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- The Adventures of Barry Ween, Boy Genius: Barry is a superintelligent ten-year-old Gadgeteer Genius who often has to resort to heavy weaponry to "deal" with his failed experiments. He also Took a Level in Badass with each subsequent reboot of his series, and now he can bare-handedly wipe the floor with whole warrior tribes without even ruffling his hair. Awesomeness by Analysis certainly has a lot to do with it.
- In Astro City, Roy Virgil was an engineering genius, aeronautical millionaire, and thrill-seeking spacefaring adventurer known as the Astro-Naut.
- In Darth Vader: Dark Lord of the Sith, Jedi librarian Jocasta Nu is made an Adaptational Badass and manages to hold her own against Darth Vader and a battalion of clones for a time protecting the archives' list of Force-sensitive children from The Empire.
- Lilith Calah from Dreamkeepers definitely counts, being smart, well-read and having defeated at least two Eldritch Abominations
- Gina Diggers, in Gold Digger, recently discovered this after being the 'fish' in jail. She forgot that she's been, you know, hanging around superheroes without dying. It tends to work out muscles. She also has a right hook and can do the math to know EXACTLY how much it will hurt. Ancient Gina, her "future me from the past" is even more powerful, being capable of creating a planet.
- Qubit of Irredeemable is the smartest guy in the Paradigm, but as soon as fighting breaks out he's out on the front lines with the rest of the team. Never without his gadgets, of course, but he can also throw a solid punch when he wants to.
- Jill Trent, of the obscure Golden Age feature Jill Trent, Science Sleuth, is an unusually early female version. Jill mostly relies on her prodigious science and engineering abilities to solve mysteries, as one might expect a Science Sleuth to do. But nearly every adventure ends up with Jill and her gal pal Daisy beating the crap out of the bad guys - just like contemporaneous male heroes would. (A public domain example of the feature can be seen here
.) - Primal Warrior Draco Azul: Eric Martinez was once a high school social studies teacher in Los Angeles, though his true passion was archaeology. While on vacation in Cancún, he was attacked by Diablos while visiting a Mayan pyramid and found himself stuck in Draco Azul's cockpit—forcing him to quickly learn how to fight.
- Both Dwight and Wallace from Sin City are very intelligent, well-educated men who are more than capable of bringing down the bad guys.
- Tintin: A highly intelligent young journalist and a force to be reckoned with. Solves crimes and punches out bad guys on a regular basis.
- Professor Calculus. Who would have thought that the meek-looking stereotypical absent-minded scientist is a savateur? And if you make him really angry, he will prove that he's strong enough to lift a much larger man up from the ground and hang him up on a hook on the wall.
- After a brief stint with the Wreckers in IDW's Transformers comics, during which he was badly wounded, Perceptor decides he needs to improve his combat abilities. He does this by adding gyroscopic stabilizers to his arm, an advanced targeting visor to his head, and a bunch of other upgrades that have the end result of turning him into a brutally effective Cold Sniper. (This takes place chronologically before his appearance in All Hail Megatron, thus retconning an answer to the question, "When did Perceptor get scary?"
- Transformers: Shattered Glass has examples on both sides.
- On the side of the Decepticons, Megatron started out as a humble mathematician, but thanks to predicting the rise of the Autobots, he formed the Decepticons to protect freedom, and invented the transformation technology to oppose them.
- Optimus Prime is no slouch, either. Originally a humble data clerk, he saw something that caused him to become Ax-Crazy, became the warlord Optimus Prime, and managed to reverse-engineer Megatron's transformation technology.
- August Von Herling of Von Herling, Vampire Hunter; while very intelligent and scholarly, he shows no fear when facing vampires.
