Made Of Iron / Comic Books

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• The Avengers besides the likes of the Hulk and Thor who have Super-Toughness, fall under this.
  • Captain America thanks to the Super Serum has peak human condition meaning his metabolism and vitality is very high, but he's still technically (Depending on the Writer) as vulnerable as any other man without his Vibranium shield. But for a mere "peak human", Cap has survived things that would kill most Muggles including regularly jumping out airplanes without a parachute and doing a HALO jump from 10 miles up, getting knocked around by the Hulk, shot in the leg, electrocuted, having his armor blown off by Gambit and jumping into the engine core of Galactus's ship and surviving. Averted in The Death of Captain America where three bullets are enough to kill him, despite Cap's foe Badass Normal Crossbones surviving the same a few issues later.
  • Iron Man (no pun intended) is usually well protected by his Powered Armor, but Tony has found himself in numerous scrapes where his armor is missing or has just failed on him and he's managed to survive. In one issue Tony unarmored is placed in some Gladiator Games by Recorder 451 and has to fight scores of aliens and a thirty foot Killer Robot with Super-Strength which throws massive stone pillars at him and rather than getting mashed to bits like any normal man would, Tony takes it like a champ and keeps fighting. This dates back to Iron Man's debut in Tales of Suspense where he activates a booby trap which kills his entire escort and imbeds shrapnel in his chest, after getting captured Tony manages to stay alive long enough to build his first Iron Man suit and fight his way to freedom and become a superhero in the process.
  • Black Widow has taken a Russian knock-off Super Serum that enhances her physical condition to peak human potential, although like with Cap some of the things Natahsha has survived are ridiculous even by other heroes' standards. She's tanked a grenade explosion which only bloodied her face slightly and she survived falling 4 stories onto a car and was totally fine. Although those examples were nothing to compared to the time Nat was surgically cut open and operated on while she was still conscious and endured the whole process, instead of fainting or going into shock like any other normal human woman would.
  • Hawkeye also finds himself in very painful situations where Badass Normal or not, he'd realistically be at best quadriplegic for the rest of his life or at worst Ludicrous Gibs, but survives every time. Clint's been smashed by Hulk and remained conscious, had mounds of debris and cars fall on him, hit with a missile explosion, punched at full Super-Speed by Speed Demon and in Avengers Spotlight #30 got shot a dozen times with More Dakka from a gang of crooks and survived thanks to one kid calling an ambulance in time.
• Quite a few characters from The Bad Eggs manage to survive seemingly fatal incidents. Ript is eviscerated and later stomped on by a Brontosaurus (in the same issue, no less), and neither of these injuries seriously damages him.
• Batman:
  • This is sometimes subverted, as several older incarnations (Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, Kingdom Come, Batman Beyond) are noticeably battered by the years of combat. Kingdom's Bats must use a full-body exoskeleton just to get around.
  • The more recent comic books (i.e. Hush) tend to show Batman's upper body as pretty much a mass of scar tissue by this point.
  • Cassandra Cain is at least as bad about this. She usually gets out of the way, but when obliged to take a bullet she can do so and not even flinch. It's mainly practice.
    Robin: Are those... exit wounds? But they're so big.
    Batgirl: I... grew.
  • Nightwing has been punched through walls by Gorilla Grodd and Donna Troy, survived a No-Holds-Barred Beatdown from Lex Luthor after being gassed, stabbed multiple times in the chest, fell 140 feet off a building onto a bus and even survived getting shot in the head. Though just like his dear adoptive dad, Dick's body is a patchwork of scars as a result.
  • Jason Todd as Robin famously survived many swings from a crowbar from The Joker and only killed for real when the building he was in blew up. As Red Hood nowadays he's tanked getting hit with RPG rounds, smacked around by Artemis and smashed through buildings by Supergirl.
  • Barbara Gordon has still endured things like getting stabbed in the liver, getting smashed into a cab, taken multiple grenade explosions which buried her in rubble. Most famously Babs survived getting shot in the abdomen and through the spinal cord and left to bleed out albeit becoming paraplegic for years before recovering.
