Popularity Power/Comic Books: Difference between revisions

*** During the 90s, Cap had an encounter with a few of the X-Men in a scuffle which saw him getting frozen from the waist down by Iceman. The move did ''not'' stop Captain America on his tracks. He then somersaulted across the air and knocked Iceman out ''while his entire lower body was frozen'', meaning that he shouldn't even have the kind of momentum to pull off such a move. Not only that, he effortlessly beat the crap out of Beast. To make things clear, Hank McCoy is no Hulk or Thor, but he's still a highly dangerous mutant who possesses strength, speed, and agility far better than the best of Olympic athletes AND he can lift well over thirty tons. That didn't stop the Cap from making short work of him.

** Cap himself puts it best in Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2:

** [[Civil War]] at least is fair about about it. [[Iron Man]] always wipes the floor with Cap in their various duels, causing him to need rescue by more powerful allies, unless Cap cheats by shorting out his armor in which case [[Iron Man]] is basically helpless to do anything but lie there and eat shield, not really making Cap look all that powerful.

*** Civil War also had Captain America defeat Spider-man, and Spidey offers a debatable justtification for it.. Captain America, in canon, is one of the most experienced superhero on the planet. "There is no 'next move' to read, for him, it's all one long move from start to finish, he has it all planed out in advance while you're still trying to react to his last blow."

*** And in the storyline immediately ''after'' the Firelord/Spidey fight -- and we mean immediately after, as in the very same day -- Firelord got smacked by the full power of the Sanctuary II battlestation, which had just finished spanking ''the entire Skrull Armada''. Firelord was blasted all the way across the solar system and headfirst into a moon at relativistic velocities... and ''got up out of the smoking crater, staggered a short way, and only then collapsed unconscious''. So, Spidey's fist > Death Star level firepower and near-lightspeed collisions with celestial bodies.

** Said incident was even mocked by Spidey himself in ''[[Marvel Ultimate Alliance]] 2'', assuming you play as him during the endgame.

* For [[Wolverine]], take for example ''[[wikipedia:Marvel vs DC|Marvel vs. DC/DC vs. Marvel]]'' comics, which was literally one big popularity contest. One issue had a scene in which Wolverine is able to make short work of Lobo, an alien being that gave Superman a run for his money and destroyed an entire planet, in less than four panels, simply because polls showed that his stats were higher that week. Moreover, both of them have regenerative healing, but Lobo is able to regenerate his entire body [[From a Single Cell]] if his entire body is destroyed. The best part? The final blow of the fight [[Offscreen Moment of Awesome|took place off-panel]], because, apparently, ''even the writers'' couldn't figure out how Wolverine could possibly win.

** According to Stan Lee the "single panel" part is a [[Coconut Superpowers]] moment...the polls were held close enough to the publication of the DC vs. Marvel volumes that most of the comics had to be drawn before the polls were finished. The result was drawing all the fights such that they could easily go either way until the very end.

** This is helped along by those writers who dislike the idea of a joke character winning against people who outclass her. Those writers invent [[Retcon|Ret Cons]] or [[Hand Wave]] the victory away... and the rest of the writers have her beat up someone bigger instead.

** As her squirrel companion Tippy-Toe once pointed out in a [[Breaking the Fourth Wall]] address to fans who reacted more humourlessly to her tendency to defeat Dr. Doom:

* A notable aversion came in one of the DC/Marvel crossovers, when the JLA went up against the X-Men. Batman, the most popularity-powered character of them all, sprang a surprise attack on Cyclops who, while he has plenty of fans, also attracts more hate than probably any other X-Man (with the possible exception of Gambit). Guess which one got taken down.

* In ''[[Fables]]'' this is one speculated source of the eponymus Fables' powers. The more popular the story about a Fable is, the more powerful they are. For example, Snow White recovered from a sniper's bullet to the skull--her sister Rose Red might not have survived since most people have forgotten her part of the fairytale-- Frau Totenkinder is one of the most powerful Fables in existance because she is every anonymous witch in folklore, and Goldilocks raises this to a level bordering on [[Blessed with Suck]] {{spoiler|when she discovers she can't heal any faster than the fish are eating her.}}