Nigh Invulnerability / The DCU

The DCU

• Black Adam: There's not much out there that can hurt Teth-Adam; there have been times when neither he nor Captain Marvel could hurt the other.
• Captain Carrot and His Amazing Zoo Crew!: Captain Carrot originally 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. In The Multiversity, his resilience now operates by Toon Physics, meaning he can survive practically anything, including decapitation.
• Darkseid is essentially a god and there are very few things that could even slow him down. Only his son Orion, Superman and Supergirl have been able to stand a one on one match with him. Similarly, Darkseid is one of the few opponents who can hurt Superman by way of having powers that are just that strong.
• Immortal Man was endlessly reincarnated with his memories intact.
• Legion of Super-Heroes: This is the sole power of Turtle. 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 Auxiliary along with Night Girl and his friend Sizzle with the hopes of eventually graduating to the Legion proper.
• Martian Manhunter has this naturally, but can augment it through his shapeshifting abilities. Mostly Made of Diamond, but can become Made of Air through Intangibility and Made of Liquid by altering his molecular structure. On top of that, he can also regenerate.
• Metal Men: They are the poster kids for External Repair. 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. Deserving special mention is Lead, who is most often used as a shield for the others. Not only is he very dense and durable, he blocks radiation — there aren't a lot of ways to hurt this guy. Also, as Mercury is fond of reminding readers at least once per issue he's "the only metal that's liquid at room temperature", so he's got both the Made of Liquid and External Repair versions of the trope.
• 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 homogeneous 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.
• 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. When combined with nanotech regeneration, it gets interesting.
• The Shaggy Man is a giant ape with the toughness of Superman & an extremely effective Healing Factor. General Wade Eiling transferred his mind into a Shaggy Man body to escape his brain tumor and gained these powers as a bonus. Unfortunately for Eiling, becoming the Shaggy Man also lowered his intelligence to Shaggy Man level, reducing the once brilliant general to just another dumb superpowered brute.
• Superman:
  • 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. In his most invulnerable version ("The Strange Visitor"), he's the most invulnerable thing in the universe and withstands the Heat Death of the Universe.
  • Superman's cousin Supergirl has this, too. In Red Daughter of Krypton she gets dumped in a star and survives. In Demon Spawn she flies through a fire and crashes into walls.
  • In Young Love, Linda says her invulnerability saved her life when her rocket landed.
    Supergirl: The landing should have killed me. But by then I was already quite strong. Invulnerable, the reporters would call it.
  • Supergirl's invulnerability is brought up in The Supergirl From Krypton (1959). Kara survives her rocket crashing when she arrives on Earth because she is invulnerable.
    Supergirl: Don't worry, Superman! I'm alive without a scratch!
    Superman: Great Scott, a young girl, unharmed! But... but that means you're invulnerable like me!
  • In The Supergirl from Krypton (2004), Kara survives a crash-landing, swims to the surface ignoring water pressure, crashes the Batboat into Gotham's docks and is not harmed by the ensuing explosion, a car crashes into her and gets totaled, several cops open fire when they see her and the bullets bounce off her skin, she crashes into a dirigible... all of it happening in the first issue.
  • In her second title, gets showered with molten metal, slammed into a railway, sets on fire... and she takes it all.
  • In Supergirl: Cosmic Adventures in the 8th Grade, Kara's invulnerability works in weird ways, but she's thankful for it.
    Supergirl: Thank you, invulnerability. You are my very bestest friend...
  • In Krypton No More both cousins endure radioactive energy blasts, lightning bolts, freezing beams, flames and faster-than-light space travel.
  • In Bizarrogirl, Supergirl gets smashed into a building and gets hurt, but her body doesn't get damaged.
  • In War World, Superman is concerned about Warworld's offensive capabilities when Supergirl points out that they are invulnerable:
    Kara: What's there to be afraid of? We're invulnerable, aren't we?
    Kal: Invulnerability is a relative term, Kara! Aside from Kryptonite and magic, we've never come across anything that could really do us physical harm — but then, we've never come up against anything quite like Warworld! I've got the uncomfortable feelings that this time we may have met our match!