  • Damian Wayne despite being a small boy has taken beatings that would kill most adults and hit with a multiple explosions. Made of Iron appears to be a family trait.
  • Most of Batman's Rogues Gallery who aren't explicitly superhuman appear to be this, as the likes of Two-Face, The Riddler and The Penguin have taken damage that would kill most mooks. The Joker however has the most cases of surviving things that should kill him, so much so that he even has a trope named after his inability to be put down. Subverted with Joker in Batman: Endgame as he's got a Healing Factor thanks to Dionesium.
• Black Canary similar to her husband Green Arrow, has somehow survived things that would kill most normal people such as blows from the likes of Giganta and Mammoth, falling thousand feet into the ocean head first and even recovering from hits from Wonder Woman and having her Canary Cry reflected back on her. This could be handwaved through the Meta-Human gene Dinah possesses also giving her enhanced toughness, but DC just keep using the harder to believe Charles Atlas Superpower excuse.
• Blue Beetle specifically Ted Kord deserves a very special mention unlike both his predecessor Dan Garret and successor Jamie Reyes he does not possess the Scarab and is not superhumanly enhanced in any way. Yet in The Death of Superman Ted is able to survive a No-Holds-Barred Beatdown from goddamn Doomsday the behemoth that had strength to kill (comatose) Supes in a fight. While Ted is obviously grievously hurt it speaks to his fortitude that he’s still alive rather than being a bloody smear like any other man would be in his place.
• In Cruelty, Reis Northcotte is bloodied by a punch and kneed in the groin, but just shrugs it off and kicks his attackers' asses. This tips off the school nurse that Reis is drugged to the gills.
• Daredevil: Daredevil. One of the more memorable examples would be the time when he not only survives taking casual slaps from the Hulk, but keeps getting back up to confront the not-so-jolly-green giant again. Not surprisingly, this trait was one of the things that Frank Miller left as his legacy with the character.
  • Likewise Daredevil’s villains and allies fall under this.
    • The Kingpin has survived a superhuman No-Holds-Barred Beatdown from Spider-Man, multiple shurikens thrown into his arm, getting shot in the back by Bushwacker and most incredibly the frame of a building falling on him. Matt himself has broken his fingers just slugging his Arch-Enemy in the face.
    • Bullseye is ludicrously hard to take down, even after getting his spine broken and most other bones broken in fights with Daredevil and other heroes, he just comes back crazier than ever with bones laced with Adamantium. One time he got his nervous system electrocuted and his neck snapped and recovered in a few weeks despite a doctor’s diagnosis stating he was done for.
    • Elektra being Daredevil’s Love Interest naturally takes after him in this department. She’s survived getting kicked off a building, clobbered by Super Skrull, blasted by Iron Man 2099 and getting most of her own skull shattered in a brutal fight with Bullseye and stayed conscious long enough to defeat him and survived thanks to medics from S.H.I.E.L.D.
• Subverted to tragic effect in an issue of ElfQuest, where a couple of boys from a human tribe throw a stone from a sling to knock an elf off of a high tree branch, believing that elves are indestructible. They're not. The elf breaks his back. The elves do have magical healers, but the injured elf is found and killed by the boys' grown-up relatives.
• Despite all the punishment that The Fox goes through, outside of a black eye here and a bruise there, Paul Patton Jr. never really seems to be the worse for wear. Mind you, he doesn't even have superpowers.
• Green Arrow is usually not quite as ridiculous in regards to this as fellow vigilante Batman, but still dips into this frequently. Ollie has survived getting diced up by super assassin Deathstroke, hit with a RPG and battered around by superpowered opponents like Hawkman.
• Tallulah Black from Jonah Hex has survived things like being shot in the head, being horribly mutilated, and having a baby cut out of her. And of course, Hex himself has gone through all of the above (except the last bit) and more many times, and with only 19th century frontier medicine (sometimes!) available to bring him back.
