Story Breaker Power / Comic Books

DC

• Batman:
  • Hellbat Armor is a suit of Powered Armor Batman built with unique materials supplied by various superhuman allies. This thing doesn't just allow Batman punch above his weight class, but deliver a Curb-Stomp Battle to the most powerful beings, like Kryptonians or New Gods. Batman used it only once, where he had to go against Darkseid himself, then put it on the Moon so it don't fail in wrong hands. Since then Lois Lane once used it to effectively hold off Eradicator, a robot with all of Superman's powers, and later stole its gauntlet, which in itself allowed her to do real damage to several Superman-level villains.
  • Failsafe, a robot capable of copying every superpower and skill and improving on them. One time it went amok it proceeded to outclass every single member of Batfamily in their area of expertise at once and effortlessly defeated Superman. It's relegated to only activate to beat Batman himself if he'd ever turn evil...but the mere fact Batman built it has, by some, been seen as an ultimate middle finger to anyone who likes other heroes, as it basically says Batman could at any moment replace any and all his allies with a glorified toy and be better off.
• Captain Atom, even in continuities where he's not a step or two away from Doctor Manhattan (who was originally Atom before the story was retooled), has a wide assortment of powers which should theoretically make him as strong as Superman or Martian Manhunter. He's only held back by the fact that sometimes he's not that bright and that if his Dilusteel skin is injured, he'll time jump in a massive explosion of quantum energy (and presumably take out a lot of property & lives in the ensuing explosion).
• Firestorm can restructure molecular bonds. This grants him a wide variety of superpowers that make him an insanely powerful demigod. His primary weaknesses are that his powers are really hard to use even if you're a genius nuclear physicist and that Firestorm is a Fusion Dance of people who don't always like each other. He also has a Weaksauce Weakness of being unable to directly alter organic matter without debilitating side effects.
• There's no reason The Flash shouldn't see the villain and have them tied up and in prison before they have a chance to react. Lampshaded a bit in the New 52 where Barry Allen is informed how fast he can process sensory input is the biggest bottleneck to his powers. At one point he gets shot due to overthinking, and reverts to just processing the superhuman speed environment on a somewhat instinctual level.
  • This was explored in Kingdom Come and DC One Million. In the former, he is made of pure speed and is able to see the narrator in Another Dimension, although he can no longer talk with anyone except Superman, because he's too fast (only Superman's superhuman senses can hear him), and he's so fast, he's constantly blurry, even when standing still. In the latter, a future Flash is the sole police force on the entire (heavily populated) planet Mercury, and The Spectre mentions that he is forever alone, unseen by most people in the city he guards "though all feel his presence".
  • In an interview, New Teen Titans scribes Marv Wolfman and George Perez admitted they wrote Kid Flash out of the book for this very reason. They stated that logically, Kid Flash should be able to defeat a villain the moment he lays eyes on them, which made writing action scenes difficult.
  • As time has gone on since the Silver Age, this has increasingly been justified and countered.
    • Firstly, while they're ridiculously powerful, most of the time they're only using a fraction of their speed (after all, who runs at full speed everywhere? While to us they're moving as fast as a bullet, to them they're basically light-jogging), which means their average movement speed is still slow enough for humans to react to. On top of this, the ridiculously high levels of speed they can run to are also dangerous as they run the risk of running into the Speed Force (the source of their power, which is also a heaven-like dimension that is constantly pulling them in as they run), so for safety reasons they only go to anything close to top speed when shit gets truly serious, but are otherwise generally only moving at a "reasonable" level of super speed.
    • Meanwhile, though they have the Required Secondary Powers of super speed, they're still ultimately a Fragile Speedster, so an enemy with sufficient Super-Strength, Super-Toughness, or significant weight can tank almost anything the Flash throws at them; though it's shown Wally West could fight and win against one of Superman's dancing partners, it was still a matter of having to fight smart as merely using super speed alone wasn't enough to overcome the significant strength advantage.
    • Lastly, as powerful as the Flash is, they don't just spend their stories only dealing with normal bank robbers or the like; the Flash often fights enemies who have power comparable to their own, such as evil speedsters like the various Reverse-Flashes, Mind over Matter Lightning Bruiser like Gorilla Grodd, or other super weights. Even the "normal" bank robberies they deal with are generally committed by The Rogues, who though a bunch of gimmick villains, are also highly experienced with fighting the Flash and so have devised tactics to overcome their Super-Speed (their leader, Captain Cold, explicitly uses the element of cold as it's effectively the Flash's Kryptonite), or their gimmicks give them enough throwing power that the Flash can't just focus on them, but also has to focus on protecting civilians and/or containing the property damage they cause. Effectively, the solution to the Flash's Story Breaker Powers is to just pit them against people who also have Story Breaker Powers and just sit back and enjoy the action.
• JLA/Avengers: Most of the items that the Avengers and the Justice League were seeking in the first and second issues have the power to completely derail the story. The Grandmaster knows this, and took caution to prevent them from being able to actually use them. They were contained in energy spheres, and disappeared when either team captured and secured it. Darkseid broke the energy sphere around The Infinity Gauntlet, but it turned out to be conveniently useless in the DC universe. When Batman tries to use the Cosmic Cube, it disappears, Grandmaster saying the players can't use their power.
