Improbable Aiming Skills/Comic Books

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Examples of Improbable Aiming Skills in Comic Books include:

  • Bullseye, the Psycho for Hire Career Killer who serves as the Arch Nemesis to Daredevil, who mixes this with a physics-defying ability to propel projectiles to turn a variety of mundane household objects into Improvised Weapons. Among the objects Bullseye has used to kill people: paperclips, playing cards, golf balls, orange pits, a ballpoint pen, a toothpick, a salted peanut, and one of his own teeth. He rarely stoops so low as to use an actual gun.
    • Taking it Up to Eleven, one comic has him saying that the prison he's in has him on stool softeners and a liquid diet for fear that if he has a solid BM, he'll weaponize that. And he would, too.
    • Putting this through Serial Escalation to make a Moment of Awesome is a two-part mini-series called Bullseye: Perfect Game. The series revolves around the fact that Bullseye is so bored, he takes an entire year off to kill one guy in the most spectacular fashion possible. The target is a baseball player, so Bullseye becomes a pitcher. When their teams face off, Bullseye creates a perfect game, by clipping his own team beforehand, from throwing a speck of dirt into an eye to cause an infection to killing someone with a thrown battery, and striking out every batter so the score is 0 to 0 in the last inning, with his target about to strike out. Too bad the umpire called the last pitch a ball.
    • In the film, he goes after Daredevil because he made him miss.
  • There are two Lanterns that top him. Bedovian, a Yellow Lantern and John Stewart, a Green Lantern. The two of them are capable of sniping each other from three space sectors away. Just to give you an idea of how big a sector is, the entire universe is divided into 3600 sectors by the Green Lantern Corps. A conservative estimate would put the size of a sector in the several hundreds of thousands of lightyears.
    • Stewart and Bedovian weren't necessarily hundreds of thousands of light years away from each other in that instance. The space sectors into which the universe is divided are wedges, with each wedge narrowing as one approaches Oa, the center of the universe. Thus, the closer one gets to Oa, the less distance one has to travel to cross any three sectors. At the time of the sniping incident, Stewart was on or very close to Oa and, if Bedovian was also fairly close to Oa, they may have been shooting across three sectors without being all that far from each other(while not quite as incredible, the distance would still be pretty impressive).
  • While all The Minutemen from One Hundred Bullets wield handguns with deadly accuracy; Minuteman Willie Tymes never misses. His fellow agents gave him a nickname "My first shot is my last."
    • That's a really awkward nickname.
  • Lucky Luke is the quintessential Wild West example. He can shoot off the firing pin of a derringer tinier than a pinky—and do so faster than his shadow. There are other occasions of improbable aiming in the comics—in one instance, two Dalton brothers shoot two bullets at each other that collide with each other half-way between them.
    • Note that Lucky Luke is a parody of Western heroes, so his speed and aim are meant to be impossibly amazing, just like the bad guys are meant to be improbably stupid.
  • From both The DCU and Marvel comics, self-trained superhero archers Green Arrow and Hawkeye, and their families of characters, can ricochet arrows off walls and into targets. And that's not even getting into "boxing glove arrows", "bomb arrows", "net arrows" or "cat arrows" (don't ask). They have, at times, been depicted as so implausibly good, some people theorize that they actually have psychokinesis and are simply using it to show off by making it look like they're the world's greatest archers. The fact that the artists and writers of their titles usually don't do very much research into how archers actually even hold their bows drives it home for a lot of people.
    • In The Dark Knight Returns, Green Arrow has lost an arm and still manages to be a crackshot.
      • Green Arrow once lost both arms (he got better) and still managed to pull off a shot by bracing the bow with his feet and pulling the arrow back with his teeth.
        • Although, it must be remembered that the footbow does exist, and, indeed, the longest arrow flight world record was set in 1979 with a footbow—2009 yards and a bit. It is even possible to hit targets with some reliability with one.
    • In Marvel's Ultimate universe, Hawkeye is an expert marksman who chooses to use a bow because of the challenge. He was shown to be deadly with anything he could throw, even killing a room full of armed guards while strapped down to a chair by flicking his fingernails. (He did mention at some point that it was not only practice, but that his vision was artificially enhanced.)
      • At one point he runs out of arrows and starts shooting piece of rebar at people. It's such typical behavior that no one even mentions it.
    • The main universe Hawkeye, in the new Hawkeye And Mockingbird series, fired three Pym Particle arrows - arrows whose heads were capsules filled with dozens of toothpick-sized arrows that were treated with the chemical Ant-Man uses to get bigger/smaller. When they deployed and expanded, the thugs they were facing got to fight in the shade. Every single one was taken down non-fatally. Hawkeye simply said he never hits what he wasn't aiming for. Did I mention this was during a motorcycle chase?
