I was reading a graphic novel I’d picked up yesterday in which a character gains super strength. A few pages later, she is attacked by an assassin, who breaks a sword across her back. The super-strong character remarks “Guess I’m invulnerable too, eh? Good to know.”
This got me thinking, are there many characters in comics who have strength above standard human levels but do not have any form of invulnerability? I’m not talking all out, Superman style take-an-artillery-shell-to-the-chest invulnerability just some level of resistance to injury. I thought it came with the territory.
Realistically, if you’ve got a musculature and bones that can handle lifting tons of weight, you’re already much much tougher than a normal human being.
The three examples that come first to mind are Spider-Man, Wonder Woman, and Timber Wolf (from the Legion of Super-Heroes). All of which are much more vulnerable than their strength levels would seem to indicate. I was going to write “their strength levels & basic physics,” but invoking science in an comics discussion is just a recipe for madness.
Wonder Woman’s weird. I mean, she blocks bullets with her bracers rather than her hands or chest as Superman would, but she’s also gone mano-a-mano with an enraged mind-controlled Supes and lived to tell about. I think she’s invulnerable (but not as much as Superman), and just does the bracelet thing to show off.
It’s sexually symbolic - she can handle beatings (as all women should) but not penetrations (as virgins seeks to avoid), hence she deflects bullets with her bracelets.
Okay, I have no idea.
There was a story arc in pre-Crisis Superman (~#532-544-ish) in which he becomes a pawn between two ultra-powerful techno-wizards, Lord Satannus and his estranged wife Syrene. Superman ends up unexpectedly split into two beings, with each having half his full powerset. One got strength, x-ray vision, flight, superspeed etc. while the other had invulnerability, heat vision etc. Oddly, both men seemed to possess telescopic vision. Since the wizards were most interested in his invulnerability, that half was whisked away while his depowered twin was dumped back in Metropolis, trying to deal with his diminished capacities. Among other hassles, he could no longer lift the gigantic key that allowed him access to the Fortress of Solitude - he had the strength but his body couldn’t take the strain.
Most of the Giant Man/Goliath types (with the possible exception of Atlas) have been strong but not bulletproof. Moon Knight and Nighthawk are stronger than normal, but have normal vulnerabilities.
Ultra Boy of the Legion of Super Heroes is another interesting one. He has pretty much all the powers Superman has, but he can only use one at time. So he can be invulnerable but not super strong at the same time, and vice-versa.
I’ve always assumed (no citations, just my opinion) that Wonder Woman could take a bullet without serious damage, but that doing so would be painful or inflict minor damage and thus she chooses to block the bullets with her bracelets.
Sorry for the double post, but I’ve glanced at Wikipedia and gained the following insight.
So there you have it. She has high resistance to blunt force trauma (Superman’s punches likely falling into this category) but is vulnerable to sharp projectiles (and must thus block bullets.)
Comic book treatments of super-strength rarely follow any laws of physics. Just because a person is super strong does not make them invulnerable or even able to punch someone harder than a normal person. In order to knock someone even several feet, you have to be moving a mass at great velocity to transfer enough energy to the target. At least some characters have a reason why they can hit so hard, like Superman and Spider-Man (very fast) or Thor and the Hulk (very heavy). But there are characters like the aforementioned Sunspot and Ultra Boy who shouldn’t be able to hit someone anywhere near as far as they seem to.
Conversely, one good example I always like to mention is Thumper from Valiant Comics’ Harbinger (and first seen in Solar, Man of the Atom). One of the bad guys (Eggbreakers), she is noted for having to carry around lead (or depleted uranium?) weights in order to make use of her strength. She was neutralized by being levitated off the ground by Solar, where all she could do was flail helplessly.
But worst of all is the treatment that speedsters get. The Flash should win every fight he gets into. ANYTHING can be a weapon at a fraction of light-speed. A handful of dirt at the speed of sound could do some major damage, especially since he can ignore friction. But I digress…
The Savage Dragon has super-strength but gets beaten to a pulp fairly often. He can definitely be scattered, smothered, covered, slopped, chunked, stabbed, bitch-slapped, and drop-kicked.
That’s actually one of the things that makes him so cool.
My take on Wonder Woman is that she learned how to use the bracelets before she became invulnerable. If you’re going to learn how to block freaking bullets, it has to be at the lightning reflex level; you can’t take the time to think, “Oh, hey, wait, I’m invulnerable. I’ll have some more toast.” Kpwing! Pretty much the inverse of why Superman stands there while somebody empties a gun into his chest, but then he ducks when somebody throws a gun at him: he needs to remember to dodge stuff like that when he’s Clark Kent. He can always rationalize away why the bullets didn’t hurt him (“guess they missed…”) but if people see a .38 special bounce off his face without leaving a mark, people are going to talk.
The Beast was strong, but not inhumanly so, without much resistance to damage. Sort of the same for the early Wolverine–sure, he had world-class regeneration, but he still got flattened in a lot of fights.
Not that much of a reach. Early ironclad warships could laugh at cannonballs, but armour-piercing shells were another kettle of fish. And the Champions game system would accommodate WW with nary a hiccup - her Strength (and hence her Physical Defense) are way up, but she’s short on Resistant defences and so uses the Missile Deflection skill to cover her from ranged physical Killing Attacks.
Done? All right. Think of the elephant feet as Superman’s punches: a large force distributed over an area. Now, think of the cow’s feet a bullet as bullets: they apply much less force than Superman’s punches, but focus said force into a much smaller area and were thus able to break through the pool cover.
It’s more a matter of pressure (force per unit area) than force itself.
The problem with that, of course, is that Superman is not an elephant, much less a giant. He’s the same size and weight as an ordinary man – okay, a slightly larger than average ordinary man; according to the movies, 6’4" and about 225 lbs. For his punches to do the damage they’re presented as doing, he’d have to be moving his hands much more quickly than generally presented–faster even than bullets, I’d guess. (F=MA, anyone?), so a punch from him should work the same way a bullet does. But he and the vast majority of super-strong characters are presented as often moving at speeds perceptible to ordinary humans when, logically, their superstrong punches should also be superfast.
