Asterix plays with this trope. There is a Gaulish Undefeatable Little Village that the Romans cannot conquer, because their local druid Getafix created a magic potion that gives super-strength. However, it is not produced on industrial levels to simply remove the Romans from all Gaul and undo Caesar's conquest, or even to take the fight to Rome at all, because Getafix only allows its use for defensive purposes, and will not reveal the recipe to anyone (or, more exactly, only to another druid that would also keep the secret, but that never actually happened). And, besides, that would ruin the tone of the comic book, which is a comedy. On the other hand, the magic potion and the main characters have had many small effects on the world here and there, mostly of the Beethoven Was an Alien Spy variety, such as the broken nose of the Sphinx.
Usually played straight in Astro City, as Kurt Busiek believes that it's important that the stories take place in our world. That said, a key event in the universe is Samaritan averting the Challenger shuttle disaster, which ushered in a new era of inspirational superheroes.
There's also the story of Vincent Oleck, a lawyer who successfully defended his client in a murder case by citing superhuman tropes such as Shapeshifting, Evil Twins, and Death Is Cheap. Later, it is explained that the case caused a major overhaul of praxis in Astro City's legal system, so the defense wouldn't work in the present day.
Deconstructed in the Astro-Naut's story. Roy Virgil, a.k.a. the Astro-Naut, developed many super-advanced inventions during his interplanetary adventures. However, he refuses to share them with anyone because he's convinced that The World Is Not Ready for them. The public is outraged that he's hoarding futuristic technology from them, especially as this was during the start of World War II and the Allies' war effort, causing his popularity to plummet.
Robo discovers that the Japanese have a set of Powered Armor suits that they use solely for fighting Biomega. When Robo points out all the civilian applications of the technology, he is told that they are ludicrously expensive and require hours of maintenance for every minute of operation ("That's less than ideal." "Yes, we're working on it."). Likewise, the Biomega themselves are a human invention, but the crazy scientist who made them decided that converting the entire world to Biomega made more sense than, say, selling a few non-replicating monsters to the military.
This really reaches its zenith when Robo discovers that after Tesla died, the government confiscated all his unfinished research and rather than using it to further science in general, they wasted it on trying to win the Cold War. Which ended up petering out exactly like it did in real life, meaning they pissed away Tesla's life work for no reason. When Robo learns this, he practically goes catatonic.
Robo: You could have helped them...
Another Atop the Fourth Wall episode: Linkara asks why the scientist in Brute Force (who can grant human intelligence to animals and create transforming battle suits) doesn't use this technology to benefit people in wheelchairs.
The superheroes, for the most part, really are useless. When The Seven try to avert the comics' version of 9/11, they fuck it up catastrophically with the Brooklyn Bridge being destroyed instead of the south World Trade Tower. The message being that the military and other trained rescue organizations are The Real Heroes. In The Boys, the US military had shot down the airplanes heading for the Pentagon and North World Trade Center Tower, thus reducing the 9/11 death toll from over 3000 to around 1000.
A key subplot of the series is the repeated failure of the MegaCorp Vought-American to avert this trope by making superheroes part of the US military. Their first attempt to deploy superheroes during World War 2 ended in all the superheroes dying in a Nazi ambush.
An obscure Golden Age example. In Target Comics' "Calling 2R" feature, a benevolent scientist known only as Skipper transformed his estate into Boystate, a high-tech refuge for unwanted boys. Boystate residents possess a variety of high-speed aircraft (by 1940s standards), "force wall" forcefields, cosmic-ray-powered healing chambers, portable radio communicators and other nifty gadgetry. But while Skipper was very happy to share his technology with his charges, he went out of his way to make sure it never left Boystate's confines. The later stories averted it when World War II broke out and Skipper was ordered to develop high-tech weaponry for the army. He was happy to comply.
While being mostly on par with real life, Diabolik has a few technologies like that:
Justified with the various attempts from good guys to reproduce the title character's plastic masks, as only Diabolik knows how to prevent them from melting. In fact, attempts at reproducing them drove one scientist insane.
One episode had a character discover part of the formula of Diabolik's masks. Knowing the potential for this discovery, he promptly ran to his boss to tell him... And got arrested for another crime before he could tell him. When he got out of jail he did use his knowledge to make a device that detected those masks... But did not give it to the police, he instead sold his services to a shady private eye, resulting in them getting ultimately murdered by Diabolik to preserve his advantage.
His nephew later found the blueprints, and gave them to the police immediately. It was actually a trap of Diabolik.
Gyro Gearloose from the Disney Ducks Comic Universe. Over the course of time, the many different writers did let him invent anything, from simple mechanical contraptions which could theoretically also work in Real Life, to ultra-soft science fiction stuff like e.g. Time Machines. In spite of all this, Duckburg does always stay at the contemporary tech level. Same thing applies to his Mickey Mouse Comic UniverseExpy, Doc Static.
A subset is that, sometimes even without Gyro, the world is frequently shown to have the capacity for advanced space travel, and even encountering alien civilisations is not too hard. Yet scientists never make any use of this technology to, you know, study space — if there's ever a plot involving scientists' efforts to send anything to space, they're likely to be suddenly back on the "Mars rover" level of technology. Something of the same thing applies with time machines, although it's averted in the stories where Professor Zapotec sends Mickey and Goofy to study the past with a time machine.
