Line #50 RequiredSecondaryPowers/ComicBooks


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7	!!The following have their own pages:
8	[[index]]
9	* ''RequiredSecondaryPowers/TheDCU''
10	* ''RequiredSecondaryPowers/MarvelUniverse''
11	[[/index]]
12	----
13	!!Other
14	* ''ComicBook/TwoThousandAD'': ''The Visible Man'' shows at least one such problem with invisiblity. The protagonist's skin becomes invisible so that [[BodyHorror all his internal organs are showing]], making him look like a monster and becoming a target for unscrupulous scientists who want to perform all sorts of nasty experiments on him against his will. After he escapes from his confinement he tries to restore his skin's appearance by developing a suntan. He quickly discovers that because the light rays go right through his skin and musculature they simply burn his organs, so he's forced to find a different way.
15	* Exploited in an ''ComicBook/ArchieComics'' story set in the future where Archie is trying to bypass a force field around Mr. Lodge's mansion in order to visit Veronica. Since force fields block everything, even air, their plan involves having Archie crawl through a hole at the top that Dilton explains is there so the people inside the field don't suffocate:
16	--> '''Dilton:''' One "glitch" in the system that nobody seems to know about, is there is a tiny hole at the top to allow oxygen in.
17	* In ''ComicBook/BlackScience'' Grant and his team develop the technology to travel to alternate dimensions. Along the way they design and manufacture dimensionaut suits that provide protection against physical damage and hostile environments. And oxygen supply. And jet boots. And blocks telepathy/telekinesis. Given that every new jump is blind, without the suits their first jump would likely be their last.
18	* One of the many deconstructed tropes (and source of problems) in ''ComicBook/TheBoys'' is that a lot of powers are limited to what physics say they can do. Thus the Superman {{expy}} can't just push a plane headed for the WTC out of the way (he can fly, but has nothing to push off against), the Flash expy kills Hughie's girlfriend because he can't actually see where he was going (as he was running across the Atlantic at the time), a little girl discovers she has EyeBeams and non-heatproof eyes... Small wonder that the corporation responsible for them prefers them to stay in their own hedonistic bubble most of the time.
19	** During a montage of superpower meltdowns, one kid is seen Hulking Out with a greenish face that looks very much like the Hulk's... except that conservation of mass still applies, so only the head is huge, with the kid's body shrunken and emaciated.
20	* ComicBook/{{Brit}} has nigh-invulnerability without super strength, so his way of fighting super-strong villains was to let them throw him at nearby buildings and make them fall on their heads, until he got himself pair of strength-enhancing gloves. Later, he also started using a JetPack.
21	* Comicbook/{{Empowered}} tried to pick up a car, but succeeded only in tearing off the fender. She did manage to pick it up and throw it on her second try, with more careful hand placement, but...
22	-->"Aaa! M-my BACK! '''Oww'''... I think I ''pulled'' something...!"
23	** Then she figured out that ''driving'' [[CarFu a car]] into her enemies is easier and has more force to it.
24	* ''ComicBook/DisneyDucksComicUniverse'':
25	** Deconstructed in the comic "Super Snooper Strikes Again!" by Creator/DonRosa. Donald briefly becomes a FlyingBrick after chugging down some AppliedPhlebotinum, and makes several attempts to impress his nephews with his new powers. He tries to travel around the world in an instant, but realizes that he still perceives the passage of time normally despite everyone else effectively being frozen in time while he's moving around at SuperSpeed, so the task could take him several months or even ''years'' to complete, and nobody would notice anyway. He also tries to use his SuperStrength to lift both a mountain and a sunken cruise ship, but the mountain starts falling apart at the base and the ship breaks in two due to years of rust decay to the hull. One could argue that Donald's failure to use his superpowers effectively is because he overcomplicates it--appearing to teleport from one side of the living room to the other or simply lifting a car in front of his nephews would have been sufficient to demonstrate his powers without the realistic drawbacks of his attempted super feats.