• Justice Society of America featured Jakeem Thunder, who had an all-powerful genie who could do anything he asked. The problem was that the genie often took wishes too literally, and so he was hamstrung... but even then, the writers had to come up with constant reasons for why Jakeem either wasn't around, or why he was taken out within seconds (Mordru and other villains would wisely take Jakeem out first). Johnny Thunder, the prototype for the character, had a similar predicament in that he was a nice guy who wanted to do good but was a bit of a dunderhead and lacked the wherewithall to get the most out of having an omnipotent being at his disposal. Alan Scott, the original Green Lantern, would also suffer similar fates, being one of the few beings as powerful as Superman on Earth.
  • The JSA's classic lineup has historically had issues with this, as the gap between its weakest members (Badass Normal hand-to-hand fighters like Wildcat or the Atom, investigators like Sandman or Doctor Mid-Nite) and its strongest members (planet-smashers like Alan Scott or Doctor Fate, Reality Warpers like the Spectre or the Thunderbolt) is colossal, even by hero team standards. Consequently, most stories involving the original team tend to have its strongest members being curiously ineffective or Out of Focus, while most modern stories tend to give the team's weaker members or Legacy Characters a power boost.
• Kingdom Come: Supergirl took no part in the metahuman war because she would join the Superman side together with Power Girl, which would mean the old-school heroes would count three full-powered Kryptonians among its forces and utterly curb-stomp any opposition. Hence, she joined the Legion of Super-Heroes in the 30th century prior to the events of the story.
• Legion of Super-Heroes:
  • The Legion were given a device they called the Miracle Machine by a race of Neglectful Precursors. Its power? Nothing less than turning your thoughts into reality. It's usually relegated to their trophy room, because, apart from the problem of how power corrupts, the Miracle Machine doesn't have any safeties; turning a skyscraper into ice cream with a stray thought is a very mild example of what could go wrong. A later author wrote a plot specifically to remove the literal Deus ex Machina from the plot forever.
  • At the end of Final Crisis, Superman managed to create one to reverse the space-time shenanigans from most of the story. It's mentioned as only having a single use (though a later story showed that it's mere existence afterwards was a warp in space-time as well, albeit in a far smaller area), and that it's so complex, Superman will never be able to create another one again due to the fact that its magnificence erased its blueprints from his memory.
  • Minor character Duplicate Boy can duplicate anyone else's superpowers. He's not in the Legion (he's a hero on some other planet), and a bit of a lunkhead besides.
  • The Legion itself in its original incarnation with a number of Kryptonian members at Silver Age Physical God power extremes including Superboy and Supergirl themselves, Mon-El, and Ultra Boy to a somewhat lesser degree. Unsurprisingly they had to be written to be on a mission other than the one the issue was actually about a lot of the time for the other heroes to actually get a chance to do something or create some element of doubt. Star Boy was originally introduced as another Kryptonian-style powerhouse, but was nerfed after a bit so that his other powers ran out and he was left only with the ability to make things heavier, in order to cut down on this.
  • The Condemned Legionnaires: A sudden emergency across the galaxy suddenly ensures that Superboy and Mon-El will be away and out of reach before Satan Girl makes her move, prompting an undermanned Legion to call Supergirl, their only left member who can deal with a Kryptonian-level enemy. Should Kal and Lar have fought together with Kara, Satan Girl would have been outnumbered and easily overpowered.
  • The Composite Superman has the powers of the entire Silver Age Legion put together. That includes three people with Superman's powers, plus a mess of Combo Platter Powers so long it took up a third of the cover of his first appearance. He's never lasted longer than a single issue, because even with an Hour of Power limitation, he'd be unbeatable by anything less than an abstract concept.
• This is why the Martian Manhunter rarely gets used to his full potential, both in the comics and on Justice League. He has each of the various powers of Superman (although with lesser magnitude; how much less varies with writers), but also with Shapeshifting, Telepathy, Mind Manipulation, and phasing, amongst other powers. While he is vulnerable to fire, several stories have shown J'onn getting over it, but it never lasts. Pretty much any power scaling problem Superman has, J'onn has it even worse.
  • Lampshaded during Blackest Night: When Black Lantern J'onn is fighting Hal and Barry, he picks up the fire station they are in and throws it into another building, saying "I'm as powerful as Superman. Why does everyone forget that?" Indeed, by the end of the issue he's incapacitated them both.
• The Lucifer comic contains large quantities of god- and god-like beings who qualify, chief of whom is the main character. As the will of God and the angel in charge of stellar fusion Lucifer is only matched by his brother Michael in sheer strength (and outmatched by his father, who has no interest in fighting anyone) and as a result the story spends most of its time de-powering him or putting him in situations where he can't simply incinerate whatever is in front of him with a thought because it won't solve his problem.
  • Speaking of God, his power is so unassailable and overwhelming that the only way the story can resolve His existence is by having him quit his position and leave his own creation halfway through. The rest of the story then becomes Lucifer, Michael and Elaine (with some help) desperately trying to hold Creation together before God's absence causes the whole thing to crumble.
• Planetary:
  • Ambrose Chase had concentration-based Reality Warper powers that allowed him to alter physics at will in a small radius around himself. Barring taking him completely by surprise (like a particular villain did by battling him in a universe that ran on Horror Tropes and using a bullet of Applied Phlebotinum, hence the past tense), he was practically unkillable. It turns out it didn't take; Chase used his power to freeze his own injury and trap himself in a pocket dimension until the others could extract and rescue him.
  • The Big Bad, Randall Dowling. His power allows him to spread his own consciousness to minds around it, basically screwing around with any parts of their memories at will, making people into Manchurian Agents, or simply turning other humans near him into more of himself. Notably, he never even gets to use said power before the heroes drop him down a ravine, possibly because any conceivable combat scenario against him would involve the heroes having to fight enormous amounts of other people, provided they weren't already parts of him without being aware of it.
