Good point.
In Spidey’s defense, he had the flu which weakened his powers. During the fight, Doc Ock mentioned that Spidey seemed weaker than normal, so JJJ, Betty Brant and the rest of the Bugle crew believed that Peter was impersonating Spider-man.
The Hero Must Have Nicer Ex-Girlfriends Than I Had!- Runs along side the You Must Die/Get Amnesia Syndrome. Too often, a hero feels remotely interested in a woman and then reveals his secret identity. 95% of all relationships fail to produce marriage.* Doesn’t the hero worry about what will happen if the break up goes poorly? Forget about her doing donuts in your lawn,buddy. She’s starting a website “Bruce Wayne is Batman… and also has a small penis!.COM”
Example: EVERY FREAKING BATMAN MOVIE!
*Cite- Out of my ass.
The same issue had the bartender mentioning "Good thing I have super hero battle insurance"
Wonder what the rates on that are. ;)Also, if I recall aright, Octupus had kidnapped someone close to Peter to draw Spider-Man out. Thus, given Peter’s poor performance, his obvious motivation, and Jameson’s reflexively-critical appraisal of Spider-Man’s character, it’s easy to believe that JJJ, at least, would believe that this was an imposter rather than the real deal.
This also shows two other syndromes.
Of all the bars: Superheroes and villains regularly cross each other and get into fights, even if there’s no real reason for it. Consider the above: Sure, both the X-men and Juggernaut hang out in New York. But randomly crossing each other in a bar? There’s 11 million people in the city!
The amazing disappearing girlfriend: Most heroes cannot get married. Even if they have extremely tight relationships and should get married, something terrible happens (like a new writer) and it’s back to square 1.
I don’t read comic books, but I noticed this one from one of the Superman movies and some of the old Superfriends cartoons:
The Fair Weather Friend Syndrome: No matter how many times a superhero has proved what a noble and selfless person he/she is by repeatedly saving the world, a villain can turn all of society against him/her in an instant by committing some foul deed and framing the superhero for it. (Or by drugging/hypnotizing the superheros and tricking them into committing aforementioned foul deed.) No one ever hesitates to believe that their heroes are guilty as sin and accordingly, everyone does their best to hunt them down and eradicate them.
How is this unrealistic? The public are fickle & faithless, & will turn on you like a rabid coyote in the twinkle of an eye.
A varient on this theme happened to The Incredibles, with the swarm of lawsuits.
The born to die syndrome - seems like in a lot of new, team based series, one of the ‘main’ characters will always die in the first ten issues. Off the top of my head, all I can think of is X-men 2099 but I know there are more.
A popular variant of this is the joined to defect syndrome. Once again, a new team based book, and before issue 10 someone turns out to be a villian. Recently, see ‘The Losers’ (great book by the way).
The second generation of X-Men lost the Indian guy in the second issue.
X-Static lost SEVERAL characters.
Which was a horrendous ripoff of Watchmen. I enjoyed The Incredibles the one time I saw it, but upon further reflection, I don’t think there was anything original there at all.
I don’t think it’s unrealistic either. It’s one of the few realistic superhero tropes, actually Take Batman: a clear border-line psychotic running around committing assaults for hte public good, masked, armed with expensive toys that mean he is clearly wealth himself or has a wealthy patron. There has to be a fairly good-sized portion of Gotham who doesn’t really trust him in the first place.
As for Superman III, I don’t remember anyone actually hunting down Superman. I rather imagine there was a scene in the White House situation room in which the president said to the assembled heads of the armed services, the NSA, and the CIA, “Well, gentlemen, our greatest fears have been realized. Superman has turned against us. I trust you’ve prepared for this in your contingency plans?”
“Well, we’ve been researching options ever since he first appeared, sir.”
“And?”
“We’re utterly, utterly screwed, sir. We couldn’t be more screwed if we were face down, unconcious, and pants-less in a frathouse.”
Also Tomorrow Woman was a casualty in Grant Morrison’s JLA.
But the whole point of Milligan and Allred’s X-Force/X-Statix was that they were fleeting celebrities, media whores, and as a result, completely expendable. Nobody expected them to stick around once their 15 minutes of fame were up, so it became a recurring theme as to which character felt “played out” and would meet a grisly death. In some cases, their management even engineered some of the deaths!
Hey, no one said that the cliche or syndrome had to be unrealistic*–just used as a plot point fairly frequently.
And the fact that it was spoofed in The Incredibles seems to validate my claim! 
How about the Preview is NOT my Friend Syndrome–where mild-mannered posters let stupid coding errors pass into a thread, hmmmm?
That was supposed to be unrealistic.
:smack: :smack: :smack:
Regenerative Power Syndrome: This is actually one of my favorite things. Wolverine’s healing factor allowed the writers to absolutely destroy him every month and have him back 100% for the next issue. This led to some interesting developments once Image comics started up.
Savage Dragon was purely a vehicle for Erik Larsen to see how much punishment he could deal to one character. The Dragon lost arms and legs, etc. The most extreme thing I remember was a bad guy who broke every bone in his body and left the Dragon in a dumpster so he couldn’t heal correctly. Pretty sick.
There was another one called Bloodstrike (I think…it may have been Strikeblood or BloodBlood) in which the group of “heroes” were all dead already. They were part of a government program to reanimate the dead and thus have cheaper hero labor. One early issue put them up against a dude named Supreme, a weak Superman copy. I’d never seen such depraved violence in a comicbook before. It was truly gruesome. But hey, just haul back the carcasses and we’ll have 'em ready to roll by Tuesday!
And along those same lines was Elementals, whose lead characters and a number of the villains were already dead, so they’d routinely get holes blown through them, jaws broken off and so on.
This is an older one and probably not relevant nowadays but A Super Team May Only Have One Female Member. The Fantastic 4, X-Men, Avengers, Justice Society and Justice League all are examples of this.
In the early days of Marvel, most women had “weak” powers and weren’t much good in fights – they all had mental powers, or “touchy-feely” abilities compared to their male counterparts. You had Invisible Girl/Woman (self-evident), Wasp (shrank herself), and Marvel Girl (telepath/telekinetic) against all their male teammates who were more suited for rushing into battle.
Another: Every Team Has One Super-Genius Inventor/Scientist. The JLA had Batman, the X-Men had Beast (though Forge came along later), the Avengers had Iron Man, and the FF had Mister Fantastic.
The Being Exposed to Intense Radiation Gives Super-PowersSyndrome–Self-explanatory. What would kill most people gives some super-powers.