Nigh Invulnerability/Comic Books

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Examples of Nigh Invulnerability in Comic Books include:

  • Of course, the original Flying Brick himself, Superman. Can survive in the heart of a supernova. Most versions of him can, anyway, and some also add super-healing and immortality on top of that. Originally, his skin could be pierced by a "bursting artillery shell", but his powers creeped and seeped.
    • One of course can't forget his Omnicidal Maniac Alternate Universe version, Superboy-Prime, a relic from a destroyed alternate universe that was left in a paradise dimension with several other refugees, only realizing his destiny as a great hero was "stolen" from him. In the end, it takes two other Supermen, a legion of Green Lanterns, and being thrown through Krypton's sun to weaken him enough to be captured.
      • Don't forget the Flashes that were needed to take him down in the first place.
      • Partly attributable to his having Pre Crisis power levels, unlike Superman himself.
  • Ultron, essentially being evil computer software, falls under this, since no matter what, a portion of itself always exists in cyberspace.
    • And more importantly, most versions of Ultron are made entirely of adamantium. Destroying him in the first place is an epic challenge.
  • The Tick (animation), for whom this trope is named. His primary power is always listed as "nigh invulnerability."
    • For God's sake, even a black hole isn't enough to beat this guy.
  • While a lot of superheroic characters have some level of invulnerability, the aptly-named Eternals of the Marvel Universe may stand out for special mention: they possess a "psychic lock" on their molecular structure that allows them to restore virtually any injury they can't flat-out ignore.
  • Madcap in the Marvel Universe has this as his primary power (his secondary power being inducing euphoria in others). He has been dismembered, decapitated, burned to ash, and even vaporized, yet always managed to regenerate within a few hours at most.
  • The Marvel character Deadpool possesses several forms of nigh-invulnerability, but none work quite as well as they should. He is incapable of dying (sometimes ignored), but that is more of a curse than anything. He can also regenerate from almost any wound, but his healing factor unfortunately seems to work in proportion to how badly he was hurt (in other words, his healing factor would kick in much more quickly and effectively if he simply used a grenade and blew his whole arm off in order to heal some slash wounds on it).
  • However, possibly the most famous nigh invincible character in the Marvel Universe would have to be Wolverine, who possesses quick regeneration abilities and a skeleton that's pretty much indestructible. He can survive pretty much any attack up to (and probably beyond) a direct hit from a nuclear warhead. The time it takes for him to regenerate depends on the severity of his wounds and who happens to be doing the writing, but chances are, Wolverine will be back up on his by the end of the page.
    • After Nitro's attack on an Elementary School, only Wolverine's BRAIN hadn't been completely incinerated because of his Made of Diamond skeleton, and he regenerated even when it was completely implausible that he could be ALIVE, let alone able to regenerate.
    • One other notable example is from the Ultimate Wolverine Vs. Hulk series, in which the Hulk rips Logan in half, throwing the lower portion of his body on top of a mountain, necessitating the need for him to climb a mile up with his intestines hanging out of him.
      • Once the remaining issues of Ultimate Wolverine Vs. Hulk were shipped, readers were treated to an even better sight— Ultimate Nick Fury interrogating Wolverine's disembodied head, with the former surmising Ultimate Wolvie's real mutant power must be to survive anything.
    • In Uncanny X-Men Annual #11, Wolverine regenerated completely from a single drop of blood. To be fair, his healing factor was supercharged with the power of the Crystal of Ultimate Vision. We don't talk about what happened to the adamantium.
      • After he was resurrected with the Crystal of Ultimate Vision, he came back as an actual god. He was going to use his power, but then realized that as a man it was not right for him to have that much power, and smashed the Crystal with his claws. I think the implication was that he gave himself adamantium bones with his god-like powers in order to break the Crystal.
      • Marvel editors continually raise the question with this: If Wolvie's arm or finger gets cut off, could it grow a new Wolverine?
    • Wolverine has survived direct hits (or near enough) from nuclear weapons, at least two times. Once in a Venom miniseries - while bonded with a clone of the Venom symbiote - and once in Ultimate Wolverine vs. Hulk.
  • Immortal Man in The DCU was endlessly reincarnated with his memories intact.
