I agree! Shapeshifting has always been one of my favorite powers. Not the limited crap like that guy in Teen Titans either. More like Advanced or exalted shapeshifting in Amber DRPG. Shapeshifting down to an atomic level, being able to absorb and eject mass, being able to change into inanimate objects, and the ability to shapeshift parts of you into other creatures. Great power. Like instantanious sorcery, but with more control.
Seriously, the only effective counter to near limitless god-like speed would probubly be some kind of clever gadget attached to a boomerang.
Or maybe a gun that makes things cold?
Seriously, I’m in the camp that if I have super-speed, and the action requires me to dismantle the villian’s transmission in a micro-second of their time, it’s still going to take me a couple of hours in my time while everything else is frozen around me. After a few times pulling that stunt I’d wind up getting bored and give up trying to be “cute” and just pull a couple of wires out or something. Does anyone write super-speed charactor stories like that? I doubt it.
And forget about this running to New York and back in a blink of an eye.
All the speedsters of comics act as if they have bionic legs with a guidance system which they ride like a motorcycle. I hate that.
When talking about super-speed, I use Barry Allen (the silver-age Flash) as a benchmark. Maybe not wise, because as someone else noted, the writers kept adding to what he was able to do to keep things interesting. Maybe not a realistic gauge but I figure you might as well go with the best.
Being able to run around the globe 7 times in a second? That’s fast. Nothing to sneeze at.
Vibrate your atoms to pass through solid matter? Pretty useful.
But super-speed coupled with the Cosmic Treadmill allows you to travel through time. An extremely resourceful super-power if you ask me.
I’d have to say, looking over this data, that super-speed looks like the ultimate power.
At least close to it. The only thing I can see being more powerful than travelling through time is being able to fly throughout the universe like Superman. I don’t know if that’s really useful but seems to be a powerful thing to be able to do.
Wouldn’t a speedster have to have some kind of altered perception to deal with their powers? At simple normal levels, but with speed in high gear, you’d be past something or have run into it by the time you’ve seen it and processed it.
And as for the speedsters ennui, I know Quicksilver has dealt with it. It’s why he’s so short tempered and impatient. He simply can’t deal well with things moving at a normal human speed.
Remenber, Barry was known as an exceptionally slow worker when not wearing his red PJs. I believe he was deliberately keeping his personal time at 95% of “normal” so that he could boost up to several thousand percent “normal” for a few objective seconds when needed without getting out of sync and showing otherwise inexplicable signs of aging…
But this “speed force” crap makes this all moot. I don’t believe in the “speed force” myself. I feel it is a device created by lazy writers. (Writers don’t know what to do with speedsters.)
Oh, nonsense. It’s done nothing but open up more stories exploring the nature and implications of the Speed Force. It’s replaced mere handwaving with mythology building. It explained what happened to Barry in Crisis. It also gave us Max Mercury, Terminal Velocity, Savitar, the pure energy costume and tied (almost) all the DC speedsters together with a common origin and power source. It’s cool. Johns is ignoring it mostly, and that’s cool, but I still remember the Waid years fondly.
The Flash can alter how he experiences time. In #213, he explains how he can zone out and act on instinct for simple tasks like putting on his uniform, and that’s how he can stay sane on long-distance runs.
Secondary effects of speed are treated inconsistantly. The Flash’s aura blocks out friction (and other heat, which comes in handy when fighting Heat Wave), but sometimes speedsters still notice things bursting into flames when they touch them (as when they discover their powers for the first time or after being mind-wiped). The aura also is supposed to block relativistic effects, so Flash can run at near-C without worrying about infinite mass, or time dialation, but apparently sometimes he can turn it off to hit bad guys really, really hard.
Nothing is treated more inconsistantly than a speedster’s reactions. That’s mostly because someone who could consistantly dodge at the speeds a superspeedster can run is unbeatable. Once Wally was hit in the back of the neck by a sniper’s bullet and kicked into gear fast enough to dodge it, before it penetrated! Another time he was charging Deathstroke (who’s quick, but no where in Flash’s ballpark), and managed to run himself through on Deathstroke’s sword! It is inconsistant writing, and often just handwaving, but in the spirit of fanboyism, I offer the following explanation: A speedster soon learns to move at high speeds on instinct, but by doing so he sacrifices some reaction speed. On the other hand, if he kept his brain on high speeds too often, he wouldn’t be able to interact with people around him, and he’d soon go mad from boredom. Therefore, they have to chose how fast to think for every situation, and they don’t always chose correctly.
Aging is easy. An accelerated metabolism is good for you. It flushes out diseasea and toxins and keeps you young (see Jay Garrick). Of course, some speedsters are aged by their powers (see Bart Allen) but that side-effect is usually reversible or temporary.
My Flash-Fu is strong!
Would his “speed aura” prevent him from being captured by the security camera in front of the girls’ locker room? If not, then I’ve got to go with invisibility as the greatest super power.
Yes. Flash can vibrate fast enough to render himself invinsible to all but the best trained eyes (cf Identity Crisis 3 [or was it 2?]). Besides invisibility is over-rated. As Ultra Boy said to Invisible Kid in Legion of Super-Heros #1, “My dog could find you.”
I usually don’t speak completely in cites, I swear.
One reason why the Flash is my all-time favorite hero (besides the fact that Barry/Wally’s costume design is the absolute best!) is the fact that he has only one power: Moving really fast. But, using a generous helping of comic book physics, writers have extrapolated from that what secondary powers he’d need (molecular control, speed aura) and what cool stuff he’d be able to do with it.
It’s the opposite of Superman, who has a list of powers as long as my arm, but never does anything innovative or paticularly interesting with them!
As The Incredibles shows us, all you need is to be able to run faster than the 24f/s capture rate of most security cameras, and you’re golden. 
But then he has to deal with a Doppler shift from light entering and leaving the time dilation zone. Light going into the fast zone would be redshifted. How could he see? Even worse the infrared radiation from his body heat would be blueshift when leaving the fast zone, possibly to UV and x-rays, giving the people around him a bad case of radiation poisoning. Although exposure would be brief.
I’m sorry. I seem to have wandered into the deep end of the comic book pool. I’m just going to go back to the shallow end now.
