How Long Superman Takes To Learn All Of His Powers | Screen Rant
Superman & Lois showed Clark's origin story, which echoes Christopher Reeve's, including how long he trained in the Fortress of Solitude with Jor-El.
Warning: SPOILERS for Superman & Lois season 1, episode 11 - "A Brief Reminiscence In-Between Cataclysmic Events".
Superman & Lois showed the origin of the Arrowverse's Man of Steel and here's how long Clark Kent (Tyler Hoechlin) trained to use his powers with Jor-El (Angus Macfadyen) in the Fortress of Solitude. Superman returned to his arctic sanctuary to recover after he used his solar flare to stop Morgan Edge's (Adam Rayner) army of human-Kryptonian hybrids. However, Edge, who is really a Kryptonian named Tal-Roh, exploited his weakened half-brother to learn his life story after Kal-El crashed on Earth.
Clark's origin in Superman & Lois is a fascinating amalgam of the tropes established in the prior Superman movies and TV series, but it mostly borrows from 1978's Superman: The Movie. The Arrowverse's Clark left Smallville at 18 after his adopted father, Jonathan Kent (Fred Henderson), died of a heart attack. He traveled to the North Pole and threw a Kryptonian crystal (or called a sunstone in DC Comics) into the ice, which then terraformed his surroundings into the Fortress of Solitude, which housed a hologram and artificial intelligence of Superman's birth father, Jor-El. Clark then remained in the Fortress for years and fully grew into adulthood as Jor-El taught him the history of Krypton, the House of El, and how to use his incredible abilities to help mankind as Earth's greatest hero.
In Superman & Lois' origin, Clark stayed with Jor-El in the Fortress for approximately nine years. The contextual clues to how long Clark was away are found when he returned to Smallville and reunited with his adoptive mother, Martha Kent (Michele Scarabelli). Clark came back to see Lana Lang (Emmanuelle Chriqui), his high school sweetheart, but he was crushed to find she had a new boyfriend, Kyle Cushing (Erik Valdez), who she married and raised a family with. In his bedroom at the Kent Farm, Clark opened up his Smallville High School yearbook, which indicated that he and Lana were from the Class of 1995. Meanwhile, the movie theater where Clark saw Lana and Kyle was playing a double feature of Friday Night Lights and Harry Potter. One of the clear inspirations for Superman & Lois, Friday Night Lights was released in October 2004 so it's the newer of the films, which lines up with Clark being gone for nearly a decade. So Clark is about 27 when he returned to Smallville.
Curiously, the Harry Potter movie released in 2004 was Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, which came out in May, but there's a poster of 2002's Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets visible behind Lana, so the Sequoia movie theater must have featured a Harry Potter double feature of the second and third movies. Regardless, the timeline for the Arrowverse's Clark begins to take shape. Kent then moved to Metropolis sometime afterward, met Lois Lane (Elizabeth Tulloch), and started work as a cub reporter at the Daily Planet as he simultaneously began performing rescues as Metropolis's flying superhero. Months later, after he saved Lois's life from a costumed villain named Atom Man, Lois named the caped wonder 'Superman'.
Clark's nine years of training in the Arrowverse is comparable to the decade Christopher Reeve's Superman spent training with Jor-El (Marlon Brando) in the Fortress of Solitude. They both also built their Fortresses in the arctic thanks to a Kryptonian crystal that Jor-El equipped them with. Both incarnations of Clark also met their versions of Lois on their first day at the Daily Planet but, from there, their lives wildly diverged. The Arrowverse's Lois and Clark married in 2006 and their twins, Jordan (Alex Garfin) and Jonathan (Jordan Elsass), were born in 2007 since they are 14 in 2021.
Hoechlin's Superman did meet the movies' Superman, portrayed by Reeve's successor, Brandon Routh, during Crisis On Infinite Earths, but the rebirth of the Arrowverse post-Crisis radically changed the history of Hoechlin and Tulloch's Lois and Clark that fans saw in Supergirl. Regardless, the Arrowverse's Clark Kent is at the peak of his abilities after training with Jor-El for nine years and Superman & Lois' Man of Steel is one of the most experienced Supermen after about two decades of being Earth's greatest hero.