1,000 Ways to Kill A Kryptonian

Create pocket dimension, get Superman to go in pocket dimension, destroy pocket dimension.

I'm willing to bet we can get a lot more creative, though. For instance, due to his extremely enhanced sight and hearing I do wonder if he would be especially vulnerable to sonic weaponry and other weapons that might attack the senses.

He's definitely been harmed by ear attacks before, but it seems like it'd be hard to progress from 'deafness' to 'deadness'.
 
He's definitely been harmed by ear attacks before, but it seems like it'd be hard to progress from 'deafness' to 'deadness'.
Oh, definitely. It's sort of the same thing with the extreme cold solution - it's less to insta-kill and more in the hopes of throwing him off balance long enough to use a more deadly solution.
 
You want to kill Superman. That's easy. Anyone could kill Superman. Killing Clark Kent is the hard part.

But a straight soul-rip should do the job.
 
Magic Sword (can cut anything variety), as he has no particular resistance to magic and an effect that allows an object to cut through anything will work on his flesh just as well as steel or concrete or whatever. Note: cannot just be a generic magic sword, because if the only magical effect is that it glows or is indestructible or something, it's not going to somehow bypass the density of his flesh or imperviousness of his skin.

In All-Star Superman, Lex Luthor kills him (well, he comes -really- close) with sunlight, which is a helluva thing. Doomsday killed him by punching him really hard, so he can die due to sufficient conventional force. In many continuities, he is completely fed by sunlight and does not need to breathe, eat, or drink anything as long as he's getting that good 'shine.
 
Magic Sword (can cut anything variety), as he has no particular resistance to magic and an effect that allows an object to cut through anything will work on his flesh just as well as steel or concrete or whatever. Note: cannot just be a generic magic sword, because if the only magical effect is that it glows or is indestructible or something, it's not going to somehow bypass the density of his flesh or imperviousness of his skin.

It also has to hit someone who can keep up with the Flash and can fly. Any plan that involves a melee fight with Superman is a bad plan unless you're a flying speedster.
 
There are some possibilities with him using heat vision on himself...

1. His heat vision does infact work on him, though he might have to amp up the intensity to really injure himself. He has been shown shaving with his heat vision (look in a mirror, heat vision the stubble, rub away the ash).

2. His heat vision actually works on the same frequency as Red Sun Radiation or whatever that makes him lose his powers, except here it's much more focused and he can control the intensity. Shooting the heat vision at himself selectively makes the affected cells lose their super durability or whatever so he can burn kryptonian flesh. This could make a sort of sense if kryptonians just naturally had these abilities... each kryptonian possesses a natural weapon adapted for weakening or injuring other kryptonians. Due to their massive durability, a society entirely composed of powered kryptonians could devolve into chaos with them punching eachother through buildings but being unable to actually kill eachother. Hence their heat-vision acts as red sun radiation and they can all zap eachother to depower any troublemakers before fights escalate into trashing whole cities. It's basically like living in a society where everyone has a long-range taser built into their eyes, as opposed to everyone driving indestructible monster trucks or something.

3. His super durability is actually due to some natural force field or something as opposed to him simply being made of some hyper-durable material. More like a space ship with deflector shields than him being made of solid titanium or something. As such, he can consciously lower his defenses or super strength if he wants to. If he needs to undergo surgery, he consciously lowers his defenses so they can operate on him. If he wants to sleep with Lois, he turns off his super strength or something so he doesn't crush her.


As for his x-rays:

It's possible that kryptonians are actually psychic or something and they just manifest their powers in more physical ways. His x-ray vision could actually be a form of clairvoyance or scrying. As such, when he glances in the mirror, he wasn't actually reflecting x-rays off of it or anything, he was just getting a line-of-sight to location he wants to scry (his own head) and used his psychic powers or whatever to observe the inside of his own skull.

After all, he's been seen casually using x-ray vision to check if Luthor is still in prison by looking across to the other side of the city. If he was actually using x-rays then he'd have to be firing beams of radiation or something that can travel through multiple walls and buildings and that would probably cause problems for any living things caught in the path of the beam.


So yeah. If you're trying to make sense of Superman's powers (particularly his ability to fly around without producing any visible exhaust, heat, or electromagnetic fields as a result of his movement) then he could either be using psychic powers or some variation thereof. Like, Kryptonians could be some weird race of Electromagnetism Benders and their powers involve manipulating photons and energy types or whatever.
This is Superman, not The Plutonian.

