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Logical Weakness / Comic Books

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Logical Weaknesses in comic books.

  • Agents of Atlas: Venus possesses the gag weakness common to many voice-dependent superheroes. Luckily, she also has superhuman strength to compensate, so it takes a pretty powerful opponent to muzzle her in the first place.
  • Atomic Robo:
    • During one of their battles, Helsingard boasts about how his Mech Suit's senses were tied into those of his cyborg-zombie minions. Robo quickly realizes that if he beats on the minions long enough and hard enough, Helsingard will suffer from sensory overload. Unfortunately, Helsingard anticipated this, and installed a failsafe that cuts off the sensory link at a certain pain threshold. Played straight with the fact that Helsingard is a Brain in a Jar, meaning a well-placed shot is all it takes.
      • Stories set later in the timeline show Helsingard being defeated by forces not involved with Robo or other super-scientists at all. As brilliant and nigh-immortal as Helsingard is, he's still just one man (mostly) spending all his time hiding out alone in various bunkers, myopically plotting revenge against Atomic Robo. Without any sources of inspiration and his obsessing with beating one opponent, Helsingard's creativity and designing skills have started to reach their limits. Meanwhile, the connectivity of the modern era has lead to rapid technological development that can leave Hesingard caught flat-footed.
    • Robo is a super-strong, Immune to Bullets metal robot. This means that he can be shut down by EMP attacks, and powerful magnets cause him certain significant issues. Plus, in his original body, his construction in the 1920s meant that he is not compatible with modern technology and must learn to operate it the same way as a human would. A Running Gag is his frustration with his inability to operate modern touchscreen devices with his metal fingers.
    • Branson relies on his control over the Homeowner's Association, since he's the only active member, to be a Jerkass to Robo and Tesladyne. However, that control requires him to remain the only active member. Elon Musk, the third member, is usually absent...but he had to make a deal with Robo in order to call his car company Tesla, meaning that when Tesladyne really needs to get through the red tape, it doesn't matter that Branson can't be pressured, because Musk can, and a 2/3 vote in Tesladyne's favour is a 2/3 vote no matter what.
  • The Authority:
    • Midnighter's brain is an advanced supercomputer that can run simulations of a fight a thousand times in a single second, allowing him to predict his enemy's every move. On the page it works like Combat Clairvoyance, but it's really a technologically enhanced form of Awesomeness by Analysis. As such, there are several ways he's been beaten.
      • First, good old fashioned Confusion Fu, like when he tried to use his abilities on the Joker and basically had a seizure.
      • Second, a power gap that no amount of analysis can compensate for, like when he fought Captain Atom in Captain Atom: Armageddon, or a guy named Forethought who had actual Combat Clairvoyance and could counter all of his moves.
      • Other characters have shut down his cybernetics, which just turns him into a normal dude.
      • One character simply refused to make a move at all, giving Midnighter's combat computer no information to work with and leaving them in a stalemate. However, this might have been a subversion, as that dude was actually an android designed specifically to destroy the Authority from within.
    • Apollo is a living solar battery and can absorb sunlight in order to do anything from generate light blasts or empower himself. Naturally, if he's cut off from UV radiation for too long, he'll get steadily weaker. And like any battery, he'll eventually run out of juice (especially if he burns through his reserves in really big bursts), so it's entirely feasible you could just outlast Apollo in a fight.
    • Jenny Sparks is the Spirit of the 20th Century, and is an unaging electric demigoddess of insane power. The problem? She's the Spirit of the 20th Century; once New Year's Eve 2000 rolled around, her time was up.
    • The climax of Secret Files: Hawksmoor sees Jack fight Plo'raach, an artificial intelligence from the future where the entire Earth is a giant mass of cities and who is basically Jack with his powers cranked Up to Eleven. Jack eventually beats him by luring him onto a bullet train and then knocking him into an empty field. Both Jack and Plo'raach need urban environments in order to survive, but while Jack can at least survive a few hours out in nature, Plo'raach originated from a time where nature doesn't exist anymore and everything is a city, so his body starts to crap out on him almost instantly, leaving Jack free to finish him off.
  • Batgirl (2000): Cassandra Cain's ability to predict her opponent's moves makes her practically unbeatable in hand-to-hand combat. The only problem is that her abilities rely on her incredible knowledge of human body language, meaning that it's practically useless against aliens, robots, and even some metahumans. In other settings this wouldn't be much of an issue, but given that it's the DCU, she tends to run into this problem fairly often, though thankfully she's still borderline superhuman in her strength and agility. Notably, Cassandra also ran into problems when facing The Joker, of all people. While he would normally not be considered a good enough fighter to pose a threat to a martial artist of her caliber, she has a hard time reading him because, as Batman puts it, "his body language just comes out as gibberish."
