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Healing Factor / The DCU

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The DCU

  • Batman:
  • Birds of Prey: Misfit has Teleportation powers, and every time she uses them, her injuries heal. Even if she doesn't teleport, her injuries heal, but at a slower rate.
  • Deathstroke: Deathstroke has some form of accelerated healing, though no one's kept track of how strong it's supposed to be, other than the fact that it's weaker than Wolverine's.
  • Etrigan like many other demon, can regenerate. Once a fake Lobo gouged Etrigan's eyes out, so he needed someone to guide him for less than an hour. After that a new pair of eyes popped into place.
  • The Flash:
    • Jay heals at a faster rate than a normal human, and his ties to the Speed Force have extended his life and helped him maintain his health. He's one of the JSA's three old men who are still acting superheroes despite starting out as such during WWII, with their generation quickly fading away.
    • Barry and Wally usually use their super speed as essentially a form of Healing Factor; they experiences the normal healing a human body is capable of, but at a much faster rate.
    • Bart Allen/Impulse, who shares the same power set, has to deal with one of the downsides when Deathstroke shoots his knee with buck shot: his super speed lets him heal very quickly, but without extracting the buck shot and setting the bone correctly his leg will be essentially useless. Making it worse, his super-metabolism also makes him immune to pain medicine, meaning he had to be awake while his bones were re-broken, set, and the metal was removed.
    • Max Mercury/Quicksilver is able to use his connection to the speed force to speed up his healing and slow his aging. Despite being the most in tune with the speed force of the DC speedsters (save Wally on a good day) his deep connection to it means he cannot always stay detached from it and he has skipped decades while merged with it, missing most of his own daughter's life and only meeting her again when she was in her fifties.
  • G.I. Zombie: Jared, the titular zombie, has one that allows him to reattach lost limbs.
  • Green Arrow: The second Green Arrow, Connor Hawke, was granted healing powers by the machinations of Dr Sivana in an issue of Green Arrow and Black Canary. Sivana gave him that healing factor using bits of Plastic Man, a character that has survived being turned to stone, shattered, and having the pieces scattered around the ocean floor for over 1,000 years. Yeah, Plastic Man takes this trope to the extreme. However, Plastic Man doesn't actually heal. He's just Nigh Invulnerable as the result of having total control over his physical structure. It's the same principle that allowed him to change back to his regular shape whenever Circe turned him into an animal.
  • Green Lantern: Black Lanterns can regenerate From a Single Cell and can usually only be destroyed by the combined light of a Green Lantern and any of the other colors.
  • Lobo: Lobo has an absurdly over-the-top one, as he is partly a Wolverine parody. Plus, neither Heaven nor Hell want him. This is taken to such ridiculous extremes that at one point, one of his powers was that a single drop of his blood will grow into another Lobo. In one story, Lobo was "killed" by having a very special bomb shoved down his throat. He exploded in a spray of crimson... only for EACH drop of blob to grow into a Lobo clone in a matter of seconds. The group of Lobos brutally murder the aggressor.... and then turn on each other, specifically murdering each other in bloodless ways, until only one remains. He announces that he is the true Lobo, and then goes off doing Lobo type things. It's implied that this happens regularly. The "Lobo clones from blood" thing was, at one time, curbed. Vril Dox II, son of Brainiac and founder of the Legion of Super-Heroes predecessor L.E.G.I.O.N., gave Lobo a concoction to drink, then sent him out on a mission. After one last army of Lobos, the cloning bit was deactivated, and only returned after Our Worlds at War, when the young Lobo (long story) is murdered by the Black Racer and his body respawns various Lobos. DC Rebirth also removes the clones from his powerset, though he still has over-the-top healing.
  • Manhunter: Paul Kirk, one of The DCU's numerous Manhunters, was given his healing factor by a particularly nasty group of Well Intentioned Extremists, as (apparently) was one of the clones they made of him, also known as Manhunter. The revival of Manhunter came a year before the introduction of Wolverine, and his power was actually referred to as a "healing factor," so Manhunter's series — which won many awards in the 1970s but has since fallen into obscurity — may be the Trope Codifier for modern comic books.
  • Martian Manhunter: The Martian Manhunter can regenerate from almost any injury. He once even grew his whole body from a severed arm.
  • The Shade: The Shade is one of these. No matter what you do to him — shoot him full of bullets, blast him to pieces, rip out his heart — he'll always regenerate his injuries. The only way to kill him permanently is to take away his shadow, removing his powers, then deliver a killing blow. In one potential future, he's still going strong after several millennia.
  • Superman:
    • Although hurting Superman, Supergirl, Power Girl... and other Kryptonians is pretty hard to begin with, if you manage it, they will recover quickly.
    • Superman once recovered from a slit throat minutes afterwards. It's unknown if this is a power of his, or just an above-average recovery time that has nothing to do with yellow-sun radiation.
    • It depends on which version you're talking about. Golden Age Kryptonians were genetically engineered. Yellow solar radiation makes it happen faster. Silver Age Kryptonians were normal humans on Krypton. When surrounded by a red solar forcefield, Superman was human but escaping "shredded every tendon in his legs." Upon escaping "his tendons instantly repair and all the pains of humanity melt away."
    • Doomsday, in The Death of Superman. It takes someone in Superman's weight class to even take him on, and on top of that he can regenerate from anything, including death. The process actually supposedly makes him stronger each time with a new defense adapted to whatever killed him so he can never be killed the same way twice. Also, unlike some of the others on this list, when he's killed he actually stays dead for days or weeks.
  • Swamp Thing: Swamp Thing seems to come back from anything as long as he is in proximity to water.
  • Teen Titans: Raven is able to heal herself by drawing magical energy from the emotions of others. Even with this power, she still falls into comas while healing on a few occasions.
  • Vandal Savage is another DCU example; he got his immortality from a meteor back during the Cro-Magnon era. He possesses one (as well as other powers) that considerably slow his aging process to the point of it being almost nonexistent.
  • Wonder Woman: Wonder Woman is pretty tough to injure in the first place but if she is she recovers incredibly quickly. For example in Generations Cheetah impales her with a spear, and when Wondy yanks it out and throws it back in Cheetah's direction the gory hole is almost entirely closed by the time the spear hits. In Wonder Woman (Rebirth) she pinpoints Maru's location when Maru puts a couple of sniper rounds through her, and instantly flies to intercept the mercenary as she heals.

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