Not as bad as Dazzler’s ability to convert sound to light, perhaps, but Jubilee’s powers ARE pretty lame.
Since when is the ability to shoot lasers from your hands a lame power?
Emma Frost taught us, just like she did with Iceman, that the problem isn’t with the powers, it’s with the person utilizing the powers.
In the first Fantastic Four movie, they got huge kudos for winning fights or stopping tragedies that they caused. If they had all just stayed in the lab and minded their own business, everything would have been fine.
I don’t recall that last bit, there.
(I mean, I guess none of the characters can mention it, since it’s not like they can pop over to our world and compare crime rates – but is there any indication that there are more muggings, or burglaries, or whatever, in the Watchmen-verse NYC circa 1985 or 1975 or 1965 or whatever than in real-life NYC at the same time?)
(Granted, the international situation is messed up due to Doc winning the Vietnam War for the gent in the White House – but that’s another question.)
In one of the Watchmen shorts they interview washed up ex nemesis of the 60’s Watchmen. He claims that he would have never become a villain if the Watchmen hadn’t existed. Of course watching the video you quickly realize this is just a lame excuse for him being a sociopath.
MsSmith587 wrote: “The Avengers are the only team AFAIK to acknowledge that one of their members is actually kind of silly (Hawkeye)”
Actually, the Legion of Superheroes acknowledged the silliness of Bouncing Boy on more than one occasion. And if I recall correctly, Duo Damsel, Dream Girl, and Matter-Eater Lad all occasionally wondered if they belonged on the team.
On the other hand, when Dream Girl announced that she wanted to stand for election to serve as team leader of the Legion, they – realized she wouldn’t have bothered, if she wasn’t going to win that election; and then she, uh, did.
I suppose the crime element is sort of the paradox of writing superhero stories—if you make the superhero noticeably effective at thwarting or preventing crime, in comparison to the real world, you have much less to write about. Hence the value of supervillains (even short-lived ones), or the occasional grim “what if” glimpse of a world without the superhero—where the superhero’s function is justified as keeping crime from getting much worse.
Mostly a problem in ongoing books/series’ where making a major change to the setting would disrupt the ability to write more of the same in the future; self-contained works like Watchmen have more leeway, and IIRC there’s also a fan theory of the “in-universe” reason why Silver Age comics tend to be more light-hearted and goofy—the superheroes there were so effective at combating serious “grim and gritty” crime that things are actually pretty peaceful and under control.
I think it’s simplest if, in-universe, there’s some single catalyzing event that causes superpowered individuals to start cropping up, and those individuals decide on their own what side to take. Superheroes without supervillains or supervillains without superheroes are neither one of them stable.
And X-Men and co to have “do I belong here?” issues include Cannonball, Cyclops, Jean Grey, Phoenix, Iceman, Wolverine, the other Wolverine, both Proudstar brothers, Storm… wait, I’ll probably finish faster if I list the ones who never had such an issue. And then there’s the ones who have a bit of a “where the heck else am I supposed to go?” factor, such as Nightcrawler: he’s been in multiple X-teams but you don’t see him applying for a job in Cirque du Soleil even though he’d be perfectly qualified for it, or trying to enter seminary.
How does Superman deal with the fact that while he can solve pretty many any problem, he can’t solve all of them because he can’t be in more than one place at a time?
Like does he look like a massive asshole every time he decides he doesn’t want to go save people in a flood halfway around the world?
The thing to remember about superhero comics is that their roots are in pulp novels. And one of the characteristics of pulp novels was a general disinterest in realistically depicting the limits of the human body. In the real world, a normal human gets shot in the shoulder, they’re not using that arm for months, and may never regain full use of it. Sam Spade gets shot in the shoulder, he shrugs it off as a “flesh wound” and is punching out mooks on the next page. And there’s a throughline from that to most modern action cinema. John McClane can run barefoot across broken glass, and doesn’t spend the rest of the film in a wheelchair. That’s the baseline for humanity in most superhero universes, and explains why “peak human” Steve Rogers is pretty clearly superhuman by our standards - “basic” humans in the comics universe are significantly stronger, faster, and tougher than humans in the real world…
You do, in fact, see Nightcrawler doing both of those things. His background had him working as a circus performer, and at one point in (I think) the '90s, he quit the X-Men to join a seminary and eventually become a Catholic priest.
He can be in multiple places at once, though. He can time travel, as he did in the 1978 Superman movie. One of him was stopping the missile, one was saving Lois.
He just doesn’t do it a lot because most people really don’t matter to him. He’s losing touch. God help us all.
nm
His background, which is why I mentioned his being perfectly qualified for a job in Cirque du Soleil (or equivalent), but once he joined the school that was it. And his priesthood apparently was never real; never mind that given the time scales they work with, he wouldn’t have had time to get his degree between leaving and coming back - one effect of time dilation and compression in comic books (and it way too much media) is that on one hand it’s possible to get through four years’ minimum schooling in three months and to get a higher degree or order without lower ones, and on the other you can have someone stay in school for twenty years without anybody batting an eye.
Well, yeah. Every single one can survive getting thrown through a wall or down a staircase. If you just want to disorient for a few minutes instead of kill someone, you can gently smash them in the head with a rifle butt.