  • Batgirl (2009): In one arc, Stephanie goes up against a speedster named Slipstream, whose powers are derived entirely from his suit. Eventually, Stephanie realizes the suit increases his movement but not his reflexes, meaning he can only run in straight lines lest he get disoriented, and he needs to map out truck routes and road maps in order to pull off a heist. Stephanie exploits this by tricking Slipstream into running into a bunch of electromagnetic gooparangs.
  • Gagging Black Canary could effectively disable her sonic scream, despite the fact the Canary Cry theoretically should be able to break through any cloth.
  • In Cardboard, the cardboard creatures can be killed by dousing them with water.
  • Chuck Dixon's Avalon:
    • Angela generates electric charges from her body. It is implied that this power can harm her as well, since she won't use it as a weapon while her adversary is touching her.
    • Vogel can fly because of her hollow, bird-like bones. Great for surveillance, not so good for fighting.
  • Daredevil:
    • His radar senses are pretty useful most of the time. Too bad they can become blurred and disorienting if there are too many objects around at once. Plus his strong senses mean he's sensitive to extremely loud noises. The movie depicts him as having to rest in a sensory deprivation tank to be able to sleep.
    • Daredevil's super-hearing often acts as a lie detector when he can hear irregularities in someone's heart rate, so as lawyer Matt Murdock, he took on a client who told Matt, with a steady voice and steady heartbeat, that he did not order the murder he was accused of. The man turned out to be a career criminal with a pacemaker, used to telling lies with a straight face, who had indeed ordered the hit. Although Matt got him acquitted in court, he still met justice by the end of the issue.
    • Its long been established that Daredevil can read ordinary print thanks to his super-sensitive touch. In the 21st century, though, more and more vital information appears on screens. Because it's not (currently) common knowledge that DD is blind, this has occasionally left him screwed, such as when Elektra handed him a piece of plot-critical evidence on her smartphone.
    • His super-touch itself causes him trouble; extra sensitivity means extra pain, to the point that in the TV series he sleeps on silk sheets because cotton feels like sandpaper.
    • Being immersed in water leaves him pretty helpless, since the water nullifies smell and sound.
  • Deadpool's regeneration is actually tailored to work with his cancer. It replaces cells killed off by the cancer at around the same rate that the cells are killed off, with room to spare for other wounds and injuries. A group of Skrulls, during the Secret Invasion storyline, tried to make a group of Skrulls with his healing factor... but without the cancer to hold the healing in check, they overhealed and exploded. Fridge Logic hits hard though when you remember that cancer itself is uncontrolled cell growth. Which his healing factor cuts down to normal-ish levels. His entire body is pretty much one big human-shaped mass of cancer cells, constantly dying and regenerating again. Is it any wonder why he's completely, utterly insane? (One theory actually posits that his insanity is at least in part due to his brain cells being constantly reconfigured by the regeneration.)
  • Magicians in Dungeon: The Early Years are versatile powerhouse and are never shown tiring from their spells. However they still need their throats and hand to cast their magic.
  • Emma Frost eventually developed a "secondary" mutation with a new power (no, not that one, she ALWAYS had that): being able to become living diamond, much like Colossus' organic steel above. Also much like him, she became Nigh-Invulnerable, almost totally impervious to physical attacks, temperatures, etc. The downsides were that she lost her psychic powers (though she was also now fairly invulnerable to others'), and while she's yet to be actually "beaten down" the occasional writer remembers that diamonds are hard but they're brittle. When struck properly her form cracks, and she was once completely shattered, needing the walking Deus ex Machina known as the Phoenix Force to be put back together.
  • The F1rst Hero: Two instances occur in the "Wednesday's Child" storyline.
    • In the Extrahuman Task Force's temporary Philidelphia HQ, a human-spider extrahuman gets loose and starts running amok. Sgt. Hector Alvarez subdues the extrahuman by spraying him with water, causing him to curl up, which is something spiders actually do when they get wet.
    • Madelyn's Mind Control powers require her to look into the eye's of whoever she's hypnotizing. As such, her powers don't work on people wearing sunglasses.
  • The Flash:
    • The Flash's powers are all about kinetic energy; they move with Super-Speed and doing so requires super-charging themselves with kinetic energy, and most of their abilities generally involve some application of this. So what's the opposite of kinetic force? Coldness (the absence of heat/vibration in atoms). Captain Cold, Golden Glider, various ice-villains, and many others have weaponised this specifically for this reason, while it's also been shown that the Flash doesn't do super well in cold environments.
