Superman Through the Ages! Forum

There have been several occasions that hint that Superman may be immune to hypnotism and mental domination. He is described as having "Super-Strong Willpower" and it may be that Superman's intellect is too advanced to fall under mind control easily.

If anything, it's probably much HARDER to place Superman under mental domination than normal.

The one incidence that comes to mind right away is "Revolt of the Girl Legionnaires" where Queen Azura of Femnaz states that Supergirl could only be hypnotized by Superboy's voice, which they had on tape and rearranged the order of words to give male-hating commands. None of the other female Legionnaires had to be hypnotized this way, even Saturn Girl, who herself has a high-degree of resistance to domination (she was able to shrug off Saturn Queen's Super-Hypnotism and the girl domination powers of Evilo's agent Apollo).

In JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA #16 (1962) Superman realizes that the music that is compelling him to dance must be based on magic somehow, because only magic could affect him thus. This is an element of a lot of stories like this, where they feel the need to explain why Superman can be hypnotized with something like "oh, it's based on magic" or "my Hypno-Coin has a red sun filter" or whatever. Another example of this is during the first appearance of Universo, where it was explained that he could affect Superboy along with everybody else because there was Kryptonite in his amulet.

The truth is, they haven't really been consistent about this. There have been occasions where Superman has been immune to mental domination, and there have been occasions where Superman has been mentally dominated (the best example I can think of off the top of my head is the Controller holding Superboy in place with "Super-Mental Force" during the "Ghost of Ferro Lad" story).

Well, the simpleton Superman of the reboot era had his mind controlled every other month, not only by supervillains but by baddie-of-the-month also-rans and 6th-stringers like Amazing Grace.

But if you mean the REAL Superman, I think it should at least be very, very difficult for anyone to control his mind.  Superman's brain operates on a level well above that of Terrans.  For one thing, he has to be able to fly, fight, repair things, etc at super-speed...even if our muscles could work that fast, our brains couldn't direct them that fast (this is why I always thought Steve Austin couldn't run 60 mph).  He has an incredible amount of knowledge of cultures and sciences from throughout the universe and he can remember stuff from when he was an infant!  It would take a brain at least as developed as Brainiac's to even have a chance of dominating Superman, and even then I doubt it would work.

Anyway, there's nothing more boring or unappealing than a story where the hero's got his mind controlled.  So I'm not too surprised it didn't come up a lot in the Silver and Bronze ages, when writers had enough ability and imagination to do better things with our time.

This calls to memory an early Spider-Man story, in which a circus ringmaster hypnotized an entire audience in order to pickpocket them, even Spider-Man who had appeared for charity. The only person in the audience not affected by this hypnotism was a man named Murdock...the Daredevil! He was immune to the hypnosis because he was blind.

Superman is definitely not blind. In fact, he can see in spectrums that terrans can not. This may prevent him from being hypnotized in some circumstances. In fact, the only instances in which I've seen Superman hypnotized involved the occult, as when Skeletor (https://www.supermanthroughtheages.com/wiki/index.php/Skeletor) put him under a mind-control spell.

Of course, there's all sorts of examples of self-hypnosis.

Depended on the writer really. For the most part, the mental domination was the result of kryptonite or magic.

The reboot Supes had been shown to resist and fight off telepathic assaults from Brainiac, Maxima, Dominus, Manchester Black, etc.

He even managed to removed Imperiex (Galactis-level being) from his mind by sheer force of will.

(https://www.supermanthroughtheages.com/superman-comics/about/aos586/mind.gif)

:s:

Oooh...  Torquasmic.  Obviously, as a telepath, Maxwell Lord > Imperiex.

I wish Superman had consistent resistance to mental domination just to avoid writers coming up with Yet Another Superman Is Mentally Controlled plot.

Pre-Crisis: he is not immune to magic mental control. See for example the ACTION COMICS issue featuring Asterix (more or less).
Post-Crisis: not immune, everyone can control him. Maxima wasn't able to do it because he was already manipulated by the Eradicator.

Does this count?  I don't know the story but I kinda like the picture  :lol:
(http://mindcontrol)