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.

Some of the superpowers in comics bring up some random questions. I know that they are comic books and we are supposed to suspend disbelief and just enjoy the story, but some things just beg for an explanation. I will start with Superman.

Flying - How does Superman fly? Does he have to jump really hard like Neo does? Does he simply concentrate and somehow decrease his density to lighter than air? Does he have to constantly focus to stay in the air? Can he make the air beneath him solid enough that he can stand on it? 

I have never really seen a good explanation for his flight. I know it is not jet propulsion from his kryptonian farts, but how does he fly? Also, how does he lift other objects while he is in flight? I'm not really talking about a person, I'm talking about a bus or a plane. Does whatever force that he focuses to get himself of the ground have to increase in order to accommodate for the extra weight? And does his physical strength matter at that point? If he lifts a plane into the air and begins to fly, does he still have to exert the same force that he does to simply hold the plane up, or does it become weightless once he leaves the ground? And speaking of his strength, how can Superman be strong enough to punch holes in mountains or pick up an entire planet and still be able to tone it back enough to shake hands with someone and not put them in the hospital?

Let's jump to the Flash now. I know that they explain away a lot with the "Speed Force", but Flash can run at superspeeds and has reaction times that are instantaneous. Does that mean that he experiences the world much more quickly than we do at all times? Imagine how annoying it would be if he lived through 1 full minute for every second that passed to us. If we try to talk to him it would be so boring to him to sit there for an hour while we complete a single sentence. Shouldn't he also age about 100x faster than a normal person? And let's think for a minute about what happens at high speeds with any type of collision. Or what about his combat method, one of his abilities is to focus his speed into a fist and swing with immense force. However, if he were to punch someone like Superman, wouldn't that break Flash's hand? He has no super strength, just speed. Also, Flash has been shown to run at speeds faster than light. My question is, how can he see if he is running faster than light?

Let's jump over to the Marvel side for a minute. Cyclops shoots beams of concussive force from his eyes. Most movies and shows make it look like his beams are heat-based, but they are not. My question is this, how do beams that basically have physical force come out of his eyes without ripping holes in them or pulling them out of his skull?I can live with the fact that he basically absorbes sunlight and converts it to that energy, the beams themselves just don't make much sense to me.

And then there is Colossus. He can cover his body with an organic metal that just appears from nowhere. And somehow in the process he gains abot 6 inches in height too. Where does the metal come from, and where does it go when he turns back to normal? How does being covered in metal increase his strength by about 1000%? It doesn't say that his entire body turns into the metal, it is just his skin. In addition to making him incredibly strong and almost invulnerable, some incarnations of Colossus also do not need oxygen while in metal mode.

One last marvel question for the moment, how could Magneto develop a helmet that prevents Professor X from reading his thoughts? If the helmet is just some kind of shield that blocks psychic probes, why can't the professor come in from under the helmet and project the probe upwards through the head? If the helmet creates some kind of field that disrupts psychic abilities in the general area of Magneto's head, would that not screw up his brain? Besides, in the early comics Magneto was shown to have minor telepathic powers as well and those should have been blocked by his helmet.

Again, I know we are supposed to not think too much about this stuff, but it really makes me wonder sometimes.