    • Also, as powerful as The Flash and the Flash Family are, with the sole exception of Jesse Quick (who inherited both her dad's super speed and her mom's super-strength), they're generally Fragile Speedsters; they heal fast, but an enemy with significant super-strength and Nigh-Invulnerability can tank most of their hits and easily overpower them. They also have nothing to protect them from mental attacks, and, as was demonstrated once, their speed has a very unfortunate effect on pathogens, meaning that if they become infected with viruses or diseases, it will hit them harder and faster than a normal person.
    • Bart Allen had his kneecap blown off, and was rushed to a hospital. During the surgery his Super-Speed meant that his flesh kept trying to heal improperly before an artificial kneecap could be placed, forcing the doctors to cut him open repeatedly. His metabolism meant that no anesthesia could be used either. The same series reveals that he can't get tattoos; they heal in no time.
    • For a time, Wally West had his powers reduced to more "realistic" levels with some obvious drawbacks. His upper limit was about the speed of sound (any faster would tear him apart), he required massive amounts of calories to fuel his metabolism, and his uniform had to be made of special low friction materials (and required frequent repair and replacement). Eventually the "Speed Force" was discovered, which not only increased his powers to a level even greater than his predecessor Barry Allen, but also provided numerous Required Secondary Powers to remove these weaknessnote . He's still a glutton, but that has nothing to do with the powers, Wally just likes it that way.
    • Depending on the Writer, the various Flashes may be weak to chemical agents: their super-fast metabolisms mean that a sleeping dart will knock them out much more quickly than a normal person, for example. Conversely, it may also mean that they "burn through" the dosage much faster and recover before a normal person.
  • Firestorm's main power is transmuting matter. He can change practically anything into practically anything else, such as lead into gold, or air into gold, or bullets into water, or water into plutonium. Not even considering his additional powers, this would make him nigh-godlike, except for one detail: he has a normal human mind and no Super-Senses, so he needs to mentally keep track of the chemical composition of everything he transmutes. This means that he can transmute things freely into elements and very simple compounds (like water (H2O) or salt (NaCl), and maybe even TNT (C6H2(NO2)3CH3) at most), but making things more complicated than that requires great concentration, if he can do it at all.
  • Ghost Rider:
    • The Ghost Rider has an ability called the Penance Stare, where he looks into his enemy's eyes and bombards their very soul with all of the suffering and pain they have inflicted on others. However, this doesn't work if the target is A) soulless, B) void of any regrets, C) so sadistic that they don't even care (looking at you, Thanos), D) draw power from pain, or E) blind, though it should be noted how this ability works is portrayed inconsistently as Depending on the Writer something such as lack of regret won't stave off the effects of the Penance Stare.
    • In one issue, a villain named Scarecrow had been imbued with a healing factor which seemed to make him practically immortal. Ghost Rider decided to solve the problem at least temporarily by breaking all of his limbs and holding them in place crooked while the bones mended.
  • Great Lakes Avengers: Mr. Immortal has Complete Immortality and will return from death perfectly healed no matter what. When he ends up in a fight against the Thunderbolts, they just knock him out without killing him.
  • Green Lantern:
    • For a Green Lantern, anything that affects their concentration or undermines their resolve can weaken their effectiveness given that their power is directly dependent on their willpower. Indeed, each color of the Emotional Electromagnetic Spectrum represents a specific emotion, and lacking that emotion weakens the corresponding Lantern. From red to violet these emotions are Rage, Greed, Fear, Will, Hope, Compassion, and Love.
    • Anyone with enough Greed to be granted an Orange Lantern Ring is too greedy to share the power, so the Orange Lantern Corps has (almost) always had only one member.
  • The level of available oxygen affects the Human Torch's powers, as well as a good soaking. The Venom symbiote once blasted him with a huge amount of sand that smothered his flame. The Thing has proven that super strong lungs can blow out Johnny's flame. Plus his powers are unreliable in a vacuum.
  • Max Damage in Irredeemable has invulnerability and Super-Strength that increases the longer he's awake. This doesn't alter his biological need for sleep, so if he wants to face the Plutonian on equal terms, he's going to be suffering severe sleep deprivation.
  • The fourth Judomaster, Sonia Sato, has the ability to generate an aversion field, which makes it impossible to hit her. This means she's at a disadvantage against attacks not specifically directed at her, like an explosion, or a foe that can attack her from every angle, like the Justice Society villain Tapeworm.