26	** Played straight in ''ComicBook/PaperinikNewAdventures''. A {{Ridiculously Human Robot\|s}} body that can pass off as a real person can only be used by an Artificial Intelligence with a Ridiculously Human ''personality''. If a less developed A.I. is uploaded into the body, it won't be able to use it in any way -- it won't be able to move, see, hear, or even transfer itself out of the body.
27	* In ''ComicBook/GlobalFrequency'', a bionic man has to go through several alterations just to use his super strength, making him a hideous, misbegotten freak of nature. The process renders him so unstable that he basically amounts to [[PersonOfMassDestruction a nuke without the radiation]]. Then there's the other cyborg, who has a cybernetic arm with superhuman strength, and goes into detail to the Global Frequency agents about just ''how'' many secondary augmentations had to be made to her body to make sure that she could use it without ripping it out of its socket or breaking her own back.
28	-->'''Member 436:''' I have to be careful with it. Bioelectric enhancements are cranky. It's not a case of just sticking an artificial arm on. The surrounding bones and fibers have to be hardened and supported, or else the new arm will rip clean off your shoulder the first time you flex. You'll need tensile support across your back, or your spine will snap the first time you lift something heavy. You need new skin; human skin isn't tough enough to handle the subcutaneous tension of superhuman strength. You'll take a chip in your brain to handle the specific dataload from the artificial nerve system controlling the arm. You're getting the idea, right?
29	* In ''ComicBook/{{Irredeemable}}'', Plutonian, being a FlyingBrick, should need several of those to be able to use his super strength the way he does, like lifting ships without them breaking apart, but [[spoiler: he doesn't, because he doesn't have primary powers either -- he is a RealityWarper who subconsciously alters the fabric of spacetime around him. When he punches something, he changes the density of his fist and the objects he punches and breaks Newton's laws to not outright kill his opponents. He isn't even aware of it, he just thinks he is very strong.]]
30	** Max Damage, from ''ComicBook/{{Irredeemable}}'''s sister title, has super strength and invulnerability which proportionally increase the longer he's been awake. Unfortunately, a side-effect of the latter is that he loses all sense of touch, taste and smell after a couple of hours -- he describes it as being numb instead of being tough, like God didn't know when to stop with the Novocaine. He also suffers from the normal effects of sleep deprivation, which is sometimes necessary to get his powers up to a certain level, so the stronger his body becomes the weaker his mind gets.
31	* John Byrne's ''ComicBook/NextMen'' explores this in detail with its main characters:
32	** Danny is a teenage super-speedster who runs barefoot-- his body can stand the speed, but ''shoes'' wear out in seconds. Even at that, he still had to spend months toughening up his soles on rocks, gravel, etc. to avoid crippling blisters or burning his feet from the friction. His leg muscles are also massive and hyper-developed, giving him devastating kicks in close combat. The costume he wears has a helmet and visor to protect his face from winds and debris at high speeds, and also possesses a built in GPS for directions. Lastly, he does mention getting hungrier after running for extended periods.
33	** Jack, his teammate, has superstrength, but needs a special exoskeletal harness to ''[[PowerLimiter dampen]]'' his powers or his body can tear itself apart, not to mention destroy [[AceLightningSyndrome everything he touches]]. His hyperdense bones and muscles ''do'' save his life when they limit the penetration of bullets, saving his vital organs.
34	** Nathan (Scanner), gets super-vision, but his eyes become huge and all-black to absorb all those frequencies and he needs to wear a special filter visor to avoid painful sensory overload.
35	** Bethany, who's invulnerable can't cut her invulnerable fingernails or hair, gradually is losing her sense of touch, and her skin was slowly turning chalk-white as ultraviolet light stopped causing tanning (a minor research miss, as tanning is made up of two processes, only one of which is a result of UV damage). Not only that, but her invulnerability does not give her any sort of super strength. At one point, she's buried alive and is unable to dig herself out due to the weight of the rubble.
36	* ''ComicBook/{{Planetary}}'' has Kim Suskind, the [[CorruptedCharacterCopy evil version of Sue Storm]] from ''ComicBook/FantasticFour''. She has to wear [[GogglesDoSomethingUnusual special goggles]] directly wired into her nervous system whenever she turns invisible. Without them, she's blind. Presumably, the goggles interact with invisible radiation -- UV and infrared -- while still magically being totally transparent to visible wavelengths.