    • Also from the DCU is Mitchell Shelley, the Resurrection Man. He has a similar ability to Immortal Man's; every time he dies, he comes back to life with a new superpower. This is actually reincarnation, but when combined with nanotech regeneration, it gets interesting.
  • In Watchmen, Doctor Manhattan's god-like powers first manifested in the ability to reform himself after the complete disintegration of his original body. He would later demonstrate intangibility and indestructibility as well.
  • Manhattan's source of inspiration, Captain Atom, is also nigh invulnerable - at one point he survives a direct hit from a tactical nuclear warhead.
  • Image Comics super-pensioner Brit is made of some material stronger than diamond -- he is totally indestructible. He has no super strength or special abilities other than indestructibility -- but when you can strap a nuclear device to your back and drop into enemy territory to detonate it, who needs super strength?
  • As quoted above, Craig "Mr Immortal" Hollis from the Great Lakes Avengers (a comical offshoot of The Avengers, whose members all had powers considered too useless to be in the main organization). He had no special abilities, no power to withstand damage, but if he actually died, he just stood up again three seconds later, fully healed. Since he was a child, he's been haunted by Deathurge, a psychopomp-like being who convinces people to kill themselves, but decided to take Craig in as a sort of adoptive son. It's been said somewhere that he's destined to be the last living creature in the universe. In the GLA miniseries, he's revealed to be "Homo Supreme", one step beyond mutant (which caused Flatman, who'd just come out as gay, to mutter "Always have to one-up me, don't you?").
  • Flint of Stormwatch has the Made of Diamond variant as her entire superpower. Super Strength seems to be more of a side-effect of having indestructible muscles.
  • Alpha from Christos Gage's Absolution is functionally indestructible.
  • Max Damage from Irredeemable/Incorruptible grows more and more invulnerable to harm the longer he stays awake. However, it resets whenever he falls asleep.
  • The primary power of the title character Painkiller Jane, a comic turned TV series, is to recover from anything. It still hurts though, hence her name.
  • Checkmate of Ultimate Muscle is both an example and a subversion at the same time. He's been raised to be immune to pain, so he's able to go far longer than any other wrestler. However, the series plays that notion straight, as it's pointed out that someone immune to pain wouldn't know when they had gone past their limit. This ability magically disappeared, though, when he joined the good guys.
  • In the game of The Darkness, one of the powers The Darkness grants Jackie Estacado is to protect him from virtually any harm... and if he does manage to die, it just rewinds time to a point when he's alive (the justification for the game's checkpoint system), or sends his spirit to The Otherworld while it rebuilds his body. Presumably, The Darkness has some variation on these powers in the comics, as well, but this editor is not familiar with them.
    • Jackie does indeed have that power in the comic. One particular scene that springs to mind is his body being reconstructed from the surrounding organic matter after blowing up a warehouse.
  • A running gag in Phil Foglio's comics is The Winslow, an immortal, indestructible being who is the focus of many violent religious sects. As the Platonic Essence of living beings (whatever that means), it was created during the Big Bang, and will exist through all successive Big Crunch/Big Bang cycles forever. The joke is that The Winslow is a small, cute, furry, green and yellow alligator-like creature with the attention span of a gnat.
    • Just how indestructible is he? If you're a cultist looking for him, and you know what planet he's on, the simplest way to search is to reduce the whole planet to dust. When you sift through the remains, The Winslow will be the largest remaining piece.
  • The Saint of Killers from Preacher (Comic Book). Lose the "Nigh." His utter immunity to damage (of the Divine Protection sort) is first shown when he ignores a hail of gunfire from a dozen cops. The villain, after he sees that the Saint is bulletproof, is smart enough to bring a battalion of tanks to their next clash, only for the Saint to shrug off multiple tank shells to the face and proceed to kill everyone present. The villain, who anticipated even this, drops a nuclear bomb on him as a coup de grace. Cut to the Saint, standing amidst the nuclear fire, completely unharmed.

Saint: [spits] Not enough gun.

    • Cassidy also has this to a much lesser degree, of the Healing Factor variety. He can take damage but heals even "mortal" wounds quickly, much faster if he feeds, and nothing but the sun can actually kill him. Even decapitation only inconveniences him for a while.
    • Debatable. Decapitation outright incapacitates Cassidy until his allies stitch his head back on. Cassidy's Healing Factor is actually used against him when Starr's associate tortures him by repeatedly shooting him with a .303 rifle. It gets to the point where even Cassidy was unsure how much more he could take, physically or mentally.
