It can be a bitch to write for some of these one dimensional characters, and that has often forced comic writers to paint themselves into corners. How do you come up with a conflict for a guy who can travel through time, can move planets from their orbits, and is a total goody-two-shoes?
You have to place him in an alternate existence; find out ways to flip him to the evil side; place him where there’s no yellow sun; have stories that turn out to be just a dream; come up with silly new forms of kryptonite; place him in Kandor, where he has the same power as everyone else; etc.
When you run out of ideas, you just cheat and change his powers. At one point they realized that the ability to travel through time, combined with his super powers, basically made him capable of doing anything. It allowed him to rewrite anything in the history of the universe, and overcome any crisis by going back to prevent its origin, which meant that they would have to keep producing stories which included the changes he wrought, or explain why not, while dealing with all the time-travel paradoxes. (Could he prevent his own birth?) It possibly made him capable of preventing the big bang, which basically made him God, so they had to stop those storylines or make them “what-ifs.”
And that’s just Superman. You have similar problems with Captain America. He has limited power, a simple world-view, and no personality. How do you make that interesting? Writers have been (kinda) successful at that (and kinda not) for about 80 years now, but where else can you go with it?
Captain America is easy. History will always provide something to struggle against. Steve Rogers is a capable dude but he isn’t superhuman and doesn’t possess extraordinary intelligence or resources. He fits right into any political or crime thriller without too much effort.
Which means he isn’t a superhero at all. He’s just the equivalent of an honest cop who works out.
Pretty much. Given the nature of his villains he tends to go back and forth between world ending spy stuff and more regular crime stuff. Occasionally he has to step out and work with the Avengers to do the super villain stuff.
Quite frankly I found the listicle to be kind of dumb. Its like they read the worst examples of each character and then jerked off into a web page.
Superman could fly because he could push off stronger
than earths gravity, but how could he stop and start
mid flight?
They turned it from leaping over tall buildings to some ill-explained form of telekinesis a long time ago.
Jumping is less cool than actual flight and a lot of Superman stories revolve around him doing weird shit just because it seemed cool at the time.
I shudder to think how many brain-hours have been wasted on crap like how to explain Superman’s powers. The best explanation is the simplest: it’s pretend. Ask any six-year-old.
Most of the dopey Superman powers came from the Silver Age/Comics Code days when you couldn’t show him just beating the shit out of bad guys like you’d expect the strongest guy in the universe to do. That’s where he got goofy powers like super ventriloquism, super weaving, the ability to induce amnesia with a kiss, super telepathy and super-eating. You also got red kryptonite which was a lazy writer’s way to make something really stupid happen to Superman that he had to figure out, like morbid obesity or giving him an ant head.
Surprised Spider-Man isn’t on there. As has been previously been pointed out elsewhere, Spidey would need a car to get around in Nebraska.
I thought the MCU’s treatment of Captain America was really good. At first I didn’t really care about the movie, because Captain America was always boring. But those are now my favorite MCU movies, and Captain America has become one of my favorite characters in the MCU.
Unless they can rewind time or can see the future, write moral dilemmas where the best answer isn’t clear and actions have consequences
So the author pretty much trashed every popular super hero. What exactly is his/her example of a good super hero? What is the standard that he/she is holding them all too?
Mothers everywhere.
Does this guy actually know anything about superheroes?
Obviously not, since he judged sixty years of Daredevil comics, an appearance on the original Bill Bixby/Lou Ferrigno Incredible Hulk TV movie, and a Netflix series by one movie. His coverage on the Incredible Hulk was equally shallow
Hell, he could have learned more about these superheroes by reading Wikipedia