Deadpool is made for directly mocking other superheroes. He’d definitely suffer if he was unique.
Endless Nights graphic novel. It’s going on in the background of Dream’s tale, but it is the original Despair. The book’s tale for Despair is actually a series of vignettes about despair, and is probably the most oblique of the bunch, so don’t expect it’ll reveal overmuch of Despair’s background.
Interresting. I’ll have to pick it up. I had my own theory (and fan-story) about what happened to the first Despair. Hopefully it’ll jibe.
Like this guy?
Captain America bugs me even more than Batman in the sense that he doesn’t have ton of gadgets and hardware and yet wins anyway. By all rights, Spider-man should be able to kick his ass at will.
But he does have the magic shield. And I don’t really consider the Steve Rogers Cap to tbe a non-superpowered character. Spider-Man he should be able to do well against because Spidey inhibits himself when fighting non-superstrong types. Venom, not so much.
Another one who bugs me is Wolverine. I happened to read a couple of issues of Old Man Logan, set in an alternate universe in which virtually all the heroes are dead, and Wolvie has become a pacifist because
he was manipulated into killing all the X-Men and their students by an illusion cast to make him think he was fighting super-villains. In a flashback, Cyclops, Storm, Colossus, Nightcrawler, Beast, Polaris, and Jubilee are shown among the dead, which number in the dozens,
The story’s okay thus far, but that element strikes me as ludicrous. Even if you grant that the combination of healing factor plus adamantium skeleton makes him unkillable, that doesn’t come CLOSE to making him unstoppable, especially when facing opponents with ranged attacks. In a berskerker rage he’d probably take down Beast and Nightcrawler, and maybe, if he were lucky, Colossus and Storm. But Cyclops, who doesn’t especially like him and who is perfectly aware of how dangerous Logan is in such a rage? And Polaris, whose reaction to a crazy Wolverine attacking her is sure to be "Oh God! I’d totally be frozen with fear if this nutcase attacking me weren’t made of metal and I weren’t, like, MISTRESS OF MAGNETISM! Anyway, I’ll just pin him to the ceiling till he calms down, and if that doesn’t happen in the next 20 seconds, I’m tossing his Canadian ass into orbit.
That said, Bats is the most ludicrous of all, because he is specifically written as not having super-powers of any sort, and as not using the super-tech that is obviously available to him. He has to be written such, of course, because if he were super-strong and had John Henry Irons’ army, he’d be unthreatened by the likes of Killer Croc.
I see DC as naturally a bunch of franchises that cross over but aren’t really fully consistent. In Batman’s world, some kind of Christianity may well be Cosmic Truth. In Wonder Woman’s, the children of Zeus rule the world. Batman & Wonder Woman can team up & ignore this difference. But when you try to take the various cosmologies of not only these characters but the Swamp Thing, the Endless, etc., & create a unified theory, it’s a kind of wacky I don’t think should be forced on every issue of every series.
Tangentially related thread. What is the Judeo-Christian God’s place in the Comics pantheon vs the other “Gods”?