Idiot Ball/Comic Books

Examples of Idiot Ball in Comic Books.

The "One More Day" storyline in Spider-Man sees Peter Parker doing the Atlas gig with an Idiot Ball of truly gargantuan proportions. Making a deal with the closest analogue to a devil Marvel possesses to save the life of his already elderly aunt, at the expense of not only his current marriage, but the entire history of that marriage? Quite possibly the first example of stuffing someone in the fridge but leaving them alive to taunt the audience. This is even worse when you consider the number of readily available contacts the man had with spells, technology, and/or mutant powers that would put her together as good as or even better than new with minimal effort.
- Parker supposedly went to those contacts, but it was shown that all of those people couldn't help him. That means guys who could take a left arm, brain, and half a heart and rebuild a person from those pieces couldn't heal a gunshot wound. Tony Stark, a man without any real medical knowledge, managed to build a super pacemaker IN A CAVE! WITH A BOX OF SCRAPS!, but there was no one who could take care of a simple gunshot wound. This wasn't an idiot ball, this was a galactic-scale Idiot Plot.
  - It was stated (exactly once, probably in an attempt at an Author's Saving Throw) that by the time Peter started making the rounds looking for help, May was already brain dead. There was, for all intents and purposes, no one left to save. Still doesn't explain why none of Spidey's allies stepped up to offer assistance when word got out.
  - Especially when you consider that Reed Richards of the Fantastic Four once built a portal to heaven and accosted God-Mode Jack Kirby to get Benjamin Grimm back from the dead.
    - Not to mention the sort of things that Elixir, Dr. Strange, and Victor von Doom have been able to pull off. Seriously, so long as the molecules of Aunt May's corpse were still largely in the same 10-foot square, things could have been done.
- Most of them, especially Doctor Strange, spouted some vague Obstructive Code of Conduct stuff to refuse helping (never mind how each is perfectly willing to spank reality whenever convenient). At least they offered the good advice that Peter should let his worries go and just enjoy his last day with his aunt. Sadly, despite the entire universe telling him this is a bad idea, Joe -- I mean Peter couldn't stand to see his mother figure die because of his enemies.
- The guy's also best friends with most of the X-Men, who have on their team an Omega-class mutant(Elixir) who was able to bring Shadowcat, Colossus, and several other mutants back from total death. What keeps him from bringing May back? Um...
Spider-Man has a mental alarm that tells him when he's in danger. For some reason he doesn't try to protect himself when it goes off, in fact he's done things like stand around and say: "That's funny, my spider-sense if going off. But that only happens when I'm in danger."
- It was explained in 90s that sometimes Peter does not know why his spider-sense is tingling. The explanation showed a man with a hidden gun. Peter knew that man is a danger but was not sure why as the man was just walking on the street.
- Which is, quite frankly, Ass Pull bulls&@*. Peter as demonstrated on countless occasions the ability to use his Spider-sense to detect and react instantly to attacks from people sneaking up behind him, from above or below, in the dark, (even when there's no actual threat, he's even darkened an area deliberately to take advantage of his Spider-Sense a few times) when he's been blinded, when his eyes are closed, when hit with smokescreens. while stunned or knocked unconscious... Every time he's known about and reacted to threats he couldn't possibly have really known the source of.
  - To be fair, one of the things the Spider-Sense is historically bad at dealing with is multiple simultaneous sources of potential danger. Also, if Spidey is particularly fatigued or emotionally distracted, he has had problems regarding signal reception.
X-Men: Xavier excusing Emma trying to mentally seduce Scott while she was treating him. As one who believes so strongly in his ethics, he would not have stood for that. He would have thrown her out, regardless of whether anything physical occurred. It's not as though Xavier never misused his power, but he still has standards (but now writers are trying to Retcon those standards away).
There was a villain who blamed Max Mercury for the death of his family, gained access to a time machine, and used it to try and destroy Max Mercury. He was temporarily incapacitated with horror when asked why he hadn't used it to save his family.
Superman and the Flash are probably the heroes most prone to these, given that one has ridiculously powerful Combo-Platter Powers, and the other has the ability to move at several hundred times the speed of light without breaking a sweat, and drain time and perception of time out of things.
- "What's that you say? Villains including a man who can absorb powers through touch, a woman who can turn into electricity on a whim, and a man powered by Kryptonite, my greatest weakness, are all after me? I'm gonna go punch 'em!"
Comics blog Polite Dissent refers to this phenomenon as ONISGS ("Oh No, I Suddenly Got Stupid!")
