Does Not Know His Own Strength / Comic Books

Characters who have trouble judging and controlling their own strength in Comic Books.

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• In 52, being a god-empowered superbeing stopped being fun for Osiris after he killed his sister Isis' attacker, the Persuader, by flying into him too hard.
• Obelix from Asterix does seem to know his strength... he is just apparently unaware that not everyone possesses that strength, hence his failure to understand the difference between "knock on the door" and "smash the door" and why no-one around him is able to carry tiny menhirs.
• In the last issue of The Punisher Presents Barracuda, Barracuda pats the young hemophiliac he had been charged with turning into a cold-blooded killer on the back... killing him. To be fair, Barracuda is a fucking beast of a man, but that's... dang, son.
• A lot of humour stemmed from the use of this trope in the 1970s comic strip Wee Ben Nevis which featured in The Beano.
• The Dandy: Frequently used in its most famous strip, Desperate Dan.
• The titular character in Concrete is very much Blessed with Suck in this regard, being a half-ton stone man who doesn't dare try to hold anything breakable.
• Done tragically in The DCU Elseworld story "Created Equal". The second issue of the two-parter starts In Medias Res a five-year-old Alex Kent has accidentally killed his mother, Lois, by hugging her.
• In Invincible upon developing his Viltrumite powers Mark accidentally throws a garbage bag into orbit while taking out the trash. He becomes a superhero soon after. Similarly at his graduation Mark accidentally throws his square academic cap into orbit. Played for Drama later as a horrified Mark nearly kills and permanently disfigures Angstorm Levy, since Mark assumes Levy has the Super-Toughness to take a rage-filled beating from him. He doesn't.
• Irredeemable: In one scene where the titular character visits one of the many sets of foster parents he had as a child, we see him feeding their severely disabled (adult) biological son. Turns out he was there the day that Jr. came home from the hospital with Mum...he just wanted to give his new baby brother a hug...
• Justice Society of America introduced Citizen Steel, who literally doesn't know his own strength — the accident that gave him his powers also deadened his sense of touch, meaning he can't feel how much force he's exerting. He walks around in a costume he was cast into so that he can control it.
• One Lucky Luke story had a pathetically wimpy guy (he has to carry lead weights so the wind doesn't blow him away) turn into a musclebound human nearly overnight with Luke's help. However, he has difficulty adapting, and crushes glasses he's trying to pick up and rips the saloon's doors off.
• The titular character in Monica's Gang suffers because of this. Since she's only 6, it leads to really funny situations (although not so funny for her parents, who have to pay for the broken stuff). Jimmy Five and Smudgy feel in their skins what her inhuman strength causes, most often in the form of physical retribution for their infallible plans to "defeat" her, though she's been known to throw around the comic's Superman expy. It's all in Amusing Injuries territory.
• A telekinesis version in the case of Hellion of the New X-Men: Academy X: After the battle against Nimrod when he asks Emma Frost to unlock his powers' full potential so he can get X-23 back to Elixir to save her life, he suddenly loses all fine control of his powers. When Beast asks him to move a paperclip he instead blows out an entire wall.
• Jack in the comic book Next Men cannot control his super-strength and has to be guided places so he does not break objects by accidentally brushing up against them.
• In Nextwave, the narration mentions that the Captain once knocked a man's lungs out of his chest by patting him on the back... but in his defense, he was drunk.
• The Punisher villain The Russian squeezed a mook to death with a one armed hug... accidentally. He was genuinely trying to be friendly!
• Robin (1993): When Tim has Aramilla forced into his system and ends up fighting Lady Shiva, he accidentally kills her due to his lack of control and temporary powers. He's able to revive her, but it transfers some of the drug into Shiva's system, allowing her to kill everyone else in the room in a whirlwind attack, to Tim's horror.
• Present all over in Savage Dragon: Smasher taking the head off her husband with a single punch, Dragon killing Solar Man when the latter lost his powers in midfight, both resulting in messy Your Head Asplode moments. Those are just two of many examples.
• Shazam!:
  • In Shazam!: The New Beginning, Billy Batson as Captain Marvel does have some problems with handling his super-strength, as he lands on the roof of his Uncle Dudley's apartment building and makes a hole in the roof while doing so, or tries to open up a locked door and breaks off the handle by accident.
