Warning! Contains spoilers for My Adventures with Superman #3!

Summary

• Bullets can't pierce Superman's skin but can push him around due to his invulnerability.
• Superman's invulnerability has downsides, such as difficulty with emergency surgeries and resilience to breakage.
• Agent DuBois found a clever way around Superman's powers by using physics to knock him down with strong bullets.

Superman has a famously long list of powers: super-speed, heat vision, flight, frost breath, x-ray vision, super-strength, and invulnerable skin. That last one means that Superman doesn't usually have to worry about guns. But one villain figured out a way to turn that strength into a weakness.

In My Adventures with Superman #3 by Josie Campbell and Pablo M. Collar, Superman goes up against a major military force, and while the ammunition the military are using doesn't seem like a major threat at first, Agent DuBois reveals one major flaw in Superman's invulnerability. Even though the bullets can't pierce Superman's invulnerable skin, real physics dictates that all that force still has to go somewhere.

Agent DuBois points out that if a bullet is fired at Superman with enough force, it would still push him around. This literal law of physics allows the military to knock Superman around and even force him down. It's a surprisingly smart way to get around Superman's invulnerability, turning it into just another power to exploit.

Bullets Can't Pierce Superman's Skin, But They Can Push Him Around

Superman's Famous Power Has a Major Flaw

When a character is as absurdly powerful as Superman, the only real way to deal with him is to find clever ways around his powers. While Kryptonite is an amazing way to fight Superman, it's pretty difficult to obtain, resulting in characters like Failsafe using pressure points on Superman to make him lose control of his powers or loud noises to disrupt Superman's super-hearing when he isn't prepared for it. But using the power of physics to bully Superman around with bullets is certainly a new idea, and it's honestly a great one.

Bullets could hypothetically break Superman's bones from pure concussive force alone.

While having invulnerable skin sounds like an amazing power, there are quite a few downsides. One major issue is that it's nearly impossible to operate on Superman in an emergency, as there are few scalpels on Earth that can penetrate his skin. Invulnerability also turns every bullet he gets hit with into a punch, and while that's not a big deal for regular handguns or even machine guns, if someone built a gun strong enough, bullets could hypothetically break Superman's bones from pure concussive force alone. After all, Superman was beaten to death by Doomsday, which shows that his invulnerability definitely has limits.

Superman's Invulnerability Has a Surprising Amount of Downsides

Is Bullet-Proof Skin a Secret Weakness?

While some fans have criticized Superman's character for being so powerful that he's boring, that pure power is actually one of the things that makes his character so fun. Even ignoring how Superman uses his powers, seeing how creators allow villains to get around Superman's powers is always a fascinating read. Superman is one of the strongest characters in the DC Universe, but he's far from unbeatable, and agent DuBois realized that when he discovers that a big enough gun can definitely take Superman down — thanks to the laws of physics.

My Adventures with Superman #3 is available now from DC Comics!