  • Marvel Comics' Incredible Hulk is an extreme example; he is both super tough, invulnerable to all conventional weapons, and has an extremely fast healing factor, so fast that it was not discovered in the continuity until he was wounded while he was slowed down because he was Joe Fixit. Basically, he has shrugged off point blank heavy nuclear weaponry, planet-splitting impacts, or strikes from cosmic entities, healed within seconds from having over 80% of his flesh repelled off of his body, and one incarnation eventually managed to restore itself from being blown to powder. Lampshaded in "The Last Titan" wherein the immortal Hulk just keeps on going alone in the wasteland after the rest of humanity destroys itself. (The alien empires were said to host an enormous celebration.)
    • When Amadeus Cho accused Reed Richards of killing the Hulk, Richards mantained that was impossible, "Because the Hulk doesn't die."
  • The Sandman. No, not that one--the Spider Man villain. He could change the density of his body so that one moment he was hard as a rock, and the next moment Spiderman's punches just hit loose sand.
    • A similar situation with Hydro-Man. You can't punch or shoot him with projectiles considering they'll just flow through him harmlessly, but you can hit him hard with electricity to induce electrolysis, evaporate him, or contaminate his liquid body mass with a solidifying agent like cement to trap him.
  • John Byrne's Next Men had a group of teenagers who each had one of the classic 'stock powers'--one guy was super-strong, one was super-fast, one could see the entire electromagnetic spectrum, etc. Bethany was completely invulnerable, of the Made of Diamond type, and the series actually showed some of the logical extremes of this power: she could use a single strand of her hair to saw through an iron bar (and if you try to grab her hair, you lose your fingers), and she eventually lost the ability to feel hot and cold as the series went on.
  • Partial subversion. From New Mutants to X-Force to X-Men, Sam "Cannonball" Guthrie's power renders him Nigh Invulnerable (as he repeatedly says himself), but only when he's "blasting" -- which is to say using his pyro-plasmodic forcefield in flight. And as if that didn't do it, he's also an External (an immortal mutant).
  • J. Michael Straczynski's Rising Stars series had a character, Peter Dawson, whose special power was that he was effectively indestructible: a microthin energy shield surrounded his entire body, protecting him from literally everything, and also lined the inside of his lungs and stomach, making poisons ineffective, too. However, the usefulness of this power is called into question, and the power as a whole heavily subverted, in the issue where Dawson appears. Since the shield can't tell what is and isn't an attack, he can't feel any sensation whatsoever--the only sense he really has available (besides sight and hearing, of course) is taste, causing him to overeat until he's a pudgy blob. While he was in high school, the football coach tried him out on the team, but as he discovered, Dawson's invulnerability doesn't make him any tougher or stronger--the other team would just run right over him. Dawson later applied to be a bodyguard, a policeman, anything where his ability might conceivably be useful, but his obesity meant he failed all the physicals. The only job he ends up getting is as a mechanic in a local garage.
    • Even more interesting, though, is that the only issue in which Dawson appears, he's been murdered. (That's not really a spoiler, since you know it from page one.) The doctor who's been called in takes most of the issue recounting his life before finally revealing how it was done: his killer snuck in at night, while Dawson had fallen asleep in his armchair, and taped his arms and legs to the chair--since Dawson didn't have any feeling, thanks to the shield, he didn't notice. Then the killer simply pulled a plastic bag over Dawson's head and waited. Even though Dawson's shield could filter out inhaled poisons, he still needed oxygen.
  • The various Miracle-people in Alan Moore's Miracleman all have skin-tight forcefields that render them invulnerable to pretty much anything in the universe. (It's also implied, though never explored, that this forcefield is also what gives them their super strength.)
    • Of course, there are ways to get around this. When Kid Miracleman, who's a psychopath, finally breaks free and begins tearing London apart, Miracleman, Miraclewoman, a pyrokinetic and two aliens with teleportation powers have to stop him. They throw cars at him, blow up gas mains in his face, throw him through buildings, and nothing does any real damage. One of the aliens tries teleporting KM into the side of a building, but he just busts free a second later: the forcefield doesn't let anything through. So, being the logical type of alien, he just tries the reverse: he picks up a small chunk of rock and teleports it within KM's forcefield, and into his head, which does the trick. After a little while.
