Superman Vs Hulk: Who Is Stronger?

Whenever two particularly strong fictional comic book characters happen to coexist in the cultural zeitgeist, there are always segments of their respective fandoms that try to determine which one is more powerful. If the fans are fortunate, the characters live in the same universe, or even two different ones with somewhat comparable rules. In such cases, the situation can be put to rest by simply having the characters face off in a standard team-up issue or a crossover ... well, at least until the fans decide to blame the outcome on the writer behind the story and return to the never-ending debate. 

Speaking of debates, let's wade into a particularly hefty one. Since Superman is DC's best-known heavy hitter and Hulk is Marvel's resident gamma-powered strong guy, they're the natural choices for today's thought experiment. The popular way to compare two superheroes is to imagine a physical confrontation with them. Today, we'll mix things up a bit and try to figure out which character is actually physically stronger.

This, of course, is a challenging ordeal, thanks to the pair's decades-long comic book history and power sets that have fluctuated quite a bit over the years. Still, that's the challenge we're tackling today, so let's indulge in a fun game of "Which hero is the strongest?"

Superman is the original overpowered superhero with a massive laundry list of different powers, but fortunately, we don't need to rattle off his entire arsenal — today, just his super strength will suffice. Not that this makes things any easier, though. Annoyingly enough, the character's official DC Comics profile refuses to give him any concrete power level stats, and fan sources consider him to have borderline unlimited strength with no known ceiling. Superman, however, is easily one of the strongest characters in all of DC Comics. What's more, he's able to add to his already immense strength level by exposing himself to the power of a yellow sun.

Various powered-up versions of Superman have displayed strength levels that teeter between incredible and outright laughable. The strongest known version, Superman Prime One Million, actually lived inside the sun for 15,000 years, leeching on its energy and turning himself into a glowing, golden god. To put his powers in context, the Superman in Grant Morrison and Frank Quietly's "All-Star Superman" series grows stronger as he's slowly dying, and goes on record pushing against 200 quintillion tons with one hand, which is stated to be around three times his usual power level.

Meanwhile, several versions of Superman have been depicted as considerably weaker than the classic Silver Age iteration of the character, who was basically able to manifest whatever feats of strength he wanted. As such, there's no truly accurate way to measure Superman's power, except by saying that most iterations of the character are probably even stronger than you think.

The angrier Hulk gets, the stronger he is.

This and a bout of gamma radiation-induced dual personality are the major components of the character's power set, but since the not-so-jolly green giant is angry roughly all the time and can always get a little bit angrier, both his fury and his strength are effectively boundless. In fact, an eternally increasing fury with no cap whatsoever is a specific part of his power set. Granted, this is the exact type of secondary non-strength power I'm aiming to avoid, but Hulk's rage is so directly tied to his physical prowess that there's no way to avoid taking it into account.   

Thanks to his anger cheat code, the Hulk is technically infinitely strong, and since he also happens to be effectively immortal, there's nothing stopping his kettle from boiling over as precisely as necessary in order to complete the physical task at hand. The Hulk, as he is fond of boasting, is indeed the strongest there is, and if he gets angry enough, there are no second and third places because he smashes the entire podium.

This means that theoretically, under the right writer, the Hulk could become an eternal, unstoppable powerhouse whose fury boils for eons and constantly increases his strength until he's stronger than the rest of the universe combined. Outside the main canon, this has actually happened when one iteration of Bruce Banner became consumed by the devilish cosmic being One Below All, whose influence turned Hulk into the Breaker-Apart – a gigantic, soulless reaper who lived for billions of years and destroyed an entire universe into nothingness.

It would be very difficult to sell modern audiences a version of Superman who's so overpowered that he can fly around the Earth so fast that he turns back time, 1978 "Superman" movie-style. Perhaps this is why James Gunn's DC Universe Superman (David Corenswet) seems significantly weaker than many comic book Supermen. He seems to noticeably struggle in his fights and take far more hits than your average version of the character. This Superman, however, is still very capable, as we see him use sheer physical power to press against (though not completely lift off the ground) a kaiju character whose size is roughly comparable to the MonsterVerse version of King Kong (who weighs at least 158 tons). This doesn't say a whole lot about this Superman's maximum strength, of course, but it does give us a rough ballpark to speculate in.

Likewise, the MCU version of the Hulk (Mark Ruffalo) is far from the big, bad powerhouse that he is in the comics. The biggest feat of sheer strength (or, at least, punching power) from this version of the character is arguably in "The Avengers," where he knocks out a gigantic, armored Leviathan with a single punch. This doesn't readily translate to bench press results, but it definitely puts the MCU Hulk in the similar "manhandles kaiju monsters" category as the Corenswet Superman. 

As far as sheer battle prowess goes, there's a fairly simple way to solve the Superman-Hulk equation. When you look at their complete power sets, Superman is above and beyond the Hulk. His far more varied powers give Superman a distinct edge in a one-on-one battle: His abilities to fly and use super speed, both of which Hulk lacks, would allow him to simply fly his opponent in space and neutralize him by leaving him in the orbit of some suitably distant gas planet.

Strength, on the other hand, is a trickier subject thanks to the aforementioned flux in the characters' power levels. In the interest of fairness, we'll discount the "All-Star Superman" miniseries and its claim that a baseline Superman can press against some 65-70 quintillion tons. Still, it seems to me that the Kryptonian's base strength is almost certainly better than the Hulk's, simply because he only needs to expose himself to sunlight in order to perform his incredible feats. As such, in the (admittedly unlikely) scenario of the two meeting on the street and deciding to have an impromptu strongman contest, my money would initially be on Supes on a sunny day.

When it comes to strength cap, however, the Hulk's escalating strength makes things interesting. Since his physical prowess is directly linked to his anger and there's no real upper limit to how mad he can get, his potential muscular strength is technically (and quite possibly literally) infinite. Because of this aspect of Hulk's powers, I'm going to say that the green guy is the stronger character. After all, no matter how powerful Superman is, he can't beat infinitely strong ... which is precisely what the Hulk's power set enables him to potentially become. 

We've established that the current live-action versions of Hulk and Superman aren't quite on par with their print media equivalents when it comes to pure strength. But since the Corenswet Superman has his aforementioned kaiju feats and generally comes across as a very strong character, the pressure is on the Hulk out of the gate.

While Mark Ruffalo's MCU Hulk can hold his own against just about any extremely powerful character whose name isn't Thanos (Josh Brolin) or Surtur (Clancy Brown), the physically biggest and heaviest opponent he successfully wrestles for a prolonged amount of time is the 23-feet-tall magical wolf Fenris in "Thor: Ragnarok." Granted, Fenris has superpowers of its own, but the way Hulk struggled against the beast still suggests that he may not have what it takes to stop a gigantic kaiju monster on its tracks, Superman-style. Still, the Leviathan punch in "The Avengers" does demonstrate an impressive stopping power, so for the sake of argument, let's put him on the same level as the Corenswet Superman here. 

Here's where things get curious, though. The MCU Hulk does demonstrate the ability to become more powerful as he gets angrier (Tim Roth's Abomination can provide first-hand information about this). However, the Ruffalo version of the character seems to lose much of the fury aspect after the Banner and Hulk personas merge into a level-headed "Professor Hulk." Since this helps him control his emotions, it also means that his strength doesn't scale as readily as the comic book version's. Meanwhile, the Corenswet Superman is specifically shown to rapidly power up when he's exposed to the sun, which heavily suggests that the comic book Superman's strength cheat codes are very much in play in the DCU. Because of this, the winner in this particular show of strength would most likely be Superman.