In the official guides, Adrian Veidt got described as having “a superhuman level of athletic prowess” that’s “better than the best agility humanly possible” – adding that his intelligence “is beyond what is normally experienced on Earth” – except his whole schtick is that anybody can do what he’s done if they eat right and exercise in between reading plenty of books: he wasn’t rocketed here from Krypton, he didn’t get bitten by a radioactive spider; he can sight and catch a speeding bullet easy as whipping up patentable breakthroughs because, well, he’s just some kind of inventor/ninja/author/gymnast who plays the stock market as if he’s psychic.
(As to that last part, there’s a note in the official guide that he should be considered to actually have the precognition superpower when he’s watching TV back at his base of operations – again, not because he picked up a bona fide superpower somewhere, but because that’s how it works and anyone could do likewise so just go with it, willya?)
From the JSA: Wildcat. He taught Batman how to box, along with a whole buncha other heroes, JSA and otherwise. In one issue he, alone and wounded, took on an invading band of 6 or 7 superpowered foes and defeated them all deftly courtesy of the writing.
I have contemplated the possibility that all, or nearly all, humans in universes with supers actually operate on an elevated baseline. That is, practically everyone has some very low-level powers, generally enhanced toughness and healing. Among the general population, these powers account for why “unpowered” bystanders often survive and recover from things we would expect to cause fatal or crippling injuries, relatively quickly and usually with minimal scarring. That slight advantage enables the most dedicated (or obsessed) to train substantially harder than real-world athletes and specialists, because they can do more without injuring themselves and recover faster between training sessions. As a result, highly trained but nominally unpowered heroes can achieve levels of ability substantially beyond those of real-world people.
(I once had a character whose backstory made this explicit. He was from an alternate Earth where biological sciences advanced more quickly, and minor, but wide-spread genetic engineering was practiced. As a result, most of the population had enough of a healing factor to shrug off bullet wounds.)
Your theory was borne out in the City of Heroes MMO. All the time, I saw little old ladies successfully retaining their grips on their purses while street thugs tried to snatch them
Ted had a magical “9 Lives” curse/spell on him, though. He basically couldn’t be killed unless he was killed 9 times in fairly rapid succession…eventually those 9 lives would regenerate, too. Now, that’s not really a power that’s under his control or willfully chosen by him, but it IS a pretty important power.
This is pretty common in Wuxia and manga, isn’t it? One example that comes to mind is Chad from Bleach, who ripped a telephone pole out of the ground and hit someone with it before gaining superpowers.
Henry Pym is routinely described in the comics as the world’s greatest biochemist, and in his first appearance he whipped up a serum that let him shrink to the size of an ant, which, admittedly, we have to give him a pass on for comic-book plausibility, because otherwise this thread would get flooded with one-breakthrough superheroes.
But then, in his second appearance, he decides that hanging out with ants is cool and all, but if he’s going to make a hobby of it, shouldn’t he invent a helmet that can translate the thoughts of ants into intelligible speech, and vice versa, so he can communicate with them while shielded from mind-control attempts by supervillains?
So, okay, that’s two unrelated scientific breakthroughs. And then the government taps Pym to come up with a radiation-immunity gas – since we need a third breakthrough to explain why dirty commie spies bust in and cause our hero to suit up and use those first two breakthroughs to fight crime and save lives – and then he builds the world’s most advanced robot, because he’s also the best at that.
Oh, and while shrinking-but-keeping-the-strength-of-a-full-grown-man is a neat trick, Pym soon realized the need to up his game by reversing it: growing to giant-size, to get stronger. Wait, what? That doesn’t make sense. Ah, screw it.