  • In the New 52, Billy nearly kills a mugger by smacking him into a car◊ when the latter accosted a woman.
• She-Hulk, who provides the page image, is usually not an example. However there's a storyline where she works out like crazy to beat a much stronger opponent (she intelligently uses a quirk of her physiology which increases greatly, in her Hulk form, the effects of workout in her "normal" form). This increases her strength to the point that she breaks nearly everything she touches, until she gets a Power Limiter suit.
• Spider-Man:
  • When Peter Parker first got his powers, he accidentally crushed a steel pipe "like it was paper".
  • Later Spidey gets into a boxing match with Jerk Jock Flash Thompson, knowing he could seriously injure Flash if he didn't pull his punches, Peter puts a fraction of his strength into a love tap punch. Not gentle enough however, as Flash goes flying out of the ring◊ of course most of Peter's classmates think it's a fluke.
  • Similar occurrence happens in Ultimate Spider-Man when Peter first got his powers, he tried to avoid Flash's attacks during a school fight, and managed to stop his fist. But, by doing so, he broke his hand. Uncle Ben and Aunt May were sued for hospital bills by Flash's parents.
  • When Doctor Octopus took over Peter's body, he was unaccustomed to Spider-man's strength and was surprised when he punched Scorpion in the face that he tore his jaw off and nearly killed him. It was quite the Fridge Horror for the Octavius as he realized Spidey was holding back all the time and could've killed half his Rogues Gallery but Peter was was always careful of hurting his foes as well his loved ones.
  • When rebounding with the The Symbiote Spidey to fight Red Goblin, Spidey gets enraged when Flash is mortally wounded and with a single punch sends Norman flying through two skyscrapers. Interestingly it's Flash who calms Peter down knowing Spider-Man will break his Thou Shalt Not Kill if he continues in that state.
• Superman:
  • Played straight when Clark is depicted as a child who realistically doesn't know his own strength as seen in Action Comics #1 (here◊). After the 1986 reboot, some writers declared that he only developed his powers at a late age to avoid it.
  • Superboy (1949) #151 dealt with a villain tricking young Supes into thinking he had accidentally killed Lana Lang with a careless display of strength. Grief-stricken, Superboy turns himself in to the police and sits brooding in a jail cell, giving the villain and his mooks a free window of opportunity to commit crimes unopposed. Naturally, it's all a ruse, and Lana turns out to have been merely kidnapped and is totally unharmed.
  • One story from the '90s saw Supes' strength start increasing exponentially. This trope definitely came into play then.
  • In Kryptonite Nevermore Superman accidentally rips a door off its hinges right after recovering his powers.
  • One Bronze Age story had Superman's strength seeming to increase beyond his ability to control, and he resorted to a super sunscreen to block his absorption of the sun's rays. It turned out to be a trick by the Parasite, who was specifically leeching Superman's ability to control his strength, making his strength seem like it was increasing, while the sunscreen was in fact rendering him weaker and weaker. At the climax, as he's realized too late what was happening and is plummeting to his death because he can't fly any more, he removes his boots because he hadn't put any sunscreen on his feet, and absorbs just enough sunlight mojo while falling to survive the impact.
  • In Infinite Crisis, Superboy-Prime attacks Conner Kent, beating him badly whilst causing a huge amount of damage to the town of Smallville, until a (fairly large) group(s) of other heroes arrive as back-up. When a heroine named Pantha calls him a "stupid kid" and attacks him in which Superboy retaliates by smacking her across the face... He ends up taking her head off and killing her, he is completely shocked when he notices the blood on his hand and has a mini breakdown.
  • "The Super Dog from Krypton": Krypto is very intelligent for a dog, but he is still a dog, so he does not understand how strong -and dangerous- he is upon arriving on Earth. Even a mere wag of his tail accidentally shatters rocks.
  • In Superman Annual #8, Pounder, one of a far-future League of Supermen who have each been genetically engineered to have one of Superman's powers, has support staff who have to do everything for him, because it's not safe for him to touch things. (The whole League is Blessed with Suck, in fact.)
  • In Superman: Secret Origin, a teenage Clark Kent, whose powers were just beginning to emerge, really had no idea how strong he was. It caused problems when he tried to play football with his friends and accidentally broke Pete Ross's arm.