  • Longtime Justice Society of America villain Johnny Sorrow has the ability to kill anyone who sees the face beneath his mask. Naturally, this didn't go over well when he tried to use it on Dr. Mid Nite, who is blind. Also, that bit about anyone seeing his face? That includes Johnny himself, which means showing him a photo or reflection of himself is the easiest way to get rid of him.
  • Luke Cage has skin that is tough enough to resist explosions, bullets, and any edged weapon except adamantium, but his internal organs are every bit as squishy as a normal human's, and his invulnerable skin makes it almost impossible to surgically treat any injuries. In Jessica Jones (2015), the only way Jess could stop a Brainwashed and Crazy Luke was by shooting him in the head point blank, which didn't directly kill him, but it did give him a near-fatal concussion. When his brain began hemorrhaging, nurse Claire Temple had to stick a needle around his eye in order to reach his brain and drain the fluid to save his life. Even that only worked because the super-strong Jessica was there to hold him down when he started convulsing. If both ladies weren't present, he would have surely died. Like Wolverine, he can still drown if thrown in a body of water and prevented from swimming. He's also susceptible to knockout or sleeping gas.
  • Most Marvel magical heroes, like Wiccan, the Scarlet Witch, and Doctor Strange, use spoken spells and Magical Gestures to use their power. They can be incapacitated by anyone who can get them Bound and Gagged — if not taken out first by a rush of tranquilizer darts they never see coming — which has led most of them to learn the basics of self defense so they can protect themselves physically.
  • As the saying goes, all who know fear burn at the touch of the Man-Thing. But not only does this mean somebody who feels no fear can walk away unscathed, if something can make Man-Thing feel even a flicker of fear than he'll be immolated by his own powers (he's actually died this way twice).
  • In Mega Robo Bros, Alex and Freddy deduce that Robot 23 is likely as susceptible to Magnetic Pulse Generators as Alex is, if they were both from the same facility.
  • MonsterVerse: In the graphic novel Kingdom Kong, Camazotz has developed super-sensitive hearing to navigate in darkness and make up for lost eyesight, so he can be disoriented by something like, say, the sonic screech of a Raptor jet flying right by the gigantic Titan's head.
  • The Mighty Thor: The Absorbing Man is often defeated by taking advantage of logical weaknesses of substances he absorbs. For example, Spider-Man beats him by tricking him into absorbing one chemical, and then burying him in another chemical that reacts explosively with the first. He can be shattered if he turns into a brittle substance, diluted if he turns into liquid (although he later figured out how to keep himself together), and if you trick him into touching toilet paper, then he's going to be as fragile and easily torn as toilet paper. He also once absorbed all the properties of Thor's hammer — including 'Thor can control this hammer'.
  • Victor Alvarez, the third Power Man, has the ability to absorb knowledge, culture, and history in the form of chi to grow stronger. New Avengers (2015) shows that when he's in an environment that's entirely new and void of any past at all, he's got nothing to absorb.
  • Plastic Man, because of his rubber based powers, has been known for having a vulnerability with extreme temperature changes and (in some incarnations) being in contact with acetone.
  • Planetary: Kim Suskind is a Corrupted Character Copy of the Invisible Woman, but unlike her inspiration, she can't see when she's fully invisible without specially designed goggles because the light goes straight through her.
  • Jesse Custer, the main character of Preacher, has a Compelling Voice power called "The Word of God". If he gives someone a command while using the voice, they're helpless to do anything but obey. However, for it to work, it has to be heard and understood, so someone with their ears plugged, or assassins who don't speak English, (which is the only language Jesse can speak) are immune and safe. The Saint of Killers is also willing to bet that he can draw his guns and shoot Jessie before Jesse can say a single word. Jesse, who has seen just how fast and lethal the Saint is, doesn't try his luck when the two confront each other.
    • The TV show based on the comic book, in addition to keeping all of the above weaknesses, also added that Jesse's commands are taken literally — no simile, no metaphor, and no idioms. He once told someone to "go to Hell", and they were sent straight to Hell on the spot. In another, Jesse told someone to "have a heart-to-heart" with his mother, culminating in the guy talking to his mom... then ripping his own heart out of his chest when the conversation was over.
  • One issue of Rising Stars dealt with the death of an invulnerable man. His power manifested as a microthin energy shield that enveloped his body and made him completely impervious to damage—and also totally removed his sense of touch. It also lined the inside of his lungs and stomach, making him immune to poisons. When he tried out for his high school football team, the other players couldn't hurt him, but his poor physical condition meant they could just bowl him over without a problem. Even his murderer used his weaknesses against him: the killer snuck into his apartment at night and duct-taped the man to the recliner in which he'd fallen asleep; he never noticed because he had no sense of touch. Then the killer pulled a plastic bag over his head and waited for him to suffocate. He couldn't be poisoned, but he still needed oxygen.