Also OP, which version of Superman since a method that might kill one will not even be ticklish to another.
 
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As of recently in the comics, one of the original seven Green Lantern rings. So we learned that one of the original seven Green Lanterns was a Kryptonian woman named Jan-Al. Unfortunately for her, the Gaurdians had still not quite figured out how the make the rings safe(well Rami hadn't, but he was in a bit of a rush on account of Volthoom) for the users. So she kept drawing on her Willpower, with a connection to the Emotional Specrum, she burnt out. Ok, she kind of exploded.
 
  1. Magic.
  2. telefraging
  3. telecuting
  4. sunlight starvation ( force him to fight a bunch of thearts while the sun is blacked out via various methods)
  5. Null zone/Teleprtation
  6. Enchanted bullet fired by a low level thug ( supes would not bother to dodge and would not notice unill the bullet is inside his chest)
  7. Rad poisoning
  8. adapt various bacterias to effect him and let nature do the rest.
  9. 40k power weapons
  10. Mental attacks ( depends on the version as some have great defenses)
  11. Bigger guns ( more power)
 
I suppose it's worth mentioning, but an eclipse would at least be something pursued. Although I don't think it would work it might make an interesting one-shot if, say, Clark Kent had to perform an hour or so of heroics as a completely normal man. But that kinda gets off topic.

What is it about the sun that charges him? The UV rays? The radiation?
 
Black Holes were mentioned, but not Time Dilation specifically.

Just slow him down to the point the universe is over by the time he's conscious of anything.
 

Radiation that isn't on certain spectrums of sunlight (though doesn't have to come from a sun) doesn't do much.


I suppose it's worth mentioning, but an eclipse would at least be something pursued. Although I don't think it would work it might make an interesting one-shot if, say, Clark Kent had to perform an hour or so of heroics as a completely normal man. But that kinda gets off topic.

What is it about the sun that charges him? The UV rays? The radiation?

What aspect that does it isn't precisely detailed, but if he's not charging in the sun, he still has a large reserve. 'Final Night' where the sun was blocked out only had him gradually lose strength.

In short-
Yellow sunlight or equivalent charges him up (an equivalent would be Starman's cosmic rod, which can charge him).
No sunlight is neutral, it leaves him on his current charge which he can deplete (how fast depends on what he does), but it doesn't actively drain it aside from that.
Red sun drains his powers (I hypothesize the solar-absorbing aspect of his cells basically take in any sunlight charge as it comes, including replacing good yellow charge with bad red sunlight)

Sometimes there's more exotic stuff, like one story where the sun was magically changed which gave him different magic powers. Or Blue sunlight, which give even greater charge than Yellow, amps them across the board, and sometimes even grants 'Superman vision'- a vision type power that can be used to temporarily give *humans* kryptonian powers!
 
Does superman age?
Because if you trapped him in a field of extremely accelerated time in a place where sunlight won't reach he will either die of old age, starvation, lack of water or something similar.
...superman can't pull off time fuckery right? He wouldn't be able to escape that? ...right?
Also is sunlight essential for his life? Could you kill him via sunlight deprivation?

Also he should totally be killed by a black hole, thematically a dead star should effect him and even if you ignore that apparently doomsday hit him enough to hurt him and I bet doomsday's punch didn't hit with more force than a collision with a fucking black hole
 
  • Enchanted bullet fired by a low level thug ( supes would not bother to dodge and would not notice unill the bullet is inside his chest)

Just standard magic bullets would not work it needs to turn him into candy or something like that to kill him, if it only needs to be magic to be able to hurt him like a normal human then Black adam would have killed him ages ago with all of his magic attacks.


Would not work he has survived a storm that "twists and tranforms anything it thouches on atomic level"


Other feat of him tanking matter manipulation.



Does superman age?
Because if you trapped him in a field of extremely accelerated time in a place where sunlight won't reach he will either die of old age, starvation, lack of water or something similar.
...superman can't pull off time fuckery right? He wouldn't be able to escape that? ...right?
Also is sunlight essential for his life? Could you kill him via sunlight deprivation?