• Kick-Ass. Handwaved by his dulled nerve endings but that fails to explain how he shrugs off the damage from repeated electric shocks and multiple beatings without requiring a lick of medical attention. The various pins and metal plates he got after the car accident would account for some of his resistance to injury, though this has clearly been turned up to eleven.
• Lex Luthor although usually bundled up tight in Powered Armor, has had many occasions where he'd be dead meat if he wasn't for his extremely high tolerance to pain. He's been knocked around and slammed into walls by Kryptonians and once got sniped in the chest by Gorilla Grodd which made him fall out of the helicopter he was flying and land head first in canyon... and he was healthy enough to recover and sleep with Sexbot Lois Lane shortly after. In the DC Universe Online Legends comic Superman is forced to redirect the falling Watchtower onto Lexcorp tower which crushes Lex inside, Lex got half his face ripped off, all four limbs severed and was impaled in five different places. Dead? Nope still alive enough to scream bloody vengeance at his Arch-Enemy and of course refuse to let Supes take him to a hospital. Luthor soon recovered thanks to Brainiac.
• Hard-head Wilson, one of the hired trouble-makers in the Lucky Luke episode Going Up the Mississippi. Captain Barrows mentions that he is Immune to Bullets, he does severe damage to the ship's steam engine by head-butting it a few times, and Luke's full-strength punches merely tickle him. Fortunately for Luke, being ticklish turns out to be his Achilles' Heel.
• Mortadelo y Filemón: And HOW! The list of accidents they have survived is basically endless:
  • They have been shot at any place in their bodies. Sometimes also they have gone through being shot several times, with each bullet leaving a hole.
  • They have fallen (or been thrown) from planes flying at more than 11,000 metres of altitude.
  • In Secuestro Aéreo, Mortadelo landed a jet airliner... at 800 kilometers per hour, without deploying the landing gear, and crashing it against the airport's control tower.
  • They have been subjected at point-blank explosions.
  • They have been cut into tiny pieces (and then glued or sewed back together).
  • They have been frozen.
  • They have been completely submerged in acid.
  • They have fallen in concrete pools that have solidified with them still submerged on it.
  • They have been put under objects that were very heavy (as in, the range of metric tons).
  • They have been thrown to outer space with no space suit whatsoever.
  • They have been devoured whole by different wild animals, mainly lions and giant snakes. They sometimes cry for help from the beast's stomachs.
    Mortadelo: (after being rescued by Filemón when a bird attempted to eat him while he was in an insect disguise) What a dreadful experience, boss! I've seen its esophagus, its craw and its sternum... from inside!
  • They have survived a NUCLEAR BOMB TEST.
    • They have actually died once or twice;
    • Once they broke an old fortune-teller's crystal ball... which prompted the old fortuneteller to reveal she was actually a buff thug in disguise. Cue Mortadelo and Filemón on their graves on a graveyard, apparently alive ("How are you doing, boss?" "Meh, kinda chilly in here.) After escaping their graves, Filemón tells the reader "You don't want to know how we did this." On the background we see an archangel chiding St. Bartholomew "I don't care if you're a fan of Mortadelo! The rules are clear; no miracles!"
    • They also died at the end of an episode of the old animated series by Estudios Vara. They were caught on a nuclear explosion (after reaching an island with a giant bullseye painted on the ground). Then we see Mortadelo and Filemón flying to Heaven, complete with tunic, halo and wings.
    • Lampshaded by Mortadelo on "¡Elecciones!" after falling off the building when trying to get into Ofelia's apartment to investigate her:
      Come on, boss, get up, that was just eleven floors! We've been through worse!
• Often prominent with The Punisher, particularly as written by Garth Ennis.
  • At one point, the title character was seen walking upright with a stabbed liver. The irony of this is that Ennis claims to hate powered superheroes, while constantly playing up all-human characters with superhuman feats.
  • It remains to be seen what future authors will do with the character in terms of this, since Ennis is leaving the character after eight years, his current story arc being the final one, and other writers have already started. In the two thus far published stories, the Punisher MAX Annual #1 and Punisher MAX: Force of Nature, he doesn't take so much damage as to invoke this trope.
