Martinex1: How much did the heroes' and villains' power class play into the enjoyment of the character and story for you? Were you a collector that liked to compare and contrast heroes' strengths and weaknesses? Did the advent of books like The Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe and DC's Who's Who add to your comic enjoyment or did it change the way you looked at characters and collecting?Did you care if Ghost Rider was less strong than Thundra, on an equal level with Giant-Man, and more powerful than Captain Britain? Super-Heavyweights down to the Un-powered - did it matter? Take a look at the slick Marvel strip to the left to get your bearings.
How did knowing strength capabilities of your favorite heroes detract from or add to your comic collecting experience? Did you and your friends debate the details like others might discuss baseball batting statistics? Did the ranks and data emerge in the 1980s or were there examples prior?
Were you into gaming? Did you develop charts and graphs to track the heroes' durability, strength, intelligence, power, speed, and endurance?Did Marvel and DC get it right (in your mind) when it came to classifying heroes and villain? Did the activity enhance or diminish the overall enjoyment of the reading thereafter?
Did you see shifts in power and strength in characters? Was that a normal evolution or was it the result of inadequate writing? Should Colossus have struggled pulling out a tree stump or was John Byrne right to be miffed with Chris Claremont about that scene? Why was Stiltman a threatening villain in the Silver Age but a punchline in the Bronze Age?
Today let's Chew the Fat about power ranking, strength charts, and all of the data that goes along with it as part of collecting! Cheers!
11 comments:
Fist let me say I was a huge fan of the handbooks and found them endlessly fun. I was more into the establishing of a history for each hero and villain and less about the power ratings which I often found pretty capricious. Some of the diagrams of weapons and such were very nifty too.
The chart above is negligent in that the Thing deserves to be in the top tier. I never understood how Wonder Man and Iron Man rated that high and the Thing didn't. There was a general disdain for Ben Grimm's might as the MU expanded and new toys became available, but while I always thought he might be less strong than the Hulk and maybe Thor (and maybe Hercules) he was just barely so and deserved to be in their rating.
Rip Off
As a huge fan of the Marvel Role Playing Game I loved comparing superheroes in terms of strength and power. I don't think it got very consistent until they committed to strength levels in the Official Handbook.
Even then, they took some liberties with the bench-pressing x amount of tons. I remember they wrote that Sasquatch was able to throw a 25-ton DC10 plane across a runway. If you read X-Men #120, his first appearance, Chris Claremont writes in elaborate detail about him holding a 250-ton DC10. I guess once they established 100-tons as the Hulk standard in the Handbook they had to retroactively bring everything back in line with that.
All this kind of reinforced my problem identifying with the more godlike DC universe. As recently as the All-Star Superman series they showed Superman lifting something like 5 quintillion tons with one hand. Now where's the fun in that?
Gimme the humble "Unearthly" strength Marvel heroes any day.
-david p.
Rip, I am with you. The Thing should be top tier. Otherwise the Thing - Hulk confrontations would seem more lopsided than they were. Yes the Thing is weaker and smaller than the Hulk but not by much at all - not a whole level down. If anything I would swap Iron Man and The Thing on those levels. I put Tony more on the level of Namor who he fought often. (This discussion makes me feel like thirteen again -ha!)
David P. I agree very much on the difference between DC and Marvel. That was one of the reasons I read Marvel more. Despite the craziness of what the heroes could do, it strangely seemed more realistic and reasonable at Marvel.
On the height charts on the bottom of the post - does anybody else have a problem with Colossus being taller than the Hulk? I never thought he was the tallest in the MU.
The only strength comparison I remember reading during my childhood was that Steve Ditko panel which I think might have been from Amazing Spider-Man Annual #1, in which Spidey's lifting a barbell, as the Hulk, Thing and Thor watch on. Stan's deathless prose tells us that those three are the only people in the Marvel universe stronger than Spidey and that, as he's not yet fully physically mature, he might one day end up actually being stronger than them. I've always liked the idea that the Hulk, Thing and Thor were barely stronger than Spider-Man. As mentioned above, their initial limited strength made them more interesting.
I think the thing with the Thing is that, as the Hulk got ever more powerful, it became unfeasible to have the Thing keep pace with him, as he would have ended up being so overwhelmingly powerful that it's hard to see what he would have needed the rest of the FF for. I'd agree though that I liked the early days when you didn't know which of the pair was the stronger. I can't remember Hulkie doing anything in his early issues that the Thing couldn't have done.