• Preacher:
  • Jesse Custer, the eponymous preacher, has a Compelling Voice. Although the voice has some limitations (the victim must be able to literally hear and understand him), it still would allow Jesse to solve most of the problems he encounters rather easily. For this reason, the writer has him decide to avoid using it and occasionally even forget to use it so dramatic scenes can play out.
  • The Saint Of Killers is a seemingly invulnerable, unstoppable gunslinger with a pair of special, demonic revolvers for weapons that never inconveniently run out of ammo, always hit their targets, and always kill what they hit. His first act after gaining his signature weapons, forged by Satan? Kill Satan. Unlike other beings, he can neither be conveniently weakened, depowered, slowed down, nor damaged by anyone nor anything that stood in his way. In the end, he kills God Himself.
    The Saint of Killers: [after taking a nuke to the face, unharmed] Not enough gun.
• Morpheus, the title character of The Sandman, is more powerful than most gods and only cosmic level beings like Lucifer are a real threat to him. On the other hand, he is weighed down with the rules and duties of his office, which renders him more impotent than many of his own dream creations. He is only able to use his full power in directly protecting the Dreaming (which does not necessarily mean protecting himself), and only while in the heart of the Dreaming. In the end, The Furies — minor mythological creatures from Greek Mythology — kill him because the act of spilling family blood has rendered him a lawful quarry for their wrath. That, and he wanted to be punished for the act.
  • There's also the fact that half the story arcs in The Sandman focus on the trials and tribulations of puny mortals, with Morpheus functioning as a mere Plot Device, if not an outright antagonist.
• In Shazam! storyline The Monster Society of Evil, the magical scrying pearls disappear without explanation between chapters so the heroes can't beat the bad guys instantly.
• The Spectre. The wrath of God personified. Each major DC crossover event includes the obligatory scene explaining just why he can't help out this time... or he just gets mind-controlled by the bad guys. He did actually help out in Crisis on Infinite Earths (where, with a bit of magical assistance, he fought the Big Bad, who had already absorbed the title's Infinite Earths, to a standstill) and in Blackest Night (pity the Big Bad didn't have a soul). His problem with this has a lot to do with the fact that, while he's not the most powerful of The Powers That Be, he is the most intimate in how he operates - while most beings in his range are off governing spacetime or abstract concepts, he prefers to spend his time judging and punishing mundane criminals, which inevitably raises the question of why he has time to create Karmic Deaths for random murderers, but not to turn every supervillain on the planet inside out.
• Superman:
  • Superman and his associated Kryptonian family have struggled with this trope to varying extents throughout their existence, as they shrug off pretty much anything below nukes (and sometimes even then) unless it's one of their explicit weaknesses: Kryptonite, magic, or red sun radiation. Making something other than Kryptonite, magic or Doomsday-level villains challenge him without nerfing Superman severely is not a task just any writer can accomplish, so various solutions have been attempted to make him more manageable to write for, though each approach has its drawbacks:
    • During Superman's Pre-Crisis heyday, few if any Superman stories hinged on his physical survival; even Kryptonite was generally used as a barrier instead of a full-on weapon. Instead, the plots were usually a Battle of Wits between him and the Villain of the Week, and once Superman actually found the villain and/or saved his squishy mortal friends from said villain's plot, the actual "battle" was barely an afterthought. However, this approach tended to be criticized for not allowing Superman to use the full extent of his powers or relying on Forgot About His Powers or New Powers as the Plot Demands, to the point that it still taints the public perception of Superman to some extent. This approach has been rarely used since the late 80s, but it still tends to crop up in stories featuring his perennial nemesis Lex Luthor.
    • Kryptonite Nevermore was specifically penned to bring Superman's power down to more manageable levels. However it was undone one issue later due to fans protesting. Various other attempts since then have been made to rein him in to more-manageable levels like being ONLY able to lift an aircraft carrier with some effort, though his power still tends to quietly creep back up to planetary scale anyway.
    • The modern approach (since the mid-90s) is to give him Uniqueness Decay. Whereas Superman stood paramount among the DCU from the 1950s unto the 1980s, he's now actually just a Jack of All Stats, who shares his position with several New Gods, Wonder Woman, every other Kryptonian and Daxamite, Icon, Lobo, and Martian Manhunter, and he is easily overpowered by Reality Warper characters utilizing magic like Doctor Fate, The Spectre (at full power), etc., or even just hyper-powerful villains like the Anti-Monitor. Basically, DC's current answer to Superman's power level is to raise the bar for Story-Breaker Power in their universe up so high that even Superman can feel mundane. The main drawback to this approach is that he faces problems in team-up stories that involve other heroes outside his "weight class", particularly Badass Normal heroes like Batman or even lower-level powered heroes like Aquaman, to the point where writers must contrive reasons for an antagonist to be an equal threat to both Superman and his partner of the month. Outside those stories, he tends to undergo Superman Stays Out of Gotham, itself requiring contrived reasons for him to leave other "territories" to their respective heroes.
  • In Red Daughter of Krypton, Supergirl gets a Red Lantern Ring. In addition to her formidable physical powers she wielded a rage-fueled weapon that allows its wearer to create anything they are able to imagine, teleport across the galaxy instantly, vomit highly-corrosive burning plasma... and more. So she predictably loses the thing which made her even more overpowered at the very end of the story.
