What is the maximum weight that Superman can lift? What's the heaviest thing he's lifted to date?

Question

Are there any characters stronger than him? I know the Hulk is way strong, and so is Thor, but could they hold their own in a fight with him? (And yes, I know Hulk lost to Supes in that one crossover comic, but that was because Supes is smarter than the Hulk - not neccessarily stronger!)

Answer 1

This is a very interesting question.

The maximum weight Superman can lift is, debated always and depends on who is writing him. His strength actually has been powered down significantly since Crisis on Infinite Earths back in 1986. Before that, the Superman of Earth-1 and the Silver Age (Kal-El) was able to move planets with his strength and flight powers. Because of this, he was nearly godlike and it was becoming increasingly difficult to write villains that could fight a man like this. Now, it is been written by the DC Comics staff that his power is in proportion to the amount of Yellow Sunlight he has absorbed and stored. His power is nearly limitless as long as he constantly is absorbing Yellow Sunglight, but the whole moving planets thing is no longer in his range of power.

As far as is someone stronger, yes. The Superboy of Earth Prime that was last seen during the Infinite Crisis was able to move a planet during the Rann/Thanagar War Infinite Crisis Special. He is believed to be on par with the Superman of Earth-1 that hails from the Silver Age.

As for Marvel Characters. It would heavily depend on who is writing him, and what the purpose of a battle or mission between the two universes. As for Superman Beating the Hulk, I may be mistaken but wasn't that due to a vote?

Answer 2

Heaviest Weight Lifted

Answer 3

Superman once towed a solar system to a new location in space.

Answer 4

The maximum Superman has lifted to date is infinite. He and shazam lifted a book of infinite pages. Which means the book had an infinite weight. Technically didnt even have to be there because infinity is like 0 when it comes to multiplication and division no matter what number you divide it by it will always be infinity. And to the other dumb guy who posted some stuff about the new writers making him weaker. That is actually a lie. Since supermans cells can absorb a infinite amount of yellow sunlight superman can get infinitely stronger. All the writers did is wrote about supes before his mental locks were gone. If anything they made him stronger by writing him to be more resistant to kryptonite. Because of supes anatomy he has no limits

Answer 5

A quick note: Marvel tops out at the 100 ton range because it is easy to visualize a character lifting (and carring) that much weight. Some things that weight 100tons: an adult blue whale, A large Steam Locomotive, A cube of water 15 feet long per side....
Marvel's scale lists the average lifting capacity, but not the maximum ability.

People often say Superman's strength is at least proportional to the amount of yellow sunlight he has absorbed. At his consistantly strongest (sustained strength) he should be able to lift (press) 2,000,000 tons... but his limits have not and cannot truely be measured.... According to DC. Some things that weigh two MILLION TONS: .... uhm.... 100 ships the same dimensions as the RMS TITANIC (about 26,000 tons each), or all the grapes annually produced in California (!) Though i have heard people argue that his limits would have eight sets of zeroes....

Answer 6

Guess it depends on *which* version of Superman we're talking about. The pre-Crisis Superman actually moved Earth once or twice. :) The Hulk would have to get very angry indeed to reach that level of strength. The current 'mainstream' Superman... well, DC isn't like Marvel when it comes to giving their characters limits out. Marvel likes to top off around 100 tons for some reason. Superman has no trouble hefting freighters, jumbo jets, and the like, so he's at *least* in that range.

As for who'd win in a smackdown between Superman and Thor, check out JLA/Avengers. They go at it in that... and it's no one-sided fight!

Answer 7

How Much Can Superman Lift

Answer 8

Ya, Supes beats the Hulk anyday, and they are both out of Spidy's league when it comes to raw power. Both Supes and the Hulk are in the 100 plus ton range while Spidey is somewhere like 14 tons i believe, hes only able to like lift a car over his head, still much stronger then Captain America, Cyclops & Wolverine!

Answer 9

This is an excellent question. The comic book companies have never fully quantified the strengths, etc., of their heroes, otherwise they might lose sales because people would want to read ONLY about the strongest, or the fastest, etc.