37	* ''ComicBook/PS238'' contains several cases where this comes up
38	** Subverted horribly when a little girl who's invulnerable to everything, including germs, has her powers temporarily disabled. Because her normal immune system has never had to do anything before, it's far too weak to fight even a minor infection, and since the doctors are unable to treat her once her powers return, she winds up dying from a normally nonfatal and easily curable disease.
39	** The teacher Miss Kyle has the ability to increase the density of her body, which makes not only her muscles stronger, but her tendons, bones, skin, etc. as well. Because she has no {{shapeshifter baggage}}, though, her size ''decreases'' at the same time. It was stated somewhere that she normally has a small amount of density increase at all times, converting a beautiful but petite woman into someone a little more than average.
40	** The Gym coach, aka Rockside, is a [[StoneWall brick]] literally made of stone. He can't find a sneaker that can stand up to his weight and hence has to walk barefoot.
41	** Harold Nelson's powers include being able to [[PowerNullifier weaken or strengthen other people's superpowers]]. When used offensively he can increase people's powers beyond their control and potentially beyond the capacity of their requisite secondary powers to contain; this can be painful, inconvenient, or deadly (the girl who dies from infection example was a case where he shut down her powers for half an hour).
42	* A minor character from ''ComicBook/RisingStars'' was NighInvulnerable, but didn't have several secondary powers that usually come with it -- he had no enhanced senses so his powers blocked his sense of touch, pain and temperature and he had no super strength so he was rather useless in a fight, being beaten like anybody else, just without feeling anything. And he needed air just like anybody else, so he was suffocated to death with a plastic bag. In fact, lack of enhanced senses was what killed him -- without his powers he didn't feel it when the murderer tied him up and put the bag on his head.
43	* ComicBook/TheSavageDragon averts the typical HealingFactor trope of bones automatically resetting themselves as they heal. A foe once beat Dragon until nearly every bone in his body was broken, then stuffed him down an industrial chimney, forcing Dragon's healing factor to repair all those bones (and, presumably, whatever muscle and other tissues damaged along with them) in the wrong positions. Despite this, Dragon managed to climb out of the chimney and even (briefly) get into another fight before being discovered by allies and receiving medical treatment. The worst part? One of Dragon's super-strong friends had to ''re-break'' all the misaligned bones so that doctors could re-set them properly.
44	* The comic reboot of ''Series/TheSixMillionDollarMan'', ''ComicBook/TheBionicMan'' eliminates the RequiredSecondaryPowers that his television predecessor (and other similar characters) had to have to explain why, when lifting a car with their single bionic arm it didn't do bad things to their otherwise entirely human torsos: in the new setting, the bionics go through their entire bodies, allowing them to use SuperStrength without breaking their spines.
45	* Gruesomely demonstrated in the superhero-genre DeconstructorFleet title ''ComicBook/{{Uber}}'', in which one of the British supersoldiers-under-construction tries to show off his superstrength to impress a girl before his superdurability has caught up with it -- when he exerts himself to his full strength his muscles rip completely away from his skeleton and he dies horribly.
46	** Additionally, a recurring element of the series is that the largely-NighInvulnerable supersoldiers tend to be oddly fragile once they ''start'' taking damage; not only does their enhanced physiology give them HighPressureBlood and insanely tensed muscles (meaning even a slight tear will cause them to fly off the bone), but because they're so tough, it's very difficult to do any kind of medical operations on them. One particularly tough character, after suffering major damage to one of her knees to the point of her shin hanging by a few strands of flesh, found that she had to leave it there because no medical tool could amputate it.
47	* In the Creator/ValiantComics ''[[ComicBook/DoctorSolar Solar, Man of the Atom]]'', Solar encounters various empowered people, some with no secondary ability to compensate. One petite woman has super strength, and a level of invulnerability, but no anchoring ability. So if she threw a punch forward, the reaction would in turn throw her body backwards. She fixed this by wearing a vest weighted down with depleted uranium. This also kept her from hitting the ceiling every time she took a careless step.
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Context RequiredSecondaryPowers / ComicBooks