ender2003's Comic Book Blogs

Spawning from one of the forum threads about characters that people don't like, a lot of people picked Superman and cited his overpowered nature. That got me to thinking about other overpowered characters.

Superman is the most obvious example, he can fly, is invulnerable, super-strong, super fast, heat vision, cold breath, and super senses (vision, hearing, feeling, etc) as well as an eidetic memory. Those are just the most frequent powers, he has been granted temporary use to too many to count as one-offs. His power levels have varied over the years but he is pretty much always the strongest hero by a wide margin. The only way that they can make his character interesting at all is basically by giving him a vulnerability to kryptonite, magic and psychics. One of his other weaknesses is the fact that he is always holding himself back. Pretty much every battle starts off with him gauging the enemy and then using the least amount of power to stop them, because if he always went full-bore he would kill everything in his path. That would reduce repeat offenses... Anyway, there have only been a handful or characters that have been shown to truly go toe-to-toe with Supes and match him physically, but his other powers always win out at that point.

Not that Superman is the only one overpowered, there are others that are guilty as well. Let's flip back and forth between Marvel and DC and go for the Hulk for a minute. With strength that can rival Superman's, Hulk gets stronger the madder he gets. This has been taken to the point where he has broken planets with his strength. While he does not have the multitude of powers that Supes has, Hulk also has been shown to have healing on par with Wolverine, or possibly with Doomsday (DC) because it is basically the ability to adapt and survive. In other words, the Hulk will survive pretty much anything and then pummel the out of it, no contest.