  • In one of the Ennis' The Punisher MAX stories Frank takes a shotgun blast to the side that removes a big chunk, including an entire rib bone. One would expect Frank to stumble off and let himself heal in the manner that an extremely well-trained and diligent former Marine would do. But with the shotgun wound, Frank continues to fight on... not even bleeding. In the same story The Dragon gets impaled, shot, beaten, further impaled, his face quite literally blown off and lives several moments past that, before finally snuffing it.
  • It's implied in The Punisher: Born that Castle's near-inhuman ability to survive damage that would kill anyone else is that he made an unconscious pact with death during The Vietnam War that would let him continue to fight a war that never ended - for a price.
  • Both Nick Fury and Tony Stark keep extensive files on all known superhumans, and it's an indication of how dangerous they consider him to be in that both of them keep a file on the Punisher. In addition, they each make a point of commenting that Frank has a nearly psychopathic ability to tolerate pain.
  • In Jason Aaron's Punisher MAX run, the continuation of Ennis' run, Frank's years of injuries are finally starting to catch up to him. A doctor flat out tells him that his body is a wreck and will only get worse. However, in the same series Frank takes an extraordinary amount of damage. In one night he gets stabbed several times with a sai (including one through his forearm) and takes several gunshots (including one self-inflicted one through the left chest-shoulder area to hit someone behind him). Then he walks across town and is met with no less than six more gunshots, gets his head smashed both through a car window and against a fire hydrant. He remains conscious long enough to walk back into the city then back into the suburbs before passing out. The trope is ultimate averted when Frank succumbs to his injuries.
  • And OH GOD, all the shit it took to kill Max!Bullseye, The Mennonite and Barracuda, think Pittsy, The Dragon mentioned above, times five. And The Mennonite was a Amish guy! Okay, he used to be a mob enforcer before turning Amish, but still!
• Sgt. Rock often takes a hell of a beating. This trope also applies, unsurprisingly, to his Arch-Enemy, "The Iron Major".
• Many characters in Frank Miller's Sin City exhibit this trait to an incredible degree. Made of Iron is probably Miller's all-time favorite character trope for male protagonists. He just loves guys who can take an appalling level of punishment from vastly superior opponents through force of will, strength of character, or just innate badassery.
  • Two characters who seem particularly adept at shrugging off damage are Manute and Marv, who require really extreme trauma to be eventually killed: Manute in a hail of bullets courtesy of an army of prostitutes; Marv by being electrocuted in the electric chair - although notably, Marv doesn't die until the second time in a row he's electrocuted.
    Marv: Is that the best you can do, you pansies?
  • The animalistic Kevin is so good at avoiding damage that he doesn't get a chance to display his durability much, but the fact that he can survive being dismembered, eaten alive by a wolf, and eventually disemboweled, without even making a sound, until he's finally killed by decapitation indicates that he's got a lot of iron in him as well.
• Spider-Man:
  • True to his Determinator attitude and overwhelming belief in responsibility, Spidey refuses to let grievous bodily harm stop him. This includes getting shot multiple times, getting shredded by explosions, getting clobbered by Juggernaut, having entire buildings fall on him as well as falling himself from great heights on a daily basis. One time after lifting tons of metal rubble off himself, Spidey exhausted was then faced with an army of mooks who proceeded to dogpile him, a few panels later we see Spider-Man head bent and swinging his arms as goons lie defeated around him.
  • Avengers vs. X-Men takes this to a brutal extreme as poor Spidey finds himself on the receiving end of a No-Holds-Barred Beatdown from the Phoenix Force enhanced Colossus and Magik. Peter is beaten bloody to point where he's mask is full of blood, he can't feel his skull and even his thought bubbles are bloodstained◊. Colossus keeps telling him to stay down but as Spidey's inner monologue reaffirms staying down is not an option and he manages to survive long enough to trick Colossus and his sister into taking each other out.