    • Not to mention in the alternate future Old Man Logan, where Hawkeye is blind, yet just as good, managing to get three gangsters in the mouth with three arrows just by listening to where they are.
  • In the Sin City story Hell and Back, a sniper has a rifle with telescopic sights mounted on a tripod. He misses, the good guy, Wallace, returns fire, across a street, into a darkened building with a short-barreled revolver. His bullet goes down the telescopic sight and through the snipers eye into his brain.
    • Both Sin City and The Badger have featured a character throwing an object with such accuracy that it plugs the barrel of an enemy's gun. What wouldn't a darts player give to be able to throw like that?
    • Daredevil has also done the plugging-a-gun (and surely Bullseye too, though I can't think of any specific examples). Frank Miller really likes these feats, doesn't he?
  • Allan Quartermain gained access to The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen mostly by virtue of his Improbable Aiming Skills. At least he's got the good grace to use a rifle. The film version did, at least; in the comic, Allan is considered valuable for his experience in adventuring more than anything else, and his signature weapon is an elephant gun and, later, a custom-made double-barreled shotgun—firearms that are very hard to miss with.
    • In the film, he also manages to teach Tom Sawyer to shoot just as accurately, which proves useful in taking out the Big Bad. Interestingly, the film also shows that Quartermain's vision isn't what it used to be. He needs glasses, but can still shoot just as precisely.
  • The Saint of Killers from Preacher has magical (they were made from the sword of the Angel of Death) revolvers that cannot miss, never run out of bullets, never jam, never inflict anything less than a fatal wound, and can be drawn faster than the eye can see. Given that he's also completely invulnerable, getting on his bad side (or, for that matter, getting close to him) is not recommended. In the final issue he kills God with his guns
  • Lightly used in Usagi Yojimbo: at a carnival, samurai Usagi cannot hit a target while Rich Bitch turned Defrosting Ice Queen Kiku gets a bull's eye on her first try. She explains that she "just aimed everywhere except the target."
  • Deadshot, a gun-wielding assassin and sometime Heroic Sociopath from The DCU, has a long-standing reputation for never missing his shot (unless he happens to be aiming at Batman). In a recent miniseries, he took out six targets scattered around a room while blindfolded.
    • Earlier in the same series, he failed to shoot a target in the bullseye while blindfolded...because Captain Boomerang Jr. had hit all his bullets in mid-air, using bent paperclips. (Admittedly using Super Speed, but still).
    • One of the only times Deadshot did miss, it was in his youth, a tree branch he was standing on snapped under him, and what should have been a disarming shot became a kill shot. The person he unintentionally killed was his beloved older brother.
  • In The Outsiders, while in a prison riot, Captain Boomerang Jr. had grabbed and thrown something, bouncing it off the walls, to hit and knock out a fellow prisoner.
  • Superman, in one comic, pretends to be a villain named the Golden Dart, kidnaps Lois Lane, and throws darts at her. His Improbable Aiming Skills allow him to keep himself from hitting Lois, instead missing her by "scant inches".
    • To be fair, it's Superman... he could just put the darts there while we blink...
  • Kid Twist, a particularly slimy individual from Joss Whedon's run on Runaways, has this as a power: once he sets eyes on a target, he never misses. This includes casually firing his gun behind him, and having the bullet turn corners.
  • In an early issue of Cable & Deadpool, while Wade (Deadpool) is casually conversing with Nate (Cable) about how he no longer feels the urge to kill, he rolls a pebble around between his fingers. When Nate's not looking, he lets it fly and nails a dragonfly so that the pebble knocks the body dead-center, leaving the wings on either side. (Really.)
  • The Archer Strongbow of Elf Quest never misses, to the point that when he does it's an obvious sign that he's in a bad way psychologically. And shortly after recovering from that, he gets the ability to hit a target without evening seeing it, though he's assumed to owe that to magical help.
  • Since Cyclops of the X-Men is using Eye Beams, you'd expect him to have very little trouble hitting whatever he can see. That doesn't explain his ability to pull off such shots as precision-stunning Professor X after ricocheting the beam around three corners or destroying six fast-moving targets, at least two of them behind him, with a single shot.
    • It's been officially stated that Cyclops's mutant ability includes an intuitive knowledge of how to ricochet his own optic blasts.
    • In old comics, this was attributed to his spending most of his training time in the Danger Room practicing how to pull off ricochets and other trick shots with his eyebeam. It even joked that he's one hell of a pool player.
    • The X-Men Noir series recasts him as an ace gunman, thus having him play out a more typical version of this trope. Not only that, but he's an actual Cyclops, sporting a possibly blind, possibly glass left eye.