  • Becomes a source of angst for The New 52 version of Superboy when he realizes that he can't be around ordinary people without killing them.
  • On the other hand, Supergirl does this on occasion, for example in one of Redan's Batman and Superman comic strips. Then again, she was still learning to control her powers.
  • In Adventure Comics #392: "Supergirl's Lost Uniform", Supergirl while in her Linda Danvers identity lifted what she thought was a fake 500-lb weight and twirled it like a baton. The fake was the one next to it. Oops.
  • Supergirl (2005): During her first fight against Reactron, Kara pulls a man out of a building at super-speed and accidentally breaks his arm in three different places.
  • In Supergirl (2011) #27—the beginning of the Red Daughter of Krypton storyline—Supergirl kicks Lobo so hard that she—apparently—kills him. Kara is so upset that she swears she didn't want to kill him and she cries she doesn't know her own strength.
    Supergirl: I don't even know my own strength!
  • The Supergirl from Krypton (2004): As she is wandering naked around Gotham City's docks, Kara is harassed by a man. Kara grabs his hand, intending to shove it away, and she accidentally crushes his fingers.
  • In Supergirl (Rebirth), as Kara is learning how to drive, she puts her foot on the brake... and through the bottom of the car. When it happens, her foster mother cries out "Again?".
  • Supergirl: Cosmic Adventures in the 8th Grade: In the first chapter, Kara breaks her desk when she puts her hand on it. And in the second chapter she puts her hand through the wall when she is writing on a chalkboard.
  • In Last Daughter of Krypton, Supergirl is not aware of her massive stregnth when her rocket crashes on Earth and she wakes up from her artificial sleep. So, she is downright shocked when she punches a robot -in reality, a soldier in Powered Armor- beyond the horizon.
  • Strangers at the Heart's Core: Wanting to increase her physical strength, Shyla Kor-Onn did set up a strength-leeching machine on the top of a building. Unfortunately, she forgot about her new magnified strength when she went to turn the machine off; she pushed it off the ledge, and accidentally crushed an innocent bystander.
  • In Supergirl (1984), Kara emerges out of her pod after landing on Earth and starts exploring her surroundings. Feeling marveled by world's nature, she picks a rock, unaware of her newly-gained super-strength, and gets shocked when the stone unexpectedly shatters into a million bits.
    Supergirl: "It's so hard...So rough to the touch! I wonder if...I—I broke it! But...I was never that strong before!"
  • Girl Power: As saving the Air Force One, Kara rips one wing off because she has not yet achieved complete control of her Super-Strength.
  • Supergirl Adventures Girl Of Steel: One of the first things that Kara needs to figure out when beginning her new life on Earth is how to open doors without ripping them off their hinges.
  • Power Girl has a long history of breaking or outright destroying things when she loses her temper. Fortunately, this usually results in getting it back under control.
• Transformers (2019):
  • Road Rage attempts to tackle a terrorist but forgets that organic beings are a lot squishier than Cybertronians and accidentally crushes him into pulp rather than capturing him alive as she'd intended.
  • The Constructicons are so strong that Hook inadvertently kills an unlucky worker with a Tap on the Head.
• Wolverine:
  • In Origin, James permanently disfigured his brother Dog when he slapped him in the face... not knowing he'd just gained some claws at the time.
  • In one series, there is a grown-up mutant with super strength but the intelligence of an infant. A horse tries to kick him and he punches it, then he gets upset because he can't put the horse's head back on.
• Wonder Woman Vol. 2: In Cassie's first fight after having her powers unlocked she's quite suprised at being able to toss Artemis down the street. Unlike most examples she's also delighted, because not only can Artemis take it she also jumped into the fight—which she likely wouldn't have survived without powers—without knowing for sure what they were.
• Wonder Girl (Infinite Frontier) Yara Flor is completely oblivious to all of her wonderful powers until she is sent to train under Chiron by Hera. Yara has a criminal record for her strength in particular, as she accidentally injures people and causes property damage.
• X-Men:
  • When Colossus is stuck in transformed form he gets angsty about people seeing him as a monster. He then proceeds to try and call his team from a phone booth but since he is frustrated, trying to dial the number causes his fingers to punch right through the phone.
  • Rogue accidentally snaps Grim Reaper's neck with a single punch after she absorbed Wonder Man's powers. She was holding back.

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