  • Since 2008 storyline Superman: Brainiac, Brainiac's been consistently portrayed as equaling Superman in strength and durability, while towering above him in intellect. On top of Super-Intelligence eclipsing even Luthor's and Super-Strength and Nigh-Invulnerability surpassing Superman's, Brainiac possesses technopathy, an entire army of Flying Brick robots that can fight Kryptonians, a ship equipped with weapons powerful enough to kill Kryptonians and shields so powerful that said weapons have no effect on it, a shrink ray that can reduce entire planets and also depower whoever it hits, enormous Psychic Powers, a cloning machine he uses to duplicate or heal himself, the ability to take control of other beings, the ability to heal even after taking grievous wounds, and a ton of other powers and gadgets. It's pretty hard to write a scenario where he loses, so various editors usually get around it by having his arrival signify a Crisis Crossover or having him suddenly develop a previously never mentioned Weaksauce Weakness.
  • In his first few appearances in the Silver Age, Brainiac lacked most of the powers that he'd later possess but was equipped with a force field belt that made him entirely immune to harm. Even Superman couldn't breach it, while the same belt came equipped with a death ray capable of killing Superman. The force field belt was quietly dropped from all subsequent incarnations.
  • We also have the famously unpronounceable Mister Mxyzptlk, a Reality Warper from the fifth dimension (much like the Spectre) whose abilities dwarf anything from our plane of existence; in one comic it's revealed that dimensions stack exponentially, so Mxy is working on a level two times above even the most powerful individual from the third dimension. Mxyzptlk can literally do anything he wants, but thankfully, he's self-aware enough to realize that Victory Is Boring and so deliberately puts limitations on himself—most famously, being tricked into saying his name backwards—to make his fights fair. He's also a bit on the proud side—which is natural, considering that he could turn any opponent into a bunch of soap bubbles if he so desired—and thus rather vulnerable to being fooled. It also helps that Mxy is primarily a trickster who is out to have a good time, not conquer the world; he views Superman as a Worthy Opponent in what the imp himself considers to be a grand game and series of practical jokes.
    • The comic Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow? shows exactly why the writers give Mister Mxyzptlk this treatment. He's ultimately revealed as the Big Bad behind the events of the story, and explains that the greatest challenge to an immortal being is not getting bored. He spent 2,000 years perfectly still, another 2,000 doing good deeds, and the last 2,000—the ones we've seen—as a purely neutral entity playing jokes. But now he's decided to try being evil for once...and that single decision leads to the death of nearly all of Superman's loved ones, the near-destruction of Metropolis, every member of the Man of Steel's Rogues Gallery becoming obsessed with killing him, a full-scale genocide (Bizarro is compelled to be a "perfect imperfect duplicate" of Superman, and so goes on a killing spree—as Superman never kills anyone—and then, since Krypton exploded accidentally as a baby, deliberately blows up his own planet—and all life on it—to fulfill the opposite theme), and Superman permanently sacrificing his own powers, leaving the Earth without its primary defender. The only reason Superman is able to defeat Mxy is because the imp decides to draw out the kill with psychological and physical torture, and even then, the Man of Steel's victory is bittersweet, as he inadvertently murders the imp (he's caught between two dimensions and ripped apart) and thus breaks his Thou Shall Not Kill rule, which leads to the power-sacrifice mentioned above.
• This has been done right at least once, in Watchmen. Dr. Manhattan is a Physical God who wins the Vietnam War practically singlehandely and should easily dissect the problem in the comic and excise it... except The Chessmaster plays not against his powers but his post-empowering uncertainty to get him to leave the planet. He's also hamstrung by his inability to see time like we do- he knows precisely what powers he's going to use, when he's going to use them, what they're going to do. He doesn't choose to use them, he just watches himself using them. He even describes the tachyon interference with his future sight, in the climax, as "freeing", allowing him to truly act for the first time in forty years.
  • The real Story-Breaker Power in this case is the aforementioned Chessmaster. In theory, he's a Badass Normal, but in practice his preposterous planning ability makes him completely invincible.
• Wonder Woman:
  • Unless handled carefully, Wonder Woman's lasso's power to force any being to tell the truth will naturally kill any mystery from a story, since deception spoken by any person who faces this power is impossible.
  • Wonder Woman (1987): About twenty issues in, Perez had all the Gods of Olympus (except Hermes) run off to the other end of the galaxy after Darkseid blew up Olympus. In-universe, they did this to build a new Olympus (even though they're supposedly capable of retaliating against Apokolips immediately); out-of-universe, Perez did this as a Deus Exit Machina to cut down on the Gods' power.
• Zatanna is one of the most powerful sorcerers in the DC Universe, and thus generally falls victim to some sort of Drama-Preserving Handicap at least once per story. She notoriously has a Weaksauce Weakness that leaves her powerless if she is gagged, which is usually exploited in team-ups just so that she can't solve the problem before the rest of the JLA get out of bed.
• Green Lantern: The Green Lanterns have explicitly an Imagination-Based Superpower that can mimic almost any other superpower. It is only limited by their imagination, willpower and the energy stored in their rings. Remove the last restriction and you have Ion. In one storyline a Daxamite obtained the powers of Ion resulting in a Physical God. This also include individuals like Jade and Alan Scott who have similar powers.
  • Sodam Yat, the Daxamite who became Ion, is an interesting case. Immediately after his ascension to Reality Warper in addition to being a Physical God, he was stuck fighting Superman-Prime. During their fight, Prime managed to injure Yat by impaling him with a Lead pipe, thus permanently gimping him. From that point on, Yat was unable to remove his ring or else the lead poisoning would kill him. This is in addition to a quiet retcon about Ion's capabilities (Lowering him from Reality Warper to Flying Brick with stronger energy blasts). Eventually Sodam Yat was separated from the entity, and a little after that disappeared from the universe. All this together means that he legitimately never had a chance to do anything that would break a story.