Yeah, I remember that strength chart that appeared in a Spider-man annual in the early '80s. I loved it and was a bit miffed by it at the same time - as I commented at BAB a few years ago when Karen posted it there (and echoing some of the comments made here today), I also thought the Thing should have been put in the super-heavyweight category as well, and I was *really* angered by Colussus not only not being at least in the heavyweight category, but also even in the super medium-weight category ranked below, say, Power Man and Valkyrie. Looking over it now, I further think She Hulk should be in the heavyweight category, ranked higher than Doc Samson at least; also, Black Bolt should be ranked lower and Silver Surfer higher.
As for those height comparisons, I agree that Colossus looks a bit too tall, but what really bothers me is that Wolverine is almost "normal" height - back in the early days, when Cockrum and then Byrne were doing the art, Wolverine, and Nightcrawler for that matter, were usually drawn so it looked like they were almost a whole head shorter than Cyclops, Storm or Banshee. Recall that Wolverine was often called "runt" by various opponents.
Yep, my inner 13 year-old is really busting out today...
Edo - YES! I agree. I think somewhere early on Wolverine was given a height of at most 5'2" (and that might have been with the hair). He was small but "mean." Much of his character seemed to be based on confronting enemies when he was undersized and outmatched; his ferocity overcame his small stature.
Well - someday he'll be as tall as Colossus.
I also agree with you on She-Hulk, Surfer, Colossus and the rest.
Yeah, the Handbooks say 5'2" for Wolvie, but he isn't always drawn that way. (And Hugh Jackman obviously isn't that short!)
I liked the various strength rankings, but I really loved when somebody defeated someone way stronger than them ... like when Spidey pounded Firelord, or Captain America beat the hell out of Mr. Hyde.
I have a very clear memory of Colossus being listed as 7'5" in the Official Handbook. I remember because I thought that was really cool he so huge, but then a couple of issues later saw that this made him taller than Hulk and (even more outrageous) Juggernaut! (I think they were about 7' and 6'10" respectively). So a bit silly.
Also, Kitty Pryde being an inch taller than Wolverine was always hard to wrap my head around, but kinda neat in a way.
Boy, how many years have I waited for an outlet to spout all this trivia?
-david p.
HIya,
Anybody here remember the time that the Johnny Blaze Ghost Rider beat the Hulk?
It was one of those issues that had 'fill-in' written all over it and revolved around a desert motorcycle race. Somehow, even though he was supposed to be a stunt rider, Blaze enrolled in the proceedings and wound up facing the Hulk, who had apparently been minding his own business (yet again) and worked himself into such a rage over the 'puny humans' that he tried to kill one of them.
It was times like this that I could really see the validity of General Ross's views.
Boring story short, Ghost Rider somehow used his flame powers to create a vortex that drew all the oxygen away from the Hulk causing him to faint.
The fact that I own this issue says that I was far closer to being a Marvel zombie than I had ever acknowledged.
But one of the assistant editors while going over the book was stunned by the outcome. He raised the point that power to power the Hulk should have been able to crush the Ghost Rider into powder. The creatives, Isabella and Wein, basically said big deal and the book ran as is. They did put in a cartoon essentially mocking the assistant's concerns, a Marie Severin image of the Hulk holding the Ghost Rider's skull in his hands. The written piece that accompanied the cartoon stated that the assistant was correct in his concerns, but since it was in the Ghost Rider book the Ghost Rider would win.
The name of the new assistant editor, Jim Shooter.
Yup, this issue of Ghost Rider was one of the elements that led to the creation of the Marvel Handbooks.
Seeya,
pfgavigan
What . no love for Sasquatch?
I think I remember him throwing around a jumbo jet like it was a toy!
I thought putting numbers to the amounts a character could lift was a mistake. Kind of makes all these types of fun debates moot.
Namor in water might be able to take them all.
Fun topic. Even when I was a kid that "Marvel Strength Chart" always bugged me a little. Like everyone else here, I thought that The Thing should definitely be on the top tier. I also thought that Colossus, She-Hulk, and Silver Surfer should be on the second tier. I never figured that Thundra was stronger than Colossus or She-Hulk. That just seems way off to me. And does anyone think that Doc Samson could take the Silver Surfer in a fight? C'mon.
I also loved the old Marvel Handbooks, where we finally learned that 100 tons was apparently the top strength level a Marvel superhero could attain. And if I recall Spider-Man could lift around 10 tons. (I guess now we know what the "proportionate strength of a spider" is).
Another good source of a character's strength level was the old Marvel Universe trading cards from the 90's. They had a handy chart on the back of each character's card rating their stats, like strength level, intelligence, energy output (like laser blasts), and etc.
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