I’m not quite clear on this. In the lastest issue of Bullseye Greatest Hits his abilities are so far beyond the norm it’s kinda-sorta getting into meta human territory.
In one scene he goads a government agent into beating him so he will lose a tooth, he then (apparently, it’s not directly shown) spits that tooth at the agent and it penetrates his skull and goes into his brain. This is getting into superhuman (something) levels, even though his other physical abilities strength and stamina wise seem very good, but not otherwise amazing. When he throws something it seems to be with almost an order of magnitude greater force than ordinary humans generate.
If the guy can spit a tooth and have it cave in someone’s skull and kill them, it’s obviously superhuman but f you need something more reasoned and not just pure opinion, Captain America, the general cut-off for human/superhumans in the Marvel Universe, wouldn’t be capable of a similar feat.
Bleah, I know I’m up too late now. I’m seeing comix threads in the Pit. If only I hadn’t taken that 6 hr nap earlier today, then I’d be asleep like a normal non flu person.
It’s a classic case of “power creep”. Each writer has to top the previous and come up with new novel ways to use a character. Batman went from a smart martial arts detective to an unstoppable superman who can disappear at will (wha? Batman was just here, how does he do that??)
Captain America can bounce his shield sixteen times on one throw, take out sixteen bad guys, and have the shield return to his hand. Ditto Daredevil and his billy-club.
And every superhero can jump blindly off a building, flinging a rope behind them, confident it will catch something and swing them safely on their way. Spidey might as well trade in his webshooters for a clothesline, it’s cheaper. (I refuse to recognise organic webshooters outside the movies)
Bullseye use to be a dude with incredible aim, now he clearly operates at a sperhuman level. I don’t care how strong you are, nobody on earth can throw a paperclip hard enough to kill and nobody can spit a tooth through a skull.
Especially with the amount MacFarlane used to make him use. I reckoned he’d be able to go about a city block per cartridge at that rate.
I don’t really have any problem with them making Bullseye more powerful, but they wrote the story in such a way that it had to be a retcon. My guess is that after BGH and Identity Disc, they’re going to go with making him a mutant.
The distinction is pretty minimal in comics anyway. Let’s face it: the only difference between almost any “type” of superhero is (a) the “flavor” of their power and (b) the color of the energy bolts. That is, the only difference between mutatns and anyone else is that all the characters who are mutants say it comes from their incredible mutant abilities… and they whine about noone loving their subspecies.
Ironically enough, they’ve strongly implied that everyone is a mutant - it’s just that some people have powers activated by random pubescent genetic change, and others don’t. And the mutant powers themselves merely tap into the mych the same sources, so that people who have them activated by radiation or taoxic exposure, or get it by focussing on an intellectual pursuit (super-scientists), aren’t really different.
Maical abilities are also slightly different, but amount to someone tapping into other forms of energy rather than “psionic” ones.
Didn’t they do something similar with Boomerang? First he was just a goofy third-string Spiderman villian with a good arm, then later he was a metahuman who could throw any small object with lethal force. I remember a Spiderman comic waaaaay back when that involved Boomerang locked up in a special cell with no loose objects whatsoever lying around–even his prison uniform was a one-piece jumpsuit with built-in slippers–because his abilities were supposedly so dangerous.
Perfectly plausible—but maybe there’s another explanation. I heard Frank Miller give an interview where he said the most brilliant thing about Hong Kong action movies is that they don’t bother to justify how a human being can fly or move at incredible speed; the simple answer is that he knows how. Comic books, on the other hand, felt they had to saddle their characters with these sci-fi-esque origins that explained the exact provenance of their abilities along with their limits. HK directors just showed whatever looked cool, reasoning that if you could fight really, really well, there’s no reason you couldn’t also, say, spit a seed at someone with enough force to kill them (which the bad guy in Iron Monkey does). Maybe comic writers are beginning to think the same way.
To each his own, but I prefer the pretense of a realistic explanation. Obviously comics are based on horseshit- a 175 pound spider couldn’t stick to a wall, but Pete Parker does just fine.
I have no problem with the super powered beings doing super human things, but dammit, the non-super powered should be a bit more toned down.
