Comic book characters who need a power-down

Cafe Society
1

Well, that should be clear enough. What comic book characters, as currently presented, should be powered down for dramatic credibility? Try to explain what makes the character too powerful, if you would, and how you’d change them.

I’ll start:

  1. The Martian Manhunter. (Yes, know he’s currently dead, but I don’t expect that to last and am assuming he’ll return at

I mean, really. All Superman’s powers, plus shapeshifting, invisibility, intangibility, and Xavier-level telepathy, all of which he can use at once (except for the obviously-incompatible super-strength and intangibility); plus knowledge of Martian technology centuries beyond that of humanity; plus the lessening of his weakness to fire so that it has to be “emotionally significant” somehow. As Plastic Man once asked, if J’onn can do all that crap, why are the rest of them ever fighting anybody anyway?

But I like J’onn. So I’d take away all the Superman knock-off powers except for flight and super-strength, and reduce those sharply–making him no stronger than Aquaman, say, and able to fly no faster than a 120 mph or so. I’d also ditch the the intangibility and sharply reduce the telepathy, making it clear that J’onn has signficant difficulty reading non-Martian minds; in other words, he’d be able to have a telepathic conversations with a willing participant, but he wouldn’t be able to probe thoughts and memories against the subject’s consent, nor would he be able to erase memories, create new ones, et cetera. (Alternatively, he could be able to do that but have such great ethical concerns about it that he refused to do so except in the most dire circumstances.) He can keep his intelligence changing his power as discussed would force him to be an actual detective. The vulnerability to fire I’d keep as it currently is.

  1. The Flashes

If you can go from zero to .99c in .01 seconds, circumnavigate the earth dozens of time without getting tired, run up the sides of skyscrapers, vibrate through solid objects, have reflexes to match, ignore time-dilation effects, and run on water like Jesus in Nikes, you should never ever come close to losing a fight to anyone whose name isn’t “Clark Kent.”

I’d limit all super-speedsters to speeds far below that of light–probably to no more than four times the speed of sound–and make it clear that it takes them a measurable time and distance to do so–say a mile to reach Mach 1. Wally would be the exception; he’d be able to reach lightspeed, but only if he had a thousand miles to build up velocity, and he’d be subject to relativistic drawbacks. And no more vibrating through solid objects without penalty; either bring back the “everything I vibrate through blows up” (so he daren’t use it on people or around non-invulnerable types).

  1. Wolverine

I don’t mind Wolverine with a healing factor that’s better than anyone else’s, or with bones that can’t be broken, or with claws that can cut through anything. I don’t like him with all three, though.

For Logan, I’d reduce his durability to what it was in the mid-80s mini-series: he’ll heal fast, but a sword through the gut is going to sideline him a long tme. No more of this ridiculous falling from the Helicarrier five miles above land and walking away afterward. Also establish there are things even he can’t cut through, not because his claws aren’t strong enough but because he doen’st have the muscle behind them to do it. Make him work harder.

Next?

2

Green Lantern.

I don’t follow DC closely enough to know exactly who the character is or what his power levels are supposed to be at any given moment (all I see are graphic novel compilations taken out of the library) but last I looked the ring was supposed to be the third most powerful weapon in the universe and without even the vulnerability to things yellow.

And all the guy can think of to do is make giant hands and hit people over the head with hammers?

One flick of green and all fights are over.

Either dial back the power or stop telling people how powerful he could be if he only had the willpower.

3

Martian Manhunter has total control over his form, right? He doesn’t have to even be a humanoid, if he didn’t want to. He’s basically protoplasm. I’d say change his fire vulernability away from a psychological block and make it so that it’s simply the only way to damage his amorphous flesh. Stabbing and shooting him doesn’t hurt him, because he doesn’t have organs to damage, and his body can just flow around the projectile/blade/fist/whatever. But fire (and, I suppose, acid or intense heat) destroy the tissue entirely. Make him physically like the monster from John Carpenter’s The Thing. With that change in mind, I’d say that bits of him that get blown off can’t function on their own. If someone chops off his hand, there isn’t a MM hand running around causing havoc, although he could grab it with his other hand and reabsorb the material. I agree with toning down the telepathy and removing all the duped Supes powers, except flight and super-strength, both of which should be extensions of his shape-shifting ability.

I wouldn’t change Wolverine at all from how he is now. He’s still pretty limited: he’s an unkillable death machine, but he still needs to get within arms reach of you to do anything, and he doesn’t have any powers that will help him with that. I think he should be pretty powerful, considering that he’s one of Marvel’s most popular characters, but he has enough built in limitations to keep him from being ridiculously over-powered.