  • Usually, Spidey's nemesis Mysterio is shown to be just a normal man hiding behind illusions and special effects, and gets easily beaten by Spider-Man once he's able to close the distance and figure out where the real Mysterio is. Some depictions, however, have him able to stand toe-to-toe with Spiderman and, while not able to beat him in a stand-up fight, can take a lot of punishment, usually enough to lure Spiderman into another trap. This has been explained sometimes as his stuntman training lets him roll with the blows and exaggerate their effect, making it look like he's taking a lot more damage than he really is.
• Taskmaster. Neither getting rammed by a speeding car, nor shot repeatedly, nor being kicked in the face by an enraged Spider-Man so hard that his body punches an economy-sized hole through the (in all likelihood heavily armoured) wall of the armoury in his hideout/gym will do more than slow him down momentarily.
• In both the comic and movie versions of V for Vendetta this trope enables V to pull off a subversion of the Instant Death Bullet:
  V: Did you think to kill me? There's no flesh and blood within this cloak to kill. There's only an idea. Ideas are bullet-proof.
• Wonder Woman Vol 1: The Golden Age version of Steve Trevor is able to shrug off at least two, attempted, executions and fight his way towards those who ordered said executions through waves of mooks. He also regularly hops back into fights after getting hit over the head with enough force to give most people rather serious brain damage.
• In X-Men a lot of the members who lack a Healing Factor or Super-Toughness certainly fall under this trope.
  • Roberto DaCosta from the subteam The New Mutants has super-strength, but not super-durability. He's explicitly just as vulnerable as any Joe SixPack... but somehow still survives nonsense like getting tackled through a brick wall. A degree of superhuman durability is pretty much a Required Secondary Power for any character possessing superhuman strength, as super-durable muscle fibers would necessarily result in super-durable muscle tissue, protecting most everything but the eyes.
  • Cyclops while it might be easy to write him off as a Glass Cannon has endured getting vicious clawed by Wolverine at close quarters and won. He's also tanked getting blasted by Norman Osborn wearing Powered Armor, slammed into the ground by Colossus and even survived getting caught in the multiple explosions of two massive trucks and a helicopter.
  • Gambit despite being considered only "athlete level" has been knocked around and slammed into the ground by the likes of Gladiator, Ares, The Juggernaut and even Apocalypse and got back up again with only a few scrapes. One time Sabretooth stabbed him in the gut and Gambit literally shrugged it off to rescue Marrow.
  • Nightcrawler has gotten punched around by Colossus, Spider-Man, Sabretooth, several Skrulls and Dracula (seriously) and been no worse for wear. He's also been electrocuted with 10,000 volts, exposed to the vacuum of space, hit with the combined blast of Storm and Rachel Grey and at one point shot through the chest. Possibly justified as Kurt's decision to leave Heaven might've granted him some divine protection.
  • Psylocke has bounced back from getting clawed by both Wolverine and Sabretooth, smacked around by Rogue and Juggernaut, blasted by Magneto, had her liver and kidneys ruptured, fell off a building with only Wolverine and his Unbreakable Bones to "cushion" her fall and even survived her own attempt at Seppuku.
  • Storm once got hit with a “mach one” punch which blew her into Stone Wall with air pressure alone and she recovered instantly. She's also fallen or been pulled to ground from several stories hard to enough to break the ground and gotten back up, though most of the times her friends are there to catch her.
  • Jean Grey has gotten knocked around, blasted with lasers and Hex-Bolts, sliced up and in a more recent X-Factor comic got thrown hard by Mojo and blasted by Jubilee’s powers, and she just shrugged it off. Squishy Wizard she ain’t. Subverted when she’s Dark Phoenix who has Nigh-Invulnerability and a resurrection based-Healing Factor, as unlike the movie Wolverine’s claws aren’t enough to kill her.
  • On the (anti)villain’s side Magneto has: taken beatdown from everyone from Namor to Blackbolt, survived getting blasted by Exodus and even Cyclops’s optic blast, kept fighting after Wolverine diced him up and once took a direct punch to the face from Colossus. Not even Nightcrawler who witnessed it can believe that Mags can still have his head on after that, though considering this is a man who survived Auschwitz maybe it’s not that surprising.

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