They do give broad strength categories (ten ton increments), but that is as if Car & Driver magazine only listed the engine displacement and not the horsepower or maximum torque that the engine can produce. So we are at a bit of a handicap when trying to find hard numbers to work with.

But let’s look at what they have shown in the comics. Back in the 1960’s, Superman’s strength was ridiculous. He used to juggle whole planets and blow out supernovas with his super breath! They should have called him “Supernaturalman”.

In the classic sense, then, the question of what is the largest or heaviest thing Superman can lift is akin to asking could God make something so big He couldn’t lift it? When we say ‘lift’, we are ASSUMING that a person is STANDING on a surface somewhere, and working against gravity. If God makes a big rock, say, way, way bigger then the Earth, Where is He going to stand to lift it? And, if He lifts it, is He really lifting it against Earth’s gravity with His hands, or is He only pushing the Earth away from the larger rock with His feet...?

So, I don’t know if Superman moving planets in the old days qualifies as “lifting”.

But, moving on to post-Crisis on Infinite Earths Superman, in one of the very first new issues (when Metallo first appeared), Superman found the place where Metallo was built. Since Metallo was powered by Kryptonite, which Superman didn’t know much about back then, he wanted to remove the entire farm to a place where he could study it. He wanted to make sure nobody else would build another Metallo, or had Kryptonite. So, he dug around the entire farm (probably several acres, several hundred yards diameter) using super pressure or heat vision to fuse the soil into rock, and lifted the entire thing.

By any reasonable estimate, this had to have been, at a minimum, several hundred thousand tons. This is far more than has been claimed for any other comic book character, even the Hulk with his ‘Class 1000’ strength.

(I am deliberately leaving out cosmic characters like the Beyonder, who could presumably have any strength level he chose. There are some other characters who supposedly have strength similar to Superman’s. For example there is Doomsday, who killed Superman, and Mongul, who has wiped up the floor with Superman in fights before. [see the story: For The man Who Has Everything.])

Not long after the DC reboot, there was an issue where Superman was shown on the cover, towing the Earth using some sort of harness, and it was obvious that it was a terrible strain on him. The harness he was provided with (by some aliens, IIRC) negated most of the mass of the planet, so that he even had a chance to move it. The Earth is 6.6 sextillion tons (1 sextillion = 10 to the 21st), so even a tiny fraction of that wold be enormous. It was not stated that he was just able to shove it out of the way, as he did in the old days. I forget some of the details of the story, but I think he only moved the Earth a short distance, not like clear into another solar system.

Getting back to the farm, where he lifted several acres worth of real estate, Superman wanted to move it to a place where he could examine it at his leisure. So he put it into orbit. Significantly, he remarked to himself that things seemed lighter when he was flying with them than when he first lifted them off the ground. This ties in with the fact (again, not specified by the comic book company, but only deduced by us, the readers) that Superman’s powers are partially psionic in nature.

People have often wondered, How can Superman lift an ocean liner without it splitting in the middle? Sure, he can handle the weight, but it can’t support its OWN weight out of the water! It’s too fragile! This is the solution to that. When Superman lifts something, it is using his muscles. When he flies with something, his flight is some kind of mental levitation or psionic telekinesis (similar to Superboy’s ‘touch-telekinesis) to support the weight, just as it supports his own weight.

This ties in with Superman’s other powers, like they replaced his ‘invulnerability’ with a force field (not named as such, but we the readers are familiar with such things.) When Ma and Pa Kent were designing the Superman costume for him, Ma commented that she noticed long ago that clothes next to his skin “never seemed to get dirty or torn.” That is why his cape often got torn, burned, the colors ran, etc., while the rest of his costume did not.

I realize this is a longer answer than you were expecting, but I thought I would give you some details. This way, I hope I answered your next two or three questions, too!

19 JAN 07, 1630 hrs, GMT.

Answer 10

Can any of them lift Chris Christie?