  • Avoiding this trope is also the reason why Green Lanterns couldn't affect anything yellow with their rings - but this directly lead to every other villain using yellow equipment and random alien monsters being yellow to avoid Hal Jordan stomping them flat in five seconds.
• Captain Atom: Nightshade (Eve Eden) often gets regulated to cameos in her appearances in other character's books because she'd otherwise solve the problem in the issue in seconds. Her Shadow Walker combo powers of teleportation, dimensional travel, intangibility, shadow manipulation, shadow homunculi creation, flight and super strength in combination with her study of magic have led more than one villain to mind control her in order to try to kill Superman and they generally only fail because she's fairly good at fighting off mind control and possession. She is also technically ruler of the Nightshade Lands which means the dimension would be warped to her will if she spent enough time in it. As if to prove the point, in DCeased, once she's infected, her powers are what ultimately causes Earth to need to be evacuated, as in addition to breaching previously unbreachable sanctuaries, she starts a chain of events that leads to the infections of fellow story-breakers Martian Manhunter, Flash, and Superman
• Teen Titans has Beast Boy who has the power to turn into any animal and also has that animal's abilities/powers. Also changing into a larger or smaller form has no drawbacks. Big deal, right? Oh he can turn into a gorilla and get it's strength, who cares in a world where people can destroy planets by sneezing? Until you realize what comprises an animal: Kryptonians are animals. So are Daxamites, Maritans, and any multitude of Heavenly/Hellish beasts. Oh and he can shapeshift into anything animal related but it will have green skin. So how about a green skin Doomsday? Or a green skinned Spectre? This only gets worse with his Menagrie persona- he can become mythological/fantasy animals. Yeah he can turn into a Unicorn of a Pegasus but what about Jormungandr the world serpent? Or Fenrir and Skulld, two giant wolves that devour the Sun and the Moon? Or the fucking Kracken?

Marvel

• Monica Rambeau: A woman with military training who's capable of converting into any form of energy along the electromagnetic spectrum, Monica has proven capable of slugging it out with actual gods and singlehandedly fighting advanced civilizations' space fleets. Because she can literally turn into light and so move such speed, direct fights against her are often over in under a second. If you go back and read the Avengers issues that follow her debut, a startling number of storylines involve the antagonists having to figure out specific ways to take Monica off the board before they can proceed.
• Doctor Strange. A long term editorial problem concerns just why Strange can't wave his hands and fix everything. Whenever the good doctor gets involved in any significant way in Marvel's other books, serious Nerfage occurs by necessity. For instance, after joining the cast of New Avengers, Strange ended up being Put on a Bus during Dark Reign, and when he finally returned, it was revealed that he'd been significantly weakened thanks to having lost his title of Sorcerer Supreme. He was only restored to full power at the very end of Brian Bendis' tenure on the Avengers books. Strange has since been DePowered several times, although it never lasts.
  • Modern creators have embraced the pitfalls inherent in Strange's power level. When a fully-powered Strange tried to magically retcon the destruction of Las Vegas caused in a previous crossover, he accidentally brought Mephisto (the Marvel Universe's Satan analogue) along and allowed him to establish a literal Hell-on-Earth beachhead. It took another crossover (Doctor Strange: Damnation) and the formation of a whole new super-team (the Midnight Sons) to fix Strange's mess.
  • On another note, this is also the reason why Shuma-Gorath, despite becoming more well-known thanks to the Marvel vs. Capcom series, is still generally a minor villain: as a Multiversal Conqueror with Complete Immortality his power so exceeds just about everyone on Marvel's roster (Dormammu, a Dimension Lord, is very, very careful not to get on his bad side) that he can't show up very often. And even then he operates through much weaker avatars or through minions.
• Franklin Richards, son of Reed and Sue Richards of the Fantastic Four. A Reality Warper on a cosmic scale, he has been largely kept as a child for decades specifically because it has been demonstrated that his mature power levels would be so far off the scale that he would become virtually unusable as a character.
  • In the aftermath of Secret Wars, Franklin has been aged up to a teenager, spending the intervening years reconstructing The Multiverse. It quickly becomes clear that his powers are beginning to burn out, with each use draining them more, preventing him from just solving every problem the team faces.
• Freedom Ring, a young hero who had a ring made from the Cosmic Cube that allowed him to bend reality to his will within a 30-foot sphere of reach. He was even able to make a full recovery from a nearly-fatal blow from the Abomination just by willing it. He was Killed Off for Real just a few issues later, and so writers never got to abuse his powers outside his own book.
  • Sadly the same cannot be said for Kobik, the Distaff Counterpart of Freedom Ring who will probably go down in comic book infamy for being the facilitator of the Cosmic Retcon that turned Captain America into a HYDRA sleeper agent.
• Planet Eater extraordinaire Galactus, subject to Strong as They Need to Be, is often this, typically serving as Always a Bigger Fish when he's not a villain.
• Ghost Rider started out only being physically difficult to injure thanks to being a flaming skeleton along with low-level superhuman strength and a couple of other minor abilities. Over the years, the Ghost Riders have gotten steadily more powerful; they reform instantly from any physical damage, are impossible to KO, have unlimited physical strength, can create and produce as much hellfire as they want as much as they want as strong as they want, have the penance stare as an autowin, have motor cycles that move as fast as they can will them that can scale 180 degree surfaces, several other abilities, and can only be harmed by weapons created from the Christian heaven or other high-level magic. So of course magic or weapons to imprison them, separate them from their hosts or even kill their hosts become common with several of their powers given a slew of weaknesses to keep them from easily ending stories. All-New Ghost Rider provides another solution: have a Ghost Rider whose powers come from a different source.
