To Spiderman’s webs when he’s done with them?
Who pays for Superman’s damage when he busts through a wall?
Any more??
In the original Spider-Man, the webs evaporated after a few minutes.
For that matter, how is Spider-man able to propel a light, thin web hundreds of feet through swirling Manhattan air currents and have it stick on dirty surfaces with enough grip to support him and maybe someone being carried? And how can he wear gloves and footwear if bristly things on his hands and feet are what enable him to climb walls? So many questions…
The cartoon “The Tick” was great for this - The Tick kept breaking buildings and kicking things over and stuff, and they would stay broken. He was a very destructive superhero.
When he’s not in costume, they’ve shown him having to take off his shoes in order to be able to climb. Maybe the gloves and footwear of his costume are some special fabric he can cling “through”?
By this point he certainly has access to unstable molecules, the magic Marvel-Universe fabric that works with super-powers. I think everyone but Thor and Iron Man uses them at this point.
“Damage Control!”
Seriously. There was a comic that detailed what happened after the heroes were done.
Can you imagine what the insurance premiums are like for the owner of The Daily Bugle building? Or the Baxter Building? Or the Daily Planet? Or ANY skyscraper in Metropolis?
Oh, and I remember Spidey quipping to webbed crooks: “Don’t worry, boys, those webs’ll dissolve in a couple of hours. Course, by then the cops’ll be here to cut you down.”
In some stories, he’s using a sort of static electricity to climb walls. Shoe soles get in the way, socks not so much.
With a combination of super-strength, super-speed, and super-engineering, Superman can probably repair most of the damage he causes.
Spidey’s webs dissolve after a while.
He is able to aim properly because erhm…he’s good like that. His heightened senses allow him to hit his targets. The web itself is super-adhesive (at the tips) so that’s why it supports all weights. They actually did mention a few times that Peter’s a genius for designing something like that.
Superman & building damage…not sure, but they do have a storyline in the Ultimate Spider-man universe where they consider him a liability because he causes too much damage.
They seem to address this a bit more in Marvel’s Ultimate universe.
The Ultimates/Shield can be seen repairing the city.
In his super-spare time.
.
I always like the original premise of The Incredibles where superheros were outlawed because of the collateral property damage and innocent bystander lawsuits.
Marvel had a book for a while called Damage Control, that focused on a non-metahuman construction company that specializes in repairing damage from metahuman fights.
And for that matter, how do super-secret hero/villain groups get rid of the trash, wastewater, radioactive waste etc. from their secret hideouts/lairs? It would be a bit of a dead giveaway when the sewer pipes keep melting or the neighbors keep finding mystery garbage bags on their tree lawns on pickup day.
I mean, I know each group tends to have its own resident supergenius, but if each of them spent the time designing a clean, efficient trash disposal method they could just sell the damn things and make big bucks instead of holding the world for ransom and stuff.
Fun fact: Go look at a Spider-Man comic. Find a panel where’s clinging to the wall and a villain rips him off. He’s never actually pulled from the wall. The wall itself will break with chunks of bricks clinging to his feet as he’s tossed.
The Silver Age Superman was always repairing stuff at super-speed, even stuff he wasn’t strictly responsible for. He spent at least as much time dealing with natural disasters as he did fighting super-villains, and probably much more. I can recall an instance in which he got grief from some cosmic type – probably Destiny, though I could be wrong – for immediately rebuilding a ramshackle town that had been leveled by an earthquake, better than it had been before, because the CT felt he was making humanity dependent on him. The Guardians of the Universe expressed a similar concern.
Most hero groups don’t have secret lairs. The JLA started out with one but moved to the satellite and then a series of public locations; the Teen Titans inherited the secret lair but in their second incarnation had a quite public location. The FF, Avengers, and Legion of Super-Heroes always had public locations. The X-Men’s mansion was initially secret in the sense that Xavier didn’t admit it was anything more than a school, but it was on a map.
I’ve often wondered how Batman ever managed to equip the Cave, though. If he were as ruthless as Lex Luthor he could ship in non-English speakers to do the work and then murder them afterwards, or if he had the tech he could use robots; but I simply don’t believe he had that level of tech that early in his career.
In the PS238 setting, one of the metahuman geniuses (Herschel Clay, formerly the power-suited hero Mantium) invented quick-construct, self-repairing buildings. There are also metahumans who work in the private sector, sometimes in construction and demolition. (There’s a background reference to that in the Career Day issue, and more detail in one of the “Ask Doctor Positron” columns, I think, but my comic collection is still boxed up.)
At least once in a marvel book it’s mentioned that Matt Murdock negotiated NYC’s superhero insurance. It’s costly but worth it, I’d think.
Actually the Batcave’s exactly what I’m talking about. Assuming it’s not a natural cave, that would have taken a lot of blasting and digging to hollow that monster out. So then whaddya do with the rubble, and how do ya keep water from flooding it, and how do you keep it stabilized (I live in an area where mine subsidence is an ongoing problem). It’d be a bit Awkward for the bedrock under one’s dwelling to give way only to end up in the Batcave while Batman and Robin are whipping up some (link possibly NSFW)Batman batter.
And maybe Batman’s enough of a genius to build his own power plant so he doesn’t black out all of Gotham City every time he fires up his computers, but what does he do with the bat-trash? Or if he pinches a bat-loaf and clogs up the plumbing so bad even Alfred can’t unclog it?