Teen Titans: Raven makes constant dives for the Idiot Ball. The first time, chronologically, was when she saved Kid Flash from committing suicide via freezing to death in the Himalayas (points for creativity, Wally). She thought the best way to save his life was to make him fall in love with her using magic and then using the same magic to make him forget she did it. He went on with his life thinking she made him fall in love with her to get him on the team, not to save his life. Smooth move, Raven.
- Not only that, after realizing what a mistake it was to hide Trigon's existence from the Titans, what did Raven do when she sensed Trigon would attack a second time? Confided the information with no one, not even her best friend. Needless to say, that didn't work out.
Uncle Scrooge is usually portrayed as one of the smartest people in Duckburg, but there are two recurring situations where he tend to behave incredibly stupid: He is usually unable to see through the Beagle Boys' Paper Thin Disguises, and he never has the common sense to be suspicious whenever he's offered something for free.
All-Star JSA Cyclone. Little Maxine Hunkel seems to have no idea that she should use her powers in combat these days. All she ever does in a fight is freeze up and scream for help. And this is not against extradimensional horrors or powerful supervillains but against petty mooks the rest of the JSA are clobbering without breaking a sweat. She should be standing in the middle of a screaming tornado with mooks being flung through the air, but instead hunches up and whimpers as they move in for the kill.
Thor, ever since Odin died, has made some very stupid decisions. He became king and every decision he has made has led Asgard from bad to worse. First, there was the Regining and trusting Loki, but this can be excused by having part of him split off. Since his return he placed the Asgardians on Earth without giving them guidance on how to interact with it, flew off to have adventures avoiding his kingly duties, did not point out his killing of his grand-father Bor was self-defense and he had no way to recognize him since Bor had been thought dead for thousands of years, using up the last of the omnipotent Odinpower to revive Sif instead of restoring said power leaving Asgard vulnerable, acting surprised when Osborn attacked during SIEGE, and now somehow moving the city of Asgard to Earth is the equivalent to moving the dimension so the entire cosmos is out of whack letting in interdimensional invaders. Balder has had his fair share too by not getting informed about what Doom was all about, not expecting retaliation for SIEGE, and exiling Thor in the first place. Oh, both also decided it was a good idea to once again trust Loki despite suspecting him being up to something and with the whole trying to kill them both and rule Asgard for the past thousand years. To be fair Balder has realized he has been an idiot and called himself out on it.
- Brash thinking is exactly what brought Thor on Earth first time: cultivating humanity cured him of his massive ego (the "Reigning" Thor, devoid of his human side, reverted quickly to a massive jerk, hinted to be no more worthy of Mjollnir until "The Reason You Suck" Speech), but still may not be enough to turn Thor into a leader. Odin is a leader, Thor is a warrior. The two things rarely come into the same being.
- Lampshaded during Fear Itself: Odin himself chides Thor's heroic optimism in thinking he could save Earth and Asgard by simply charging at the Serpent and punching him really hard, but admires his selflessness and bravery, deciding to keep putting Asgard first anyways, but letting Thor know how proud he is.
One Super Mario Bros. story in the Nintendo Comics System involved an actual Idiot Ball, the Stupid Bomb. Anyone caught in its blast radius would be temporarily rendered mind-blowingly stupid (Save King Toadstool, who's already at the bottom of the IQ ladder as it is). By the end of the story, almost everyone (Good, bad) is made an idiot. The antidote for the Stupid Bomb was the Smart Bomb, but they were all used up making one lone Snifit smart enough to dethrone Bowser and take over- luckily, with the rest of Koopa's army dumbed down, he couldn't do anything.
Identity Crisis hinges on "The World's Greatest Detective" and countless others not checking phone records of the deceased.
In X-Men vs. Avengers (the first one), the Supreme Soviets get an epic idiot ball moment. If your available assets were a mildly-enhanced super-soldier wielding metal melee weapons (Vanguard), two guys in metal power-armor (the Crimson Dynamo and the Gremlin), and one guy who turns into a bear (Ursa Major), would... okay, by now you've noticed the recurring use of the word "metal" and remembered what trope page you're on and deduced they made a run at Magneto. You're right, they did. And it went exactly how you'd expect.
- But they were still tactical geniuses compared to the Stereotypical Evil Government Agents in a later issue of that limited series. 'All right, we're half a dozen normal humans with submachine guns and we just booted a door and found the room full of mutant women and children! Quick! Machine-gun the entire crowd before any of them can use their freak powers on us!' 'What about that old guy in the corner with the purple bucket on his head?' 'Eh, he's probably nobody'. Really. Fortunately for them, this was one of Erik's "face turn" months so they actually survived. Barely.