• The "Illuminati" is a secret club consisting of the Marvel Universe's richest, smartest, and most powerful heroes; among their ranks include Reed Richards and Tony Stark (both of whom are so rich and intelligent that they can't use their inventions to change the world) as well as Professor Xavier and Doctor Strange (both of whom are listed on this page independently). Other on/off members include Black Bolt, Black Panther, and Namor, all of whom are royalty of highly advanced nations. In theory, they came together in order to pool their efforts to defend the Earth from worldwide threats, but their combined wealth, power, and intelligence means they have no choice but to be a Not-So-Omniscient Council of Bickering to maintain any sense of conflict in their universe.
• The Incredible Hulk is perhaps Marvel's ultimate example; capable of limitless strength and with the will to use it, he's able to physically match most of Marvel's 'heavy hitter' villains by himself- and having that kind of power makes the rest of The Avengers seem a little redundant. This may be one of the reasons why the Hulk is constantly persecuted no matter how often he's saved the world, after all it's a lot easier to explain why you don't want to have a fugitive on your team than it is to explain why you don't want the single strongest superhero on the planet. This was also the main reason he was off on Sakaar during the Civil War- no matter what side he chose, or even if he didn't choose any, if he was still on Earth the authors would have no choice but to make him a major player. Once he got back, he not only broke the story, he tried to break the world.
• The Mighty Thor:
  • Loki is only a Squishy Wizard compared to Thor. Although sometimes Depending on the Writer, Loki is generally far stronger than average even by Asgardian standards (where the average adult is nearly as strong as Spider-Man), so in addition to vast magical power (he is only listed as surpassed by Odin and perhaps Karnilla, another Thor character, so his exact magical abilites are unknown in comparison to someone like Doctor Strange or the Scarlet Witch), Loki is experienced in combat, a genius (though this aspect is limited by his Inferiority Superiority Complex, Unfavorite-ness, and need to defeat Thor no matter what), and is so much of Consummate Liar that he has tricked Mephisto (aka the devil), Norman Osborn, Doctor Doom, Odin, and the heroes of Earth several times over. At least some of these traits need nerfing to keep the story alive. He was later depowered after dying and being resurrected in the body of a child in order to keep his Journey into Mystery (Gillen) and Young Avengers story engaging, however he was later aged back up which should have restored most if not all of his previous magical abilities. This trope is subsequently Lampshaded in the first issue of his solo series Loki: Agent of Asgard, where he is a good(ish) guy with a series of captions showing he's consciously making a better story, because as an Asgardian god, he is a creature of story (and also intentionally taking the hard route to avoid temptation to fall back into his old evil ways).
    "Now, I know what you're thinking: WHY am I falling to my death while a man who makes terrible life decisions shoots an arrow at my face? eh? Why don't I just MAGIC everything better? Tell the universe a nice BIG story? "Then Loki wiggled his fingers and everything was fine. Also his mission was complete and he had a pony and balloons and a cosmic cube. The end." It's not a very GOOD story, is it?"
    • The same series also has an evil older Loki from the future with even more power and the benefit of foreknowledge running around. What stops him from breaking the story? Temporal Mutability.
  • Thor's father Odin is virtually omnipotent to the point where heavy hitters who can easily destroy planets are ants next to him, and he's shown to have power to annihilate entire galaxies. For the most part, stories need some kind of plot device like the Odinsleep to keep him out.
    • The Silver Age took the Odinsleep exemption and instantly drove it into "bad joke" territory; throughout the 60s and into the 70s, Odin putting his head down for a restorative nap was practically guaranteed to bring on a "destroy Asgard"-level threat.
  • Surtur is one of the few villains Odin is allowed to fight against. One of his first attacks was destroying a galaxy, and it was done to re-forge his magic sword.
• In The New Universe, there was the Star Brand, a mysterious power that can do anything, can regenerate from virtually nothing and has the potential to do bad things when mishandled. When the power was brought over along with the rest of that universe's Earth into the Marvel-616 universe, the Living Tribunal erected an impenetrable barrier because a power like that would upset the cosmic balance irreversibly. When the Star Brand made its official first appearance during Jonathan Hickman's Avengers run, that power was toned down considerably.
• His name is The Sentry. He may be the Angel of Death (it's implied he was the one who caused the Plagues of Egypt). He was used by Norman Osborn on the Dark Avengers team because he has Story Breaker Power. After an intense, multi-issue battle with the Hand in Japan in New Avengers, Spider-Man points out that the fight would've been over in five seconds had the Sentry been there to help. Severe mental illnesses kept him from doing too much until his death.
• Spider-Man:
  • A mundane street-level example would be Spider-sense: while having the ability to sense an incoming attack before it actually happens is definitely on the low end compared to other examples on this list, in practice it should make Spider-Man practically untouchable for other beings in his weight class, and should even be be capable of countering a wide variety of superpowers such as Super-Speed and invisibility. When Spidey put in some time to learn actual martial arts after losing his Spider Sense (as a result of being so utterly dependent on it) and then regains it, Iron Fist basically says Spider-Man should be practically invincible in hand-to-hand combat. And that's not even getting into the wide variety of non-combat applications Peter can use it for whenever the writer feels like it, such as being a living lie detector or a one-man tracking machine. It's probably chief on the list of Powers Writers Forget About A Lot.