I don’t really have an opinion on speedsters like the Flash.

4

Wizard/sorceror/magician characters are the worst. I mean, given the nature of their powers, there are no logically obvious limits at all. Zatara the Magician and his daughter Zatanna could do pretty much anything just by reciting a command backwards. Sargon the Sorceror, armed with his Ibistick, might as well have been God. Doctor Fate is the only member of the Justice League who could take down Superman (who is vulnerable to kryptonite and magic).

The Specter – a cop sent back from the dead by a Higher Power to fight evil – similar problem. Why doesn’t he just wish all evil away?

5

And top of the list, of course, is the omnipotent God-Man! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_the_Dancing_Bug

6

I don’t think MM is ever played as quite as powerful as you say he is. In battle, he’s formidible, but people are constantly knocking him for a loop, hurting him, etc. I think the Justice Leauge cartoon does a decent job with this: most of the heroes are nigh indestructible, but any of them, Superman among them, can be taken down and knocked out if you just hit them hard enough or shoot electricity through them.

MOST DC heroes are ridiiculously overpowered if you think about what they can really do and how it could be employed. Writers nevertheless find ways to let the villians beat these powers. Zatanna may have an awesome ability, but how hard is it to simply cover her mouth before she can say anything? Countless villians have done just that.

I do think sometimes powerdowns make for decent story lines, with a character having to learn to deal with less power than they were used to. But by and large, as long as writers can come up with elaborate ways to render these excessive powers moot, the story can continue to be entertaining.

7

Except often the excessive powers require the writer to depict the character as an idiot.

For example, I recently reread the Final Night miniseries. There’s a scene in it in which Black Canary and a woman she’s protecting are about to be lynched by a mob of ordinary people, armed with sticks, rocks, & torches. Batman sends the Flash, Nightwing, and Robin to rescue them; Wally carries the other two. Now the scene as described has no drama, because Flash vs. 100 people with torches & clubs–hell, 100 people with Uzis–isn’t even the beginning of a fight; he can disarm them before they’ve even seen them. He has no need of the junior Batmen at all. So they solve the problem by having him arrive from nowhere, yank ONE gun away from a would-be lyncher, and then stand in the middle of the mob posturing, saying. Naturally he gets conked on the head, and Nightwing and Robin have to save their moronic friend.

Which is a basic problem with all the overpowered characters: you have to assume that they’re idiots WAY too much.

8

That was the only way Molecule Man worked as a character at all.

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Classic JLA Martian Manhunter: No powers when invisible, except flight and telepathy. Not even durability. (Maybe shapechanging, never saw it used while invisible.) No intangibility.

Not bad, really.

10

Well, to some extent, they ARE idiots. In the sense that they are not externally aware of themselves and their powers like we are. Wally is just some nigh-teenager who has an incredible power that could make him godlike… but he still thinks of himself as just some guy. Trying to interact with people on a non-superspeed level is just him being human, even if tactically it is pretty stupid if you think about every event as a tactical battleplan where he must always use his full powers to instantly solve any situation.

Most superheroes don’t sit down with a situation and run through all the cool stuff in issue #219-316 and figure that if they just grab the miracle cube from hyperstorage they can instantly turn an oncoming meteor into a blob of pink jello. Except Batman. But then, Batman is probably THE most overpowered hero EVER.

11

Actually I started to list Batman among my overpowered characters; I just figured someone else would, along with how they’d fix them.

12

The Hulk. Yes, I KNOW “Hulk is strongest one there is” but that just means the bad guys have to have an insane power level to beat him. (Superman should have faced the REAL Hulk, btw.) I like the concept on a neverending rage machine, but again, it distorts the story if he’s that powerful. That kind of muscle belongs to guys like Thor and Hercules, because they are divine.

Another one: Firestorm. Why does this guy even have super-enemies? Who would fight a guy who can turn anything into anything? Depending on the rating of the comic, any fight could be ended by something that would be either comical or horrifically bloody: either “Your machine gun bullets are now Peeps!” to “Your clothes are coated with poison ivy juice” to “I turned your bones into sulfur.”

Heck, Flash’s villains are mostly a joke with his current power level. I agree, give him the speed of, say, Quicksilver, which is fast but not godlike.

Oh, and delete Zauriel. If you’ve seen and experienced “God”, nothing will faze or surprise or intimidate you ever again. No fun.