  • In Runaways, Victor is a cyborg and can't pass through metal detectors without setting them off.
  • Quite a few heroes with regeneration powers have logical weaknesses as a result. Savage Dragon's bones will knit wrong if not set quickly (forcing him to re-break them), Claire from Heroes avoids this by having her healing not kick in until foreign objects are removed and bones set but this obviously has its own drawbacks as Claire can be stuck unconscious until someone happens along to help her. Batman once faced a dilemma trying to remove a kryptonite bullet from Superman as the wound was closing around the bullet too quickly and he was still tough enough to resist surgical instruments. When Hulk required surgery, he sought out Doctor Doom to help, who built an adamantium chainsaw to use in the procedure.
  • Porcelain of the Secret Six has the ability to make anything they touch shatter like glass, with their ability becoming more powerful the harder an object is. But therein lies the catch: since it scales to how hard an object is, Porcelain's ability has no effect on soft objects, which means someone like Elongated Man would be their Man of Kryptonite.
  • Shazam! (2023) has the seven gods that provide Billy with his powers decide (without informing him) to take turns in giving him a power boost, influencing him more in the process. The logical weakness is that he gets their mental weaknesses; Solomon's arrogance, Hercules's recklessness, Atlas's gullibility, Zeus's lechery, Achilles's overconfidence and Mercury's prankishness.
  • The Big Bad of Sleeper (WildStorm) has a great intellect and uses it to talk to his enemies and convince them not to fight him, or even to Mind Rape them. Up until one of them rips his tongue out of his mouth.
  • Sonic the Hedgehog (IDW):
    • The Cacophonic Conch is an artifact that emits a noise that Zeti find horrendously painful. But it's still a conch shell, which means the sound only lasts as long as your breath does. Dr. Starline find this out the hard way when he tries to use the Conch on the Deadly Six and tuckers himself out after one breath, giving the Six an opportunity to snatch it from him.
    • Kit has incredibly powerful Hydrokinesis that is able to to topple entire buildings and turn water into incredibly sharp ice, which makes him extremely dangerous to face. However, his water pack isn't infinite; if he uses too much or spreads it too thin, he'll eventually be left with not enough water to be useful in a fight. Tails exploits this multiple times when they have to face each other.
    • Sonic may possess Super-Speed, but that is reliant on the condition of his legs. A few arcs end up nerfing him by simply either having him damage one of his legs and/or attaching a weight to them so it's more strenuous for him to run at his signature speed.
  • Spider-Man:
    • The Sandman:
      • Humorous example verging on a Weaksauce Weakness: the Sandman was first defeated when Spider-Man vacuumed him up.
      • He also once teamed up with Hydro-Man, until they realized that if they touched, they combined into a sort of composite sludge monster. They got stuck that way for a while. When they separated, Sandman was so traumatized he pulled a Heel–Face Turn, at least for a while.
      • Similarly, intense heat or electric attacks can turn him to glass. Sometimes when fighting the Sinister Six, Spidey and other heroes use Deadly Dodging to get Electro to do this.
    • Spider-Man:
      • He has been shown to be susceptible to pesticides that affect spiders. He can't stick to surfaces that are sufficiently slick.
      • His Spider-Sense can also be rendered useless or even a drawback if faced with overwhelming danger from multiple sources. Iron Man also proved that if Peter can build a tracer that emits a signal detectable by his spider sense, then others can build devices to trigger false positives in his spider sense, rendering one of his greatest advantages useless.
      • Peter was the main host to the Venom symbiote for a while before he got rid of it. The close connection meant that the Symbiote has an understanding of every part of his physiology, including the Spidey-Sense, and has adapted itself to not set it off. Venom is one of the few foes who Peter can't see coming.
      • The sense isn't very specific, and can thus be fooled by misdirection. For instance, in one What If? story, The Punisher set a trap with a Dr. Octopus dummy and a bomb. Spidey assumed that his danger sense was going off because he was about to tangle with Doc Ock and never realized the real threat until too late.
    • The aforementioned Hydro-Man was defeated in his second battle with Spider-Man when the wall crawler tricked him into spreading his liquid form too far and left him unable to reform his body before evaporating. As he is made of water, he can also be defeated by being turned into ice and kept at the right temperature, such as when Spider-Man used an Ice Pellet to take him out effortlessly. He is also vulnerable to electrocution.
    • In Spider-Boy, Bailey's paralyzing fangs are a potent way to end a fight, but they only work if he can bite deeply enough to inject the venom. If he faces someone whose skin is too tough for his teeth to penetrate, his venom becomes useless.