  • The Clone Saga had a habit of introducing these, including Judas Traveller, a Reality Warper, Scrier, who appeared to be omnipresent, and Spidercide, who had Voluntary Shapeshifting on such a level that he could turn his entire body into liquid. None of these characters are in anything resembling Spider-Man's weight class, and it proved so difficult to write around that the comic ultimately gave a rather unconvincing retcon to the former two and killed off the latter in a way that made very little sense.
  • On the subject of street-level superheroism, Symbiotes are likewise way too overpowered for a regular Spider-Man story and unless their Kryptonite Factor gets brought up Spider-Man almost never manages to defeat Venom/Carnage solo. In fact, Venom, Carnage, and Toxin in particular are usually only one Next Tier Powerup away from being in the overall Marvel Universe's heavyweight class, as Absolute Carnage and the Red Goblin Arc can attest.
  • Spider-Verse has a Spidey that was still fused to the Enigma Force, still allowing him to be Captain Universe. Consequently, he should be able to end the saga by going over and flash-frying Morlun and his kin. When our Spidey asks him why he just doesn't do that, that Spidey says that he can't, as the Enigma Force can only stay at that universe. On the plus side, though, that means Morlun and the others can't waltz in without risking getting flash-fried by Cosmic Spidey... only they did, and promptly murdered him. Miles Morales realizes that Cosmic Spidey was playing too close once they need to bring out Captain Universe again in Spider-Geddon.
  • This single-universe loophole has been deployed a lot in 21st-century Marvel comics to limit story-breaking widgets. When Jonathan Hickman started throwing around multiple Infinity Gauntlets in his Fantastic Four run, this was a major constraint on them: They were only empowered in their home universes, limiting their usefulness on the multiversal scale Hickman's FF operated on.
• On the subject of Captain Universe, the Uni-Power is a powerful cosmic force that grants a person its bonded to incredible power. However, it only shows up when a terrible threat appears and leaves once it's gone. In Spider-Geddon, it proceeds to chew out the Spiders for calling him in as it was felt that it was beneath him. Miles Morales put him in his place, though.
• When Thanos acquired The Infinity Gauntlet with all six Infinity Gems he gained absolute control over past, present and future, bent reality to his will, could exist in any location and to move any object, could steal and control souls of both living and dead, had the most powerful Telepathy in the Universe and gained access to every source of power that ever existed or will exist. There was nothing that could defeat him, neither Marvel's greatest superheroes, Death, Mephisto or all-powerful cosmic gods, including The Eternity, who is the Anthropomorphic Personification of the Universe itself. The main reason Thanos ultimately lost in the end was because the Gauntlet made him too powerful meaning he could not be with his beloved Death since he was so far above her. The Heart of the Universe from Marvel Universe: The End is basically the same thing only on a multiversal scale, enabling him to defeat every single being in the Marvel Universe, culminating in thwarting the second biggest one of them all, The Living Tribunal (who was more powerful than the complete Infinity Gauntlet). After defeating the Living Tribunal however, he realises THE biggest one of them all, The One Above All, is still infinitely more powerful than him, and TOAA has completely out-gambitted Thanos into recreating the entire Multiverse, but with a few flaws removed.
• X-Men:
  • Professor Charles Xavier is the most powerful psychic in the world. By rights, any problems the X-Men face should be dealt with at the speed of thought. As a result, most of the major plotlines the team faces start with either a Deus Exit Machina or a lecture on Mind over Manners. There's also a vast array of anti-telepathy technology that will pop up whenever the plot demands it; at one point a high-schooler built an anti-telepathy helmet using plans he downloaded off the internet, then beat up Xavier with a baseball bat. It wasn't one of the Professor's finer moments. In fact, Professor X is so prone to having his telepathy instantly shut down that his status as "World's Most Powerful Telepath" is something of an Informed Attribute.
  • One of the reasons Phoenix hasn't been revived is because her canonically godlike abilities and strong friendships with her team would easily end the 'Wolverine vs. Cyclops civil war' that the writers seem intent on following. It's stated, in-universe, that the only reason they're fighting is because she's no longer there to mediate between them! Indeed, only a few years after both Cyclops and Wolverine were Killed Off for Real (supposedly) a storyline focusing on the resurrection of Jean Grey popped up — after the character being dead for almost 15 years.
  • Scarlet Witch's reality bending powers are considered way over the top. Once she remade the universe into the House of M and depowered 90% of the mutant population, so they had to nerf her down to the point she can't handle the Phoenix Force during Avengers vs. X-Men. This is somewhat justified, as her powers originally weren't nearly so story-breaking, and were only made so in the 2000s as a blatant excuse to transform her from a character into a Plot Device. In fact, Avengers: The Children's Crusade retconned that her powers only got so strong due to Wanda getting possessed by a cosmic entity as part of a Doctor Doom plot, though subsequent writers rarely bring that up.
  • On the villainous side of things, there's Exodus, one of the few psychics on Earth who can hold his own against Professor X, in addition to wielding telekinesis at such an advanced level that it practically makes him a Reality Warper. He's also immortal, a teleporter, can bring people back from the dead and... yeah, perhaps it's sinking in now why he's one of the more infrequently used X-villains. His initial affiliation was with Magneto, who was very quickly incapacitated by way of a psychic lobotomy because, duh, if the X-Men ever had to contend with the two of them at once they'd be annihilated.