  • Another invulnerable Marvel mutant is the Blob-- not The Blob, just a guy with that name-- who has stood up to everything from Wolverine's claws, to flamethrowers, to the Hulk's punches.
    • Though not, apparently, Wolverine's head-banging in a certain 2009 movie... though this is probably because in the comics his head was always vulnerable compared to the rest of his body.
  • And the Canadian superheroes Alpha Flight have a villain-turned-hero called Diamond Lil --though she does not have superstrength, she effectively hits twice as hard as normal because her fists absorb none of the impact energy. (Given that she's also a six-and-a-half-foot-tall weightlifter, that's gotta hurt.)
  • Deconstructed in the story of Element Girl in the The Sandman comics. She is tired of being an invulnerable superhero, but she cannot commit suicide because her body keeps involuntarily changing to a form that will survive each attempt.
    • The "divine protection" form is tweaked slightly for Cain. He is not himself invulnerable to harm, but he has a mark from God that makes it clear anyone killing Cain will face God's wrath. The mark is sufficient to warn off deliberate attacks, but probably wouldn't save Cain from accidents and such.
  • The Juggernaut in the X-Men: it's almost impossible to inflict even minor damage on him, he quickly regenerates in the rare cases (almost always involving magic) that somebody can can hurt him, and once he gets up some steam, he just plows right through any obstacle in his way.
    • At full power, Juggernaut has a force field that he can summon at-will just inches away from himself.
    • One time, a demon mystically melted his flesh and organs... and Juggernaut's bones still kept moving forward. The demon was literally too stunned to do anything about that. He's practically a Physical God, as he is an avatar of Cyttorak, an evil god thing.
  • The X-Men's Emma Frost is LITERALLY Made of Diamond. One of her powers is to take on a diamond form, while losing her psionic powers in the process. This can of course be reverted.
    • Before Emma, Penance of Generation X was as hard as diamond, and she couldn't turn it off.
    • In a future, Emma Frost and Scott Summers' daughter, Ruby, has a similar ability. Contrary to the name, it is just as much diamond as her mother. The red hue is due to her father's powers.
  • Invincible and other comics taking place in that universe are teeming with Nigh Invulnerable characters, but Guardians of the Globe member Dupli-Kate is a particularly good example of Hive Mind-style invulnerability. When all her copies are apparently killed in a brawl, her husband, brother and team mourn her death -- only to learn that her 'zero' has been holed up in a remote location for, apparently, years as proof against just this kind of scenario.
  • Unlike Superman, Wonder Woman can be physically wounded (if you can get past her lightning-fast reflexes), but she can still take far, far more damage than normal humans and still keep fighting.
  • This is the sole power of Turtle in The Legion of Super Heroes. Literally, he's simply very nearly completely invulnerable. He can be harmed, but not much and not without an excess of effort. He was rejected from the Legion due to his lack of offensive capabilities, but joined the Legion Auxilliary along with Night Girl and his friend Sizzle with the hopes of eventually graduating to the Legion proper.
  • Cell, one of The Morlocks from X-Men-related comics, is a giant single-cell organism, meaning he can regenerate any damage done to him at all and absorb organic matter for nourishment. Basically the only catch to this is that he can't digest inorganic objects, meaning he had a bullet stuck harmlessly in his head for a while. His teammates Shatter and Litterbug, however, were just super-tough; Shatter was made of some kind of super dense obsidian-like rock, while Litterbug had a layered, chitonous exoskeleton.
  • Butterball, from The Initiative, has a variation on this power; he is completely immutable, and therefore cannot be harmed in anyway. This power is apparently all-encompassing, as he has extreme difficulty learning new subjects, can't lose (or gain, for that matter) weight, can't get in shape, etc, etc....
  • Man-Thing is both something of a blob (he's a mass of plant matter with no internal organs to damage), and even if something manages to destroy him, he'll simply regrow from swamp matter back home.