  • Darth Vader: Dark Lord of the Sith. One chapter has Tarkin and a team of bounty hunters hunting down Vader. Tarkin seeks to methodically identity the vulnerable points of the Empire's greatest warrior. Vader defeats each method.
    • Expend your hunters to find out the limit at which Vader can use his Force-Choke, then stay outside that range. Vader kills and skins a predator animal that stalks its prey by camouflaging itself, wearing its hide as an Invisibility Cloak.
    • Vader can deflect blaster bolts with his lightsaber, so use Fire Breathing Weapons. Vader's armor protects him long enough to use the Force to crush the flamethrowers and blow them up.
    • Steal his lightsaber. This just makes Vader mad, which should make him more prone to make mistakes—as Tarkin notes, this doesn't work on Vader, who thrives on such emotions.
    • Use Chandra-Fan trackers to pick up the sound of Vader's breathing apparatus despite his cloak. Vader lures them into a Crystal Landscape that causes sound to echo, enabling him to ambush them. Then he turns his breathing apparatus off, staying alive long enough to get his lightsaber back.
    • Finally Tarkin exploits Vader's self-confidence and lust for the kill. The Sole Survivor of the hunters, Tarkin flees into the Stormlands where he pretends to collapse with exhaustion. When Vader moves in to finish Tarkin, he gets struck by lightning because he's taller. However Vader then turns it round; just when Tarkin thinks he's won, a Not Quite Dead Vader Force-chokes Tarkin just long enough to drop him, having now lured him close enough to do so.
  • Sub-Mariner: Atlanteans have this dependency on water given their aquatic adaptation, with the exception of the mixed breed Namor. Same can be said of Aquaman, though his dependency on water eventually faded going into the new millennium.
  • Superman:
    • Superman's powers are fueled by solar energy and his body can only contain a limited amount of power. Each use of his powers consumes a bit of his stockpile, with varying rates of energy consumption depending on the nature of the power. Normally, this isn't a problem as he's constantly absorbing energy when in sunlight, but if he's ever cut off from the sun for an extended period, he's left with a fixed supply of energy and will slowly weaken as his reserves drain, so he must limit his activities as much as possible to conserve energy. His most basic abilities like Super-Strength and Super-Speed are relatively safe to use to a limited degree, but his more demanding powers like heat vision will drain his battery exponentially faster.
    • As astounding as Superman's powers are, they are still bound by the laws of the physical universe (or at least a comic book version of one). Since magic and other reality-warping powers are not bound by these limitations, Superman has no defense against them.
    • While not their most prominent weakness, Kryptonians are at least hurt by high-powered sonics. Their Super-Senses and invulnerability seem to roughly cancel each other out in this instance.
      • In Red Daughter of Krypton, Lobo uses a sonic grenade to neutralize Supergirl. On the one hand, it works and Kara passes out because of the extreme pain. On the other hand, she's real mad when she comes to.
    • Superman and Supergirl's weakness to red sunlight fits as their powers depend specifically on yellow sunlight. The New 52 and Man of Steel versions depend on multiple factors of Earth's atmosphere for their powers, thus exposure to a Krypton-like atmosphere can shut their powers down.
    • Superman's super resistance to injury proves a problem when he is shot with a kryptonite bullet and needs surgery. Fortunately, the surgeon is clever enough to use a shard of the bullet he could access to weaken Superman just enough to make the incisions necessary to extract the rest.
    • In The Untold Story of Argo City, Supergirl faces alien creatures whose bodies cannot be harmed or touched because they are made from liquid fire... so she simply freezes them solid.
    • Death & the Family: When the spirits of the McDougal Clan take over Supergirl's body, Inspector Henderson reasons that, since they are bonded to their family's heirlooms, said relics can be used to hurt them. Henderson quickly stabs one coin, causing the spirits pain and letting Supergirl throw them out of her body.
    • Let My People Grow! Since 1970's incarnation of Brainiac is a humanoid computer, Superman is able to hurt him by building a gadget which interferes with his electronic brainwaves.
    • "Brainiac Rebirth": After being rebuilt as a living robot, Brainiac is massively more powerful than before, but he is still a robot, meaning his computer brain is vulnerable to electromagnetic disturbances caused by a sunspot.
    • Batman/Superman: World's Finest: Evil sorcerer Felix Faust is cautioned to keep Billy Batson silent when attacking him, so he magically fuses his lips together before engaging him. Being unable to transform into his super-powerful alter ego Captain Marvel, Billy is forced to run away.
