I’m going with the Green Lantern Corp. Those guys EACH should be able to handle just about any one humanoid. (I grant incarnations of death or Gods should be problematic) but Superboy-Prime? And other badasses like that?
The ring is…“Only limited by the wearers imagination”. Superboy-Prime? Welcome to the Phantom Zone buddy, I don’t need a projector. I got my imagination. Or how bout I shrink you to microverse size? Teleport you to the center of a red sun?
But instead they always use the GLC to show how badass Character X is by killing multiple ringwielders at once.
My position on Lanterns is that, were it not for the ability to make green kryptonite radiation (which not all can do; I expect their rings would have to have a sample of it first), a single GL is not really a match for Superman. Oh, a GL can give him a fight, but when it comes down to it he has any one of them beat for brute force. I can recall a story (admittedly pre-Crisis) in which Kal fought Hal and eventually busted through Hal’s shields and simply took the ring, with the strong implication that the fight lasted as long as it did as Kal was holding back in an effort not to kill him.
And the “anything I can imagine” thing is misunderstood. It has to be something they can VISUALIZE–that is, understand the workings of. I can recall several statements that John Stewart (architect) can make more complicated structures than Hal Jordan, even though Jordan beats him on willpower. So I don’t believe the average GL can send anybody to the Phantom Zone; he or he would have to know how the projector works.
( Lex Luthor with a GL ring – now THAT would be bad.)
To answer the thread question, I’d say the worst sufferers of the Worf Effect is Galactus on the Marvel size, and the Spectre on the DC side.
That reminds me of reading Marvel’s The Secret Wars back in the 80’s. They introduce The Beyonder and had him smack down Galactus, IIRC (and Galactus has just snuffed out Ultron).
Secret Wars and Secret Wars II both had so much Worfing. I mean, “This new guy can effortlessly overpower everyone you’ve ever met from our canon” is pretty much the sole plot device.
It’s been 20-25 years since I read them, but ISTR:
Beyonder owning Galactus, as mentioned above
Beyonder hanging with Hulk in a physical fight, at a time when Hulk’s (famously variable) powers were at a high point
Beyonder resurrecting and powering up Kurse to the point that he gives Thor, Beta Ray Bill, AND all of Power Pack all they can handle
Mephisto powering up the Thing to the point that he single-handedly beats down a comically long queue of scores of upervillains
I think the worse one of all is the Flash. The guy can move faster than the speed of light, if he’s willing to sweat a little. He should be capable of knocking the block off of just about anyone almost instantaneously. Heck, he should be able to catch a bullet and hurl it back at the attacker with more force than it was originally shot with. What’s more, he keeps getting hit by common projectiles that he should have no problem dodging, even if he doesn’t notice them until they’re an inch or two away. And yet he is routinely one of the first ones taken down anytime a group he’s with is being attacked.
Basically his powers move up and down the scale purely at the whim of the writer. During the Great Depowering that hit most of DC’s heavy hitters following the CoIE, he was slowed down to around mach 1, but it didn’t take them long to jack him up to being faster than he ever was before. Now that Barry Allen (he’s much more studious and smart than Wally was) is back wearing the cowl, he should be pretty nearly invincible. But he’s not.
Flash is definitely shown with varying power levels, but he’s not usually used as a gimmick to showcase some other character’s badassery; usually he just sort of scales to his opponent of the month to make it into a fairish fight.
At one point not long before Crisis, Dr. Alchemy turned Barry’s entire body into water vapor, and then Barry was ‘blown away, literally!’. Barry was able to form himself into a cloud and reform himself out of raindrops. There’s one scenario where a DC character is harder to kill than Superman…
Poor Ben (The Thing) Grimm comes to mind. He’s always YELLING “It’s clobberin’ time,” but he tends to get his butt kicked by almost everyone the Fantastic Four tangle with, at least in the first encounter.
Not a comic book character, but Derek Morgan on ***Criminal Minds ***is SUPPOSED to be a tough guy, an ex-football star… and yet, he regularly gets pushed around by serial killers who are much older and smaller.
I agree. I think that was to reinforce how powerful Galactus is compared to the mainstream heroes and villains. He’s an “aspect” of the Marvel universe–like Death, isn’t he (it’s been a long time since I’ve read the comics)? And then The Beyonder swats him down.
Isn’t Superboy Prime the one who gives the space-time continuum concussions by punching the Universe really hard? I think it’s kind of justified for the Corps to have trouble with him.
One that’s been troubling me lately is Girl Genius, where the Jägers have just been Worfed. Now, it’s always been established that there are folks who can beat the Jägers in a fight: Gil as long as he’s not caught off-guard, Higgs, Old Man Death the Sandwich-Maker, etc. But these are all exceptionally badass individuals. There’s no way you could field an army of über-Jäger soldiers. But now we see an army of bipedal bears who can just casually swat a Jäger away. If there are mass-produced constructs that can do that, why haven’t we heard of them before?
“Oh, no! A crook with powers! We need Batman!”
“Oh, no! A crook with no powers! We need Batman!”
“Oh, no! A crook with no powers, and he’s planting helpful clues! We need Batman!”
Morpheus. Dream of the Endless, older than the Gods, an aspect of the Universe itself, is trapped and imprisoned for 70 years by some half-baked English twat piddling about with magic spells.
Indeed. Ultron’s powered by a fusion reactor, which is pretty badass, but Galactus dines on the life-energy of entire worlds - which includes the stored solar energy that the planet has absorbed over days, months or even years, and that’s a lot more than one reactor puts out.
The Thing should be a sub-trope…which ironically enough, Worf was the first other example I thought of. He gets Worf-Effected, but doesn’t stay down and eventually his opponent quits rather than kill him.
The whole Avengers team used to do this all the time. Every time they encountered a new prospective member, they would get in a fight with him and get their asses kicked. You have, Thor, Ironman, and Giant man being thumped by Hawkeye.
The Worf effect is when a supposedly badass character gets his butt kicked to show how even more badass the villain of the week is. Sandman doesn’t really apply, Dream getting trapped wasn’t done to show off how powerful the Alestar Crowley knockoff guy was.
The biggest beneficiary of the Worf effect is Batman.
Doctor 13 (in some stories) automatically made magic not work in his general area, even though he did not do so consciously. In practice, Batman is a milder version of that but applicable to any super power - anyone in Batman’s general area is automatically powered down enough so that Batman can be effective.