  • Kris de Valnor from Thorgal is reputed as a deadly archer and proves it many times through the series. However, Thorgal himself can top her feats when pressed. In one instance he won a Duel to the Death by firing two arrows at once. One of them hit the villain while the other collided with his crossbow bolt in mid-air.
  • Arrowette of Young Justice, who is probably not a member of the Green Arrow Clan, was once shown having a conversation with her mother (the first Arrowette) while playing darts. The camera pans back to show a line of darts driven into each other point to tail, Robin Hood style, from the first, dead center on the target. The ladies decide they really need to find a different game to compete with.
  • In a Donald Duck classic, one of the nephews manages to deflect Donald's golf ball into a hole-in-one by rapidly firing several shots at it. With a toy airgun. Which he just happened to have with him. To the golf course.
  • Wolverine has demonstrated this by first throwing a dart, and hitting a perfect bullseye, turning away from the dartboard and sitting down at a table, throwing his remaining two darts behind his shoulder, where they both managed to hit the bullseye as well. When challenged to get 3 bullseyes again, he stood up and stacked the darts on each other. He has also thrown a katana with his left hand (he's right handed) at an attacking stuka plane, hit the pilot in his side, causing him to crash and burn. He has said that he can put six shots through a quarter, and still have change left for a gum machine.
  • And, of course, there's Captain America's ability in throwing his shield to hit multiple targets by means of ricocheting, and still come back to his grasp.
    • Though, in early issues of the Avengers, the "coming back" part was explained by little magnets on the shield and on his gloves!
    • This was later retconned into simply being the product of lots and lots of practice; when John Walker was brought in to replace him as Captain America, it took weeks of training with the Taskmaster for him to even be able to throw it reliably; he never figured out how to get it to ricochet or hit multiple targets or come back to him after being thrown.
    • The only other person who could match Steve's ability with the shield including the ricocheting was the previously mentioned Hawkeye.
  • 52: The Great Ten's Celestial Archer is capable of freaking ridiculous feats with this. He can shoot out the sun and hit a target on the other side of the world. In his defense, his bow is a weapon of the gods and thus is inherently capable of doing that kind of thing.
  • In his first appearance in the pages of JLA, the villain Prometheus fired a bullet at Catwoman from one of his gauntlet-guns. The Huntress shot the bullet out of midair with a crossbow bolt. This is a woman who, when introduced, was just a schoolteacher who worked out a lot.
  • In Wanted, the Killer, who is clearly a Captain Ersatz of Bullseye and Deadshot, is so great a shot that he decides to pack it in the first time he misses a target from less than a half-mile away. His son, Wesley, inherits the power, which allows him to shoot flies out of midair, deflect bullets with a knife, and shoot people between the eyes without looking at them.
  • Speaking of flies, in an early episode of Usagi Yojimbo, the hero is attacked by a ruffian who is so dirty that flies swarm around him. That is, before the attack. A second's worth of flashing steel later all the flies are lying on the floor, split in half. Except for the last one that's been filleted.
  • Jeremy from Zits once gets really, really, lucky in a story arc involving him making a twice-in-a-lifetime, back-handed-courtlong-backwards-eyes-closed shot in a game of HORSE with his friend, Hector. Of course, the jury's out at the end of the story on whether the shot counts if the ball goes through their neighbor's driveway's hoop instead of their own...
  • Former Green Arrow sidekick Roy Harper, aka Speedy aka Arsenal aka Red Arrow aka Arsenal again, boasts that he never misses—boasts that he can back up. During the Rise of Arsenal storyline, Roy, in a fit of rage, stricken with grief, addled with drugs, and handicapped by his unfamiliar cybernetic arm, breaks his bow, throws it at a bullseye -- and hits it dead center. Even when doped up, handicapped, and mentally unbalanced, he never misses.
  • Resident Action Girl Dani Moonstar of the series New Mutants. Doubles as a Crowning Moment of Awesome—with her arm broken, she uses her one good hand and her FOOT to shoot her tormentor in the throat with an arrow.
  • Oxbow from Marvel: The Lost Generation is capable of hitting his target every time - including the time he went to the moon, where it took him exactly one arrow to get accustomed to the different gravity!
  • Best Tiger, a new member of Image Comics' Guardians of the Globe, is by a wide margin the greatest marksman to ever live. Which is why he wears a blindfold so his work will remain challenging. He is introduced using a single bullet to take out several dozen men via ricochet; he intentionally inflicted superficial yet disabling wounds so the bullet would be able to keep up its momentum.
  • DV8 once contended with a mercenary calling himself Dirge. When Dirge first met Frostbite, he bragged that he once shot nine teeth out of a man's head in nine different shots without hurting him otherwise. The tenth shot killed him, but it wasn't Dirge's fault the guy couldn't keep still.
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