  • Taskmaster has the power to copy the skills and movements of anyone. However this doesn't grant him Required Secondary Powers, which can potentially render a copied skill useless; he once copied someone's diving abilities only to nearly drown when it turned out he hadn't bothered to copy the ability to swim. His copying powers also overwrite his memories and own skills, as he still has the mental capacity of a normal person; not only has he forgotten how to perform some basic menial tasks but he's also forgotten most of his childhood, his ex-wife, and possibly even his daughter. When up against Deadpool's random insanity, he can't predict anything and gets confused and beaten pretty quickly. He has a similar problem with Moon Knight. It's not that he can't predict or copy him, it's that Moon Knight's fighting style is too gluttonous for punishment for Taskmaster's tastes. His copying ability is also limited by the fact that he possesses a normal human body; when he fights Squirrel Girl, he can't copy any of her moves that utilize her tail.
  • The Silver Age DC villain Ten-Eyed Man was a guy whose "power" was being able to see through his fingertips. Every single battle involving him ended with him being tricked into grabbing something causing him incapacitating pain. Batman: The Brave and the Bold lampshaded this by having Batman defeat him by chucking a cactus at him. He was used as a one-shot villain in Batman: The Black Glove and was defeated by throwing boiling oil on his hands.
  • Songbird (formerly Screaming Mimi) from Thunderbolts is another vocal-based heroine who is rendered completely useless if she's gagged.
  • When Mr. X joined the Thunderbolts, he bragged at length about being able to predict every move his opponents made based on a combination of low-level telepathy and reading body language. This served him well until he came up against Quicksilver. Suddenly, being able to predict his opponent's moves didn't help at all since he still wasn't fast enough to counter them. Trying to fight against Amadeus Cho also went badly, because telepathic contact with Cho's genius level intellect and seeing mathematical patterns everywhere was disorienting to Mr. X.
  • The Transformers: More than Meets the Eye: Tarn is capable of using his voice to coax other people's sparks into giving up (and then exploding). Eventually, Deathsaurus points out this requires the person has to be able to hear him, and has turned off his audio receptors. However, Tarn reveals he can just use the internal radio of the ship they're on instead.
  • Ultimate Marvel:
    • Ultimate Galactus Trilogy: Despite turning into metal, Colossus' eyes are still vulnerable to a sharp Eye Poke, as Sam Wilson reveals. Because if they were made of metal, how would he be able to see?
    • The Ultimates: Gregory's Nanotech powers are far superior to anything the Ultimates can throw at him, let alone what Tony's suit is capable of. However, still being based purely in technology, Gregory is still vulnerable to something his "stupid" little brother had long made contingencies for in his own suit.
    Gregory: What have you got? Pulsar-beams? Booster jets? Durability? A force field?
    Tony: Don't forget my electromagnetic pulse.
    Gregory: *depowered* What? What's happening? What have you done!
    Tony: Your tech might be better than mine, but it's still just tech, Greg. That pulse just took out every piece of electronics in a ten-mile radius.
    Gregory: Oh no.
  • Venom: Eddie Brock is fighting the supervillain Stegron, a dinosaur-human hybrid. Stegron boasts that he outweighs Eddie by about fifteen hundred pounds; Eddie correctly deduces that he's too heavy to swim, and defeats Stegron by breaking open a water pipe and flooding his lair.
  • The White Tiger amulet contains the power of the Tiger God, the very first thing humanity feared, thus granting the user the power to inflict terror and fear on others. The problem? The Tiger God was the first thing humanity feared, which means it has no effect on things like aliens, Atlanteans or Asgardians.
  • Batman finally figured out a weakness for Wonder Woman, who has no Weaksauce Weakness. Her upbringing was highly competitive and she won the right to represent her culture in man's world by winning a competition. Batman guessed correctly that her body would give out before she ever willingly gave up and came up with a way to force her into Fighting a Shadow, as seen in JLA: Tower of Babel.
  • Siryn from X-Factor (2006) has a similar gag weakness. However, it's handled very inconsistently; in one case she was able to shatter a metal gag with low-frequency sonics, while a later story had her effectively neutralized by a strip of duct tape placed over her mouth.
  • X-Men:
    • Wolverine:
      • He can't pass through metal detectors because of his skeleton. He is also vulnerable to magnets. (This doesn't stop him from attacking Magneto as if he doesn't remember what happened the last zillion times — his skeleton also makes him vulnerable to magnetism) Of course, this doesn't stop him in any story that requires him to travel by plane. At least once this has been played for laughs, with Wolverine and another character walking out of an airport while she comments on how she's always wondered how he got through metal detectors and now she knows. The reader, of course, is not privy to this information. Once, he walked into the Pentagon, and showed a medical certificate stating he has metallic prosthetics due to war injuries. Not far from the truth. In the Ultimate Universe, he once got in by sticking a (fake) grenade into some guy's bag so airport security would freak out and he could sneak past the detectors in all the confusion... Ultimate Wolverine is a bit more of a Jerkass than regular Wolverine.