    Kara: Point well taken — I'll remember that!
  • In Kryptonite Nevermore, all Kryptonite has been reduced to ordinary iron, and people think that Superman "is really invulnerable". However Superman lost most of his power throughout the story, to the point a bullet could hurt him.
    Such is the force that his invulnerable body smashes through the roof as though it were paper...
  • 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. Previously several Flashes were needed to restrain him. This is partly attributable to his having pre-Crisis power levels, unlike Superman himself.
  • Bizarro also counts, since he is an Evil Counterpart of Superman.
  • Mongul has generally been portrayed as being able to match Superman's strength. So has Cyborg-Superman/Hank Henshaw, due to most of his body being cloned from Superman's. Zod similarly has pretty much the exact same strength and durability as him.
  • Brainiac: As seen in Superman: Brainiac, he is stronger than Superman and almost totally invulnerable to harm. Even Superman himself has trouble actually wounding him. The reverse isn't true. He also has cloned body parts and cybernetic enhancements for patching up any wounds he does take (like when Luthor broke his neck), and is capable of transferring copies of his mind to other bodies (though he hasn't used this ability in a while, he would constantly abuse it in the 1990s and early 2000s) qualifying him for the Made of Diamond, External Repair, and Body Surf categories. The force-fields he builds are even tougher than he is. The shields on his ship regularly tank the largest types of supernovas, and in New Krypton several dozen solar-powered Kryptonians working together weren't able to scratch them.
  • Kryptonian invulnerability becomes plot-relevant in storyline Crucible when the main characters find out that destroying Korstus' cloning facility will trigger a self-destruct mechanism. Supergirl and Superboy volunteer to stay behind and destroy it while their friends run away because they are the only ones who might possibly survive the explosion thanks to their superhuman toughness.
  • The Death of Superman: Doomsday as well, likely even more than Superman himself thanks to a combination of being The Needless, a powerful Healing Factor, the ability to adapt to anything thrown at him, and finally, if something did kill him, the power to come back to life immune to whatever killed him the first time. And in the Hunter/Prey miniseries he's revealed to be, essentially, a Kryptonian science experiment, so he'd be just as tough as Superman even without all the above.
• 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...
• The Teen Titans villain Trigon is more or less invincible to any form of damage from all of the Titans. Only Raven in her ultimate form was able to vanquish him.
• 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.
• Zigzagged with Wonder Woman; she can take tremendous impacts and spar with Superman, but unlike Superman, she can be physically wounded (if you can get past her lightning-fast reflexes) by sharp or piercing objects. She can still take far, far more damage than normal humans and still keep fighting.
• 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.
• The Saint of Killers from Preacher. Scratch the "Nigh"; presumably a living saint walking the earth is considered an exception by the laws of physics, and they find it comfortable to ignore him. 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. 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.
• The S Andman 1989:
  • Deconstructed in the story of Element Girl. 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. Lucifer is not intimidated by the mark, but he still lets Cain go unharmed out of amusement. Cain is deeply shaken by the encounter.
• The Council of Spider's member code named Goliath has a low level of invulnerability. When Red Robin blows up the cave the Spiders are in he shields the members who are more susceptible to damage with his body to no apparent ill effects but he can be cut with the blade hidden in Tim's staff.
• Dynaman of The Golden Age has this, as one of his creators says that his invulnerability is based on his stamina, and that it would take an infinite number of punches to wear Dynaman down. During the final fight between him and the Golden Age heroes, where most heroes found themselves unable to do anything more than just crack Dynaman's helmet, Alan Scott as the Green Lantern uses his ring-powered punches to turn Dynaman into hamburger, softening him so that Libby Lawrence as Liberty Belle could pierce him through with the broken part of Starman's cosmic rod and electrocute him to death.

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