Also he should totally be killed by a black hole, thematically a dead star should effect him and even if you ignore that apparently doomsday hit him enough to hurt him and I bet doomsday's punch didn't hit with more force than a collision with a fucking black hole


He does not seem to age as Superman 1 milion exsist and there was 1 Supeman that was so old that the universe had ended but he was holding it togheter. Also Superman has feats of being in a black hole and not dieing.
 
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Just standard magic bullets would not work it needs to turn him into candy or something like that to kill him, if it only needs to be magic to be able to hurt him like a normal human then Black adam would have killed him ages ago with all of his magic attacks.



Would not work he has survived a storm that "twists and tranforms anything it thouches on atomic level"


Other feat of him tanking matter manipulation.






He does not seem to age as Superman 1 milion exsist and there was 1 Supeman that was so old that the universe had ended but he was holding it togheter. Also Superman has feats of being in a black hole and not dieing.
I know that he's survived a black hole I'm just saying it doesn't make sense based on what I know of him
 
Challenge him to a children's card game and send him to the Shadow Realm.

...this sounds like a joking answer, but with the proper hostage situation, he'd be forced to play along, and would summarily have his soul trapped forever, presuming he lost. There has been precedent for his ability to escape from alternate dimensions - Superboy Prime notably punched out of more than a couple - but these have required him to have physical mass, and separating his soul from his body would, well. There you go.

Of course this approach runs into a couple of problems.

The first is that you need to actually beat him in the card game, but this is easily solved by forcing him to play along with a pre-stacked deck, one specifically stacked against him.

The second is the inherent need to crossover with a different multiverse to gain access to Shadow Games and Yugioh magic, which is a much more significant hurdle - but really, once you're seriously considering the idea of killing freaking Superman, I say pull out all the stops. Worse comes to worst, DC Earth is a supremely magic-rich environment; I'm sure there's a knockoff of some sort hiding somewhere in some forbidden archive or another.

The third problem is the Flash's Speed Force, which could hypothetically let him vibrate to the dimensional frequency of the Shadow Realm and rescue Superman's soul, but this is solved by ... well, it's solved with difficulty. The most basic answer is "keep the card game a secret", but let's face - keeping a secret from the entire Justice League is more than a little difficult. But here's what's important: it's not impossible.

Basically, what I'm trying to say is, the proper application of children's card games lets you punch way above your weight class.
 
IIRC the whole sun-diving maneuver where Superman actually submerges himself into the sun is extremely taxing on his body. It seems very likely that just as depriving him of solar energy may be fatal after some time keeping his cells overcharged with solar energy could be fatal.

I.e. trap him in a yellow spun. Of course, if you can do that a red sun may be just as viable. I can think of a few scenarios where tricking him into supercharging his powers repeatedly to hurt him might be viable though- force him into scenarios where he needs the extra power repeatedly.

Edit: It says something about the Flash that trapping HIM in the Shadow Realm strikes me as completely useless since he'll just run out of there.
 
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IIRC the whole sun-diving maneuver where Superman actually submerges himself into the sun is extremely taxing on his body. It seems very likely that just as depriving him of solar energy may be fatal after some time keeping his cells overcharged with solar energy could be fatal.

This is actually canon, as of All-Star Superman. Good read.
 
I.e. trap him in a yellow spun. Of course, if you can do that a red sun may be just as viable. I can think of a few scenarios where tricking him into supercharging his powers repeatedly to hurt him might be viable though- force him into scenarios where he needs the extra power repeatedly.

When he first pulled it in Our Worlds At War, where he stayed to charge for a bit, it seemed to overwhelm his thoughts and he *barely* pulled through.

It didn't cause any long-term problems like in All Star Superman, but it was a bad scene none the less.
 
Hmmm
There are ways to deage people in dc right?
From what I understand superman absorbs sunlight overtime growing stronger via doing so?
So by returning him to a younger age he'll be weaker as at that age he hasn't absorbed as much sunlight and therefore he will be easier to kill

You just have to allow yourself to kill a baby
 
Hmmm
There are ways to deage people in dc right?
From what I understand superman absorbs sunlight overtime growing stronger via doing so?
So by returning him to a younger age he'll be weaker as at that age he hasn't absorbed as much sunlight and therefore he will be easier to kill

You just have to allow yourself to kill a baby

Well if you just deage him then his cells should still have their sunlight so he should be more powerful then he was when he was a baby.
 
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