      • The reason Wolverine has a Healing Factor in the first place is that writers quickly realized that his adamantium-coated bones would kill him if he didn't have one; not only is adamantium toxic, (there's a reason real-life prosthesis involves biologically inert metals like titanium) but it would prevent his marrow from functioning properly. As such, whenever his healing factor goes on the blink, he's not Brought Down to Normal, he's Living on Borrowed Time until adamantium poisoning catches up to him.
      • Speaking of things toxic, while his healing factor makes him highly resistant to toxins in general, it also counteracts things like anaesthetics and sedatives, making the rare surgery he needs extremely difficult at best. It also means getting drunk involves a titanic effort on his part, and with his background, he could use getting drunk a little more often.
      • His metal bones weigh a lot, causing him to have difficulty swimming and to make it even worse drowning is one of the few ways to kill Wolverine, since drowning starves the brain of resources. His healing factor can't save him either, because there is nothing to heal — and even if brain cells were regrown, they wouldn't make the same connections.
      • On the flipside, the nature of his claws make him a counter to SHIELD's Power Nullifier cuffs - or, at least, the model they were using in Civil War (2006). His claws might be a result of his mutation, but they're not a "power" so much as just a weird way for his bones to be arranged, and the cuffs can shut down his Healing Factor but they're hardly up to rearranging Wolverine's entire skeleton. Just to add insult to injury, the design covers the entire hand, so when Wolvie pops his claws anyway, they go right through the cuffs and destroy them.
    • His daughter/Opposite-Sex Clone X-23 suffers many of these same weaknesses, though her body is not severely impacted by adamantium itself since only her claws are bonded.
    • X-23's Arch-Enemy Kimura's body is indestructible; not even adamantium blades can damage it. She has no protection from telepathic attacks, and she still needs to breathe. She once suffered a Mind Rape by Emma Frost, and in All-New Wolverine, X-23 kills her by drowning her in the ocean.
    • Shadowcat:
      • She can only stay phased inside an object as long as she can hold her breath. When the character debuted, it was pretty clear that she couldn't breathe at all while phased, which made sense because air, while not solid, would still be out-of-phase relative to Kitty. This was either a source of Fridge Brilliance because there's no air inside solid objects, and the air wouldn't move with her. It would just dissipate. This limitation was invoked for story reasons, to make the character sometimes vulnerable when in costume. It changed to its current interpretation around the time of the Mutant Massacre, when she got injured and her default state became "phased". If she couldn't breathe while phased, this would have killed her quickly.
      • Also averted in that she is never shown dropping through the center of the Earth whenever she phases, so it is assumed she can apparently create phase boundaries on the soles of her feet allowing her to walk on solid ground even though she is out of phase with it. She examined the Fridge Logic of this and learned that "down" was what she made of it. She can walk on nothing, a power that she's used to great effect on several occasions. Used as a weakness in one instance, when a Brainwashed and Crazy Wolverine attacks her by stabbing her not-phased foot. Ouch.
    • Colossus can turn himself into organic steel completely, including all the internal workings of his body. Apparently he does not have blood in this form (and neither does it require it). One downside to this is that if something does manage to injure him through the Nigh-Invulnerable status, turning back into the more frail and bleeding human form would be a Very Bad Idea. Fortunately he can still heal with time. In his metal form, the equivalent of setting broken bones requires heavy machinery. Also much like Wolvie, he is vulnerable to magnetism, leading to problems fighting Magneto.
    • House of X #2 reveals that Moira MacTaggert has the mutant power to return to the womb at the time of her death with all of the memories of her past lives intact. However, as Destiny points out, it's a mutant power, which means it won't activate until she reaches 13. If she dies before then, then she's Killed Off for Real.
    • Sebastian Shaw can absorb kinetic energy to make himself stronger, making attacking him directly useless. However, he still needs to breathe, and has no special resistance to temperature — Storm once made him run away by making the area so cold that he couldn't stand it.
    • Shaw's Hellfire Club-mate Harry Leland can increase the mass of things near him, without changing their volume, making most people trying to attack him unable to move from the weight. Unfortunately, if you've already pouncing towards him in an attack from above, the increase in weight is only going to make for a heavier crash.

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