    • Similar to DC's Swamp Thing. When Alan Moore took on the title he retconned Swamp Thing as a mass of swamp growth with Alec Holland's memories, rather than a transformed Holland. He also explained the character's apparent death in the previous issue and subsequent survival with the summation "You can't kill a vegetable by shooting it through the head". Swamp Thing soon discovered he was the Earth's latest plant elemental (courtesy of John Constantine), and learned how to manipulate the planet's flora through the metaphysical plant-collective plane called the 'Green'; including growing new bodies for himself at an accelerating rate. (Several days with the first attempt, split-seconds soon after.) His invulnerability started at 'Blob' but soon encompassed 'Regeneration', 'Made of air', 'External Repair', 'The Proxy', 'Multiple Bodies', 'Can Only Kill Part of Him', and arguably 'Physical God'. Things only escalated when he absorbed the powers of Earth's other elementals...
  • In the J-horror inspired DC Comics comic, Crossing Midnight, Toshi first discovered this when she jumps from the Treehouse of Fun in her yard and doesn't get impaled by the wrought iron fence.
  • How has this topic gone on this long without mention of Colossus, who was stronger than Ben Grimm and the Hulk when introduced as a 17-year old, and can now go toe-to-toe with any incarnation of the Hulk (barring the tragedy-enhanced "Green Scar" incarnation from World War Hulk).
  • One of the Hulk's enemies is the superintelligent Leader. The Leader uses pink, rubbery biological androids called Humanoids as Mecha-Mooks. They fall into the "made of rubber" category, being resiliant and stretchy enough that punching them doesn't do any harm.
  • Plastic Man can survive practically anything. He's nominally Made of Rubber, but he's essentially a Blob. He can be cut and pierced without bleeding or pain, he reassembles himself if broken into pieces, and he doesn't age. One time travel story had him blown to bits in the distant past and scattered across the ocean floor, only to be reassembled in the present day (not without psychological harm, though). He's even invulnerable to most psychic attacks, owing to the fact that his body is made of homogenous plastic "stuff" and doesn't have a distinct brain. It has been repeatedly claimed that he could be killed by sufficiently intense heat, but the fact that he was able to survive a fight with Martian Manhunter who had been turned into a flaming giant at the time, throws even this into doubt.
  • While not nearly as durable as Plastic Man, Reed Richards is Made of Rubber and can survive most attacks, at least as long as he sees them coming in time to stretch with the impact.
  • Captain Carrot of the Zoo Crew seemed to have about the same durability level as the Tick. His origin story paired him with Superman, and made it plain that he was nowhere near as tough as Supes, but that he could still withstand a lot of punishment.
  • The poster boy for the Extreme Luck variation would have to be Gladstone Gander of the Carl Barks duck universe. Gladstone is officially the luckiest person on Earth (and is insufferably smug about it).
  • The poster kids for External Repair would have to be the Metal Men. It's hard to name a Metal Men story that doesn't involve most of the team getting destroyed, and they make the sacrifice cheerfully, because they know that as long as Doc Magnus can gather up their broken bits, he can fix them as good as new.
  • Slapstick has been shot with bazookas, burned with fire, zapped with electricity, twisted into a knot, and kicked across New York City with no ill effects. The only thing that can really hurt him is a specific frequency of energy that disrupts the molecular bonds of his electroplasm body, and that only works temporarily.
  • Werecheetah Britanny Diggers, along with all other lycanthropes in Gold Digger, can only be harmed by silver or magic (other injuries regenerate almost instantly). Alas, magic is pretty common in the Diggerverse.
  • Short-term X-Man Paulie Provenzano had Nigh Invulnerability as his mutant power, but it came with the limitation that he had to be able to be generally aware of the attack. He learned of this limitation when he made the mistake of taunting Northstar with a homophobic slur, which resulted in the speedster punching him so fast he couldn't even register it.
  • Adam Destine of ClanDestine is completely invulnerable, as well as being immortal. He can withstand superpowered combat, large-scale explosions, lasers, crashing on Earth from space in a bus with broken windows (albeit with a spaceship engine attached, courtesy of his Gadgeteer Genius son) and who knows what else with nothing more than Clothing Damage. He also apparently doesn't need to eat, drink, or breathe to survive- he once went a decade without doing any of the above, with no ill effects. The power was given to him by his wife, a very powerful genie.
  • Doctor Doom is an example of the Proxy variant. Doom has been defeated and killed on many occasions, only to reveal later (whether intended at the time or retconned in later) that it was Actually a Doombot and the real Doom would never be defeated by something so pathetic.
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