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Sufferedphoneix posted...

In what little I've seen him in comics he never came off evil. Just lives by really old world standards where you wanna solve a problem you using might.

Black Adam was basically a one-dimensional villain for almost the entire span of his existence. It wasn't until the early 2000s that Geoff Johns retconned his entire origin and personality (Geoff Johns was doing that to a lot of characters in the 2000s, usually for the better) and made him that sort of "honorable villain" sort of character who has more justification for being the way he is.

The idea that he could actually be something of an antihero didn't really come until the mid 2000s, when they introduced Isis as a character/love interest that helped redeem Black Adam and lead him more towards being a benevolent dictator of his home nation. But that's more or less become the default interpretation of the character now.



wolfy42 posted...

and in that one he pretty much fights both shazaam and superman to a standstill, and would have killed either of them one on one.

With comics, it's always a matter of interpretation. In one comic, under one writer, Character A may completely curbstomp Character B, but then you read another comic under another writer and Character B will beat Character A easily.

What makes it worse is that comic book universes tend to constantly reboot now (DC seems to do it every 10 years), and the cartoon universes are generally separate continuities of their own. So comparing the "power levels" of any given character and figuring out who can beat who is usually just a case of cherry picking whatever examples you want to prove what you already believed to begin with.

As an example, Golden Age Superman in the 40s wasn't all that powerful at all, while Silver Age Superman in the 50s and 60s was a borderline god. They scaled his powers back post-Crisis, and post-Zero Hour he was even weaker. So if you had them all fight, say, Thanos from the MCU, some of them would have a really hard time beating him, but others would pretty much knock him out in about 7 seconds.

And like I said earlier, with these two characters, it really becomes important whether you think Superman has a weakness to magic (in the sense that he's literally weakened or harmed by it in the same way kryptonite affects him), or if you think he's just normally vulnerable to magic the way an ordinary human is (meaning it doesn't hurt him any worse than it hurts anyone else, but he can't resist it the way it resists almost everything else). Plus, then you get into even thornier questions (Ddoes a "magic punch" count as magic or just physics? Superman would theoretically be weak against the former but not against the latter). Some stories just treat Superman's "weakness" to magic meaning that he's no stronger against mind control or illusions or polymorphing and stuff like that than anyone else is, but he's still relatively immune to magically-created fire, cold, etc, because that's still jsut physics regardless of the source.

And then there's the question of how effective the trick that was mostly popularized in Kingdom Come would actually be - namely, having Billy transform and using the magical lightning as a weapon to hit Superman with it.

https://i0.wp.com/thefanboyseo.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/RCO020.jpg

It's a cool idea and a cooler visual, and in Kingdom Come it didn't really matter whether or not it should "work" (because Kingdom Come was a non-canon Elseworlds story), but in a more canonical setting you'd have to decide whether or not Shazam's lightning would could as pure magic or just electricity for the purposes of affecting Superman, and how he would be affected by it. In some stories it might do little more than just stun him, in others it might kill him outright.