that Lois legitimately gets superpowers
- When acting as "Superwoman", Lois wears a blonde wig. This not only makes her look a lot like Supergirl (who wouldn't actually debut for another 8 years), but it also shows that Lois came up with a better disguise than Clark
- Someone even suggests that the mysterious Superwoman might be a relative of Superman from Krypton. Was this issue the genesis for the idea of Supergirl?

Spoiler: Not Kara Zor-El

Feat Catalogue:

- Designs and builds a drill which he uses to hollow out a mountain in order for the government to build "top-secret research plants" inside
- Throws a giant sign with spin so it deflects a falling car roof, and then wedges itself precisely between two vehicles that were about to crash so they harmlessly deflect off it
- Flies down and grabs the sign before it does any more damage, and also stops some criminals' getaway car
- Uses heat vision (still called X-ray vision at this point) to burn up and destroy the last sample of 'Vivanium', which Luthor used to power his machine
- Follows Lois by the scent of her perfume, despite her using her powers to evade him

Spoiler: Showing the difference between their control and experience with their powers

Feat Catalogue (non-Superman):

- Lex Luthor builds a machine that can imbue anyone with Superman's powers temporarily (for 8 hours), although it only has one use and he would need months to build another one
- Luthor uses a special chemical solution and a projection machine on a door in order to create an image of Lois, showing that she was the one who passed through the door earlier (you could have just used a security camera, you know...)

**

- Lois, empowered by Luthor's machine, builds another complex machine in 10 minutes, which would take ordinary men months to complete. This is despite her clumsiness and inexperience with her powers.

Weirdness:

- Instead of using his machine to empower himself right after building it, Luthor just left it lying around so Lois could find her way in and use it

Superdickery:

- Blames Lois' "feminine vanity" for allowing him to follow her, since she wore perfume that he could smell

Spoiler: 50s sexism

Power Tracker:

- Low Herald Level. By powerscaling, Lois should also have been at that level when she had her powers, although she didn't perform any feats to demonstrate it