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"Earthquakes in the distance. The Phantom Zone trembles under the weight of this fight. Every creature and prisoner must have been alerted to this."It was not stated or shown that he shook the entire Phantom Zone previously, no. It was likely just a local area. And we cannot upgrade every single herald-level DC Comics character by a literally infinite amount based on a single instance of unspecified circumstances and completely unproven speculation, no matter how much anybody might try to rhetorically and speculatively reframe it.
Superman isn't saying a portion of the Phantom Zone is trembling, he's saying that the Dimension is general is shaking because of their fight; no where does it even hint that it might be just the general area.
What? No one here is trying to upgrade these characters based off just these statements alone. I don't know where you're getting that assumption from.
Yes. The New Gods were unaffected by the events that transpired in Crisis on Infinite Earths. Their true forms -- let alone emanations -- don't change from Pre to Post Crisis.Do his avatars or lower reality manifestations scale to that in the post-Crisis continuity? That seems very unreliable and inconsistent in that case.
I am still of the opinion that we should wait and see where this thread goes, before we start deciding whether or not these characters have reliable feats of that level. As things currently stand, a majority of the staff have collectively decided that some of these feats are okay.Yes he is, but the writers are definitely not, and have an obligation to not let every single character that is far less powerful and enormously slower than the Flash seem redundant in team book settìngs (hence why Captain America and Black Widow aren't presented as being completely useless in any team with Thor in the same roster), and Superman and Wonder Woman still don't remotely have any explicit feats of such a scale, which is necessary in order to make this kind of widespread upgrade even slightly reliable.
As I saw Peter David (?) state in an interview once, superhero comic book writers always have to cheat in stories involving extreme speedsters in order to pretend that they ever get a challenge.
I also want to note that your opinion can just-as-easily be applied to the Man of Steel. There are stories where Superman (or someone with his powers) has either overpowered the stronger members of the League, or someone else mows them down and Superman has to come in before the tide of the fight starts turning.
Didn't Golden-Age Superman go from barely being able to jump over buildings to traversing the Universe? My point isn't that he's inconsistent, it's that he goes through gigantic leaps in power as he ages. His few appearances since the golden days have him fighting characters on Silver-Age's level. Most notably the Anti-Monitor and Superboy Prime. In an effort to kill Superman, the Anti Monitor absorbed all of the energy from the Anti-Matter universe in an attempt to kill Golden-Age Supes, and the two Kryptonians present survive.An extremely weakened Anti-Monitor, yes, and the Golden Age Superman also matched the Silver Age incarnation of Superman at least once, but he also did not have any feats remotely approaching such a scale, and again, everybody can fight everybody as long as a writer feels like it is the fundamental lifeblood of these settings, as is blatantly apparent to anybody truly paying attention, and which was also outright confirmed in a video with Stan Lee that we linked to in our wiki.
Also gives another wallop to Silver Age.