  • Nate Grey the X-Man is one of the few mutants alive who can boast power levels surpassing both Exodus and Xavier, and has been compared at his full power to not just Phoenix but Dark Phoenix. Essentially Cable without the crippling T-O virus that constantly keeps that character's powers in check, Nate might boast the comic book world record for the most instances of being De Powered, with most of them occurring over the course of his 1995-2001 title (where the writers clearly struggled to find ways to write stories for such a powerful character without resorting to the depowering gimmick). He was killed off for several years, then brought back in Dark X-Men, imprisoned for a little while, and finally brought back as part of the New Mutants, albeit at power levels far below his usual standard, but apparently even that wasn't enough to make writers feel comfortable with him as he was promptly shuttled off to Comic-Book Limbo not long after. He came back again in Uncanny X-Men (2018) after 6 years in Comic-Book Limbo with only intermittent flashback appearances, with his powers back and then some... as a villain, specifically, the Big Bad of the X-Men Disassembled arc and the subsequent Age of X-Man event, albeit one who was genuinely trying to do the right thing. At the end of it all, Nate was once more Put on a Bus, planning on rebuilding his pocket reality while everyone save Magneto thought him dead.
  • Darwin has the power of spontaneous mutations that allow him to adapt to any immediate threat, effectively giving him Complete Immortality. The only downsides are that his mutations are primarily defensive (meaning he can't necessarily use them to win fights,) and he has no real control over how his body adapts (one famous moment in World War Hulk has him square up against the Hulk...only to spontaneously teleport three states away, stating, "Apparently, the best defense against the Hulk is to not be anywhere near him.").
  • Rachel Summers is conspicuously absent from most of mega-events. Since an Omega-level psychic with full control over the Phoenix Force would solve any conflict very, very quickly, the writers constantly come up with excuses for sidelining her.
  • Xi'an Coy Manh suffers from this—since she can possess people, she usually either ends up knocked out of commission or otherwise sidelined, because "Xi'an possessed the bad guy and solved this in two pages" isn't very interesting. Writers often try to mitigate this by having Xi'an limit herself out of conscience (yes, she could make someone jump off a building, but she couldn't live with herself afterwards) or expanding her powerset to give her something else to do.

Other

• Amulet has Trellis's overly-powered barrier. It's so durable that it survives a high altitude impact that pretty much destroys a large surface with Trellis who doesn't even look strained. Heck, it can even be used as an improvised submarine to escape the Nexus.
• Black Moon Chronicles: Wismerhill is perhaps a bit too powerful by the time of the second story arc on Terra Secunda where he's a God-Emperor. While his conflict with the Black Moon took years to unfold and finally killing Haazheel required immense effort and the help of all his allies, every conflict on Terra Secunda is resolved rather quickly with Wismerhill smashing Lucifer's demonic army, then smashing the Ophidian Army and kidnapping the Emperor with little effort, and then easily thwarting a second demonic invasion because his friendship with the new god pretty much gives him a Deus ex Machina who does house calls.
• Disney comics:
  • Super Goof, that is, Goofy with Superman's powers. There's a reason he's rarely used in serious stories, even with him being saddled by two Drama Preserving Handicaps (namely, his powers coming from special peanuts that have a time limit, and being Goofy). Ultraheroes is one of the few times he appears in a serious story, and in his first battle in the second chapter he quickly inflicts a Curb-Stomp Battle to the mightiest of the villains. He's quickly saddled with another Drama-Preserving Handicap by Gus wolfing down his peanuts to keep him out of the way until the final showdown, when there's finally someone who can fight him.
  • Paperinik New Adventures has Xadhoom, who is a Physical Goddess who can hear radio signals, travel faster than light, can produce any form of energy with enough power to blow up planets, and, being an Energy Being, is effectively invulnerable and immortal (hitting her with enough kinetic or gravitational energy will knock her out, but it takes a lot of kinetic or gravitational energy and she'll recover quick enough). And that's her being Willfully Weak (as using her true power would mean a loss of self-control and death by Phlebotinum Overload): with her true power she could easily wipe out the universe with a gesture and then remake it. To hamper her, the writers tended to put her into situations where she couldn't go even halfway to her self-imposed limits (as she's sensible to collateral damage, thus she won't use so much energy to kill innocents) and made her enemies Gadgeteer Geniuses who are smart enough they have found two different working methods to contain or kill her (maybe three, but the third one relied on tricking her into wearing the helmet containing the device and she saw through it so we don't see if it could have worked).
  • Also from Paperinik New Adventures we have Moldrock, a Physical God who is flat-out stated to be the mightiest enemy Paperinik has ever faced or will ever face. In his first appearance Paperinik can fight him due him being severely weakened while inside the dimension he was imprisoned in, but in his second appearance he had broken out and had the time to partially recharge his powers, and no matter what, Paperinik can't even scratch him. In his third appearance he's had even more time to recharge him powers, and is so strong to single-handedly conquer planet Corona with ease, so powerful that Paperinik successfully knocking him out is treated with shock by everyone, Paperinik included (he had intended to use a one-time power up to stun him long enough for the rest of the group to escape).
• Dylan Dog: Kim, a young Hot Witch who falls in love with Dylan, was Put on a Bus because her powers could solve almost anything. To say nothing of her cat Cagliostro, who is even more powerful.
• In Irredeemable it turns out the Plutonian has absolute-level manipulation of reality. The people who know have (reasonably) decided that the knowledge of the full extent of power must at all costs be kept from them so to stop Go Mad from the Revelation. Did we mention he learns of his power in the last two issues?
• Jerom, a friendly thawed caveman from the Flemish Suske en Wiske series has Super-Strength, is Nigh-Invulnerable and also appears to be highly intelligent. Since he is the only character in the series with this amount of power, he usually solves the plot whenever he gets involved. Therefore, writers almost always think of ways to put him on a bus or incapacitate him in another way. Otherwise, the story would be over before it even started.