13

I admit I’m not a reader of comic books, but from what I know about the character, the first thing that occurs to me is for Batman to somehow lose access to his fortune (governmental corruption, betrayal by an insider, investments in Enron, it doesn’t matter how). Batman is left with his physical and mental skills, and a fair amount of money and technogadgets, but he no longer has access to (practically) infinite funding and his near-impregnable underground fortress. If his anti-aircraft codpiece breaks, it might be a while before he can get the resources to fix it.

14

That would definately be a good Batman arc, adn some writers ahve explored a little of this, albiet never in full. It would be hard to explain how this could happen in the context of the curernt DC universe where Batman has tons of rich friends, but then alienating friends is something that Batman has sort of a talent for. In the past two years, his paranoia about superpowered heroes has almost destroyed the Justice Leauge, what, twice already?

15

Not necessarily. Take the late 80s Legion of Super-Heroes, in the middle of Levitz’ run. The White Witch could do a great number of things with her magic–IF she was prepared. But she had to gather materials for many of the spells, and even for the ones that required no talismans could only have “a handful” of spells at a time, and thus needed her fellows assistance in many ways. It kept her from having to be written as an idiot.

16

Who was that Native American Medicine Man who hung around with Alpha Flight during Byrne’s original run? I HATED that guy. All he had was a magic medicine bag from which he would pull the solution to any problem. It was like Batman’s utility belt without the plausible deniability (and less interesting.) How to redo him? Well, take away that medicine bag for starters. It might not be a bad idea to add a childhood trauma, like having his parents killed outside a theater when he was young :smiley:

17

Except for the fact that she used her powers like that to begin with, when she was shown by other writers to be able to use her magics in less limited ways.

And ‘Learn and Burn’ is a fairly lame limitation for a magician. (Although it’s another clue that makes me think Levitz was a D&D nerd.)

As to characters that need powering down…

Seconding mystics needing a hard limit on their power.

To the Flashes - Wally needs powering down, and Bart needs to stop getting powered up. Jay’s fine, though.

Superman. Sure he’s not up to his old power levels, but he’s getting back up there.

Firestorm. I don’t know what the current Firestorm’s like, but before he died, Ronnie had a bit where he turned a meteorite (a large one, though I can’t remember just how huge) into marshmallow fluff. (The best limit on someone like Firestorm or Element Lad is a limit on the volume of material they can alter at a time.)

Green Lanterns need a hard limit, rather than silly weaknesses.

Hourman (the android) was pretty insane. When Rex finishes rebuilding him, I hope he powers him down, some.

On the Marvel side, most of the ones I think need depowering are dead, or depowered, in the main continuity, but I’ll mention them, anyway:

Charles Xavier, Jean Grey, Magneto, Scarlet Witch.

18

Shaman.

19

Hawkeye and Green Arrow have too many trick arrows. They’re more interesting when they only have the type of arrows you can buy at Wal-Mart. The first time I read a comic with Hawkeye (Marvel Team-Up #18, I think), he was shot out of a pneumatic tube straight into the air. He whipped out a “retro-rocket arrow” to slow down his ascent, and used a “parachute arrow” to control his descent. Unless he reasonably anticipated that precise pneumatic tube scenario, I can’t imagine a practical use for either of those arrows.

Scarlet Witch–When they bring her back, she needs specific limits on how powerful she is, preferably back to 1964 levels.

Superman–Nothng is more boring than the stories where he moves Earth out of its orbit. No one ever improved on those old Fleisher Brothers cartoon shorts. Those should be the standard.

Jean Grey–Can mentally heft about 200 pounds. Cannot devour planets. Claremont took a very wrong turn with this character almost as soon as he started writing her.

Doom–Works best with no magical or mental powers, just the armor, the intellect and the boundless arrogance.

20

Yeah, but Molecule Man was supposed to be a spaz. That’s one reason I always preferred Marvel to DC – DC’s heroes are just too powerful, and there’s a whole stable of them: Superman, Wonder Woman, Zatanna, the Flashes, the Green Lanterns, Martian Manhunter, etc. Not to mention Batman, “if he’s prepared”. DC’s villains have to struggle to even look like a threat in the face of the JLA or what-have-you. That’s why I always liked DC’s street-level heroes, like Green Arrow and Nightwing, better. Where’s the dramatic tension in watching a team of gods smacking around the goober of the week?

Marvel has a tendancy to make the villains the overpowered ones, therefore giving the heroes that much more trouble. The only reason Magneto hasn’t slaughtered all of the X-Men several times over is because he doesn’t particularly want to. Graviton and Molecule Man are hampered by psychological insecurities. Doctor Doom actually did conquer the world not once but TWICE (with Namor as his fawning slave) and gave it up because it got boring. Most all the really powerful heroes are either dead or depowered.