Scrooge himself also qualifies. Given the fact he might be the richest character in all of fiction, his funding alone could pretty much solve all the world's problems. A pity he's cheap.
Ex Machina plays with this trope. The main character is a former superhero who has the ability to talk to machines (so he could tell a train to stop itself, tell a computer to turn itself on, and tell a gun to jam itself). However, he hangs up his cape after he screws up a bit too much (plus the government specifically forbade him from doing any more superheroing while it was studying his gear). He only goes back to work on 9/11, where he's not quite fast enough to stop the first plane, so one tower is still demolished (he saves the other one). He then decides to run for mayor of New York City, figuring he'll do more good in that role. For the most part, he's correct.
Subverted in Invincible. Atom Eve, who has an Imagination-Based Superpower that lets her rearrange matter to the point of borderline Reality Warping, decides that being a superhero is a waste of her potential and starts doing humanitarian work in third-world countries like terraforming barren African savannahs into fertile landscapes.
Qubit, Irredeemable's Captain Ersatz of Reed Richards/The Doctor, invents and routinely employs teleportals to travel around the Earth and to other planets in an instant. He is, however, fiercely protective of the technology, and his fears are proven justified when the Vespa weaponize the technology and use it to stop the Plutonian:
Qubit: I'm as flattered as Einstein was when he saw Hiroshima.
In Judge Dredd, the availability of superscience to the public varies from storyline to storyline. In some issues, organ theft/traficking are major crime operations. In other issues, hospitals regularly provide cloned organ transplantations to patients (thus making organ theft/traficking redundant). Human brains can be transplanted into humanoid robots in Mega-City One. However, the cheapest model is $120,000 and over 90% of Mega-City One's residents are on permanent welfare.
Jupiter's Legacy viciously deconstructs accusations of this trope, pointing out that just because someone can change the world doesn't mean they actually should; having superpowers or being super-intelligent doesn't magically imbue people with the political and economic knowledge needed to understand the impact of their actions, nor the moral character to affect the world ethically. The Big Bad is a Reed Richards Expy who decides to make the sort of grand sweeping changes to society that critics say the real Richards should make... and he does so by taking over the world because it's the only way he can enforce those sort of unilateral changes. His efforts do succeed in changing the world, but only for the worse; the glut of super-advanced technology completely destroys the global economy and puts millions out of work, said technology is so bleeding-edge that it's downright dangerous for normal people to use (multiple cities get destroyed when his experimental power plants explode from an unknown malfunction), political upheavals lead to mass displacements and refugee crises, religion is outlawed because of his personal biases, and any dissent is brutally suppressed under the logic that Utopia Justifies the Means, with any superheroes who fail to fall in line with the new world order being jailed without trial or just straight-up murdered.
In the graphic novel The Network (which was about a television network devoted exclusively to covering superhero news) one of the news headlines explained "The heroes have the ability to end poverty and hunger. So why don't they? Find out in an exclusive interview with the Champion."
Planetary is a long and thorough deconstruction of the trope. The Four are obvious corruptions of theFantastic Four who suppress any and all technological advancement by hoarding the incredible scientific discoveries they encounter for themselves, demonstrating the amorality of finding something that could reshape modern society for the better overnight but just not doing so with it.
William Leather: We are adventurers, my crewmates and I, on the human adventure. And you can't all come along.
A side-story explores the logical extension of this trope, with NASA outsourcing the design of their new space rocket to Herschel Clay, a metahuman Gadgeteer Genius with a love of tinkering. Problem is, by the time their own engineers have had a chance to try to comprehend his designs Clay has already found a way to improve it. In other words, they get a new design in the mail that becomes obsolete by the time they're ready to take that one off the drawing board, and so on: They simply can't keep up with his constant improvements.
PS238 also averts this trope with the Rainmaker Project, a section of the school where students with powers that don't lend themselves well to combat are trained on how to use them in civilian life, like a kid with the ability to turn anything into food being trained to turn things like rocks into nutritious but low calorie diet foods that tasted like high quality chocolate. It's also shown that many superhumans use their powers in a variety of ways for the civilian sector; the previously mentioned Herschel, for example, has his own company that apparently produces a large number of superscience inventions for everyday life.
Rough Riders: Invoked by Theodore Roosevelt himself when he blows up Edison's lab during the finale of Ride or Die as he was wary of the man's inventions being used to elevate warfare on a catastrophic scale. Heartbroken over the loss of a lifetime's work and feeling his age, Edison never tried to rebuild his enormous stockpile of high-tech wonder.
Deconstructed with Knuckles' ancestors, the Brotherhood of Guardians. They had the most advanced technology on Mobius, combined with potent mystical prowess and powerful allies. At no point did they try and stop Dr. Robotnik during his original decade long spree of terror, even when he was a clear threat to them, only getting involved in areas of echidna interests. It's suggested that their obsession with following their centuries-old traditions was the problem, with even their allies calling them out on it, saying that echidnas would become a footnote in Mobian history, whereas they could usher in a golden age if they got involved with other races. When Dr. Robotnik returned, now as Dr. Eggman, Princess Sally asked them for help, but they refused because she couldn't agree to using their most advanced weapons, suggested to be nuclear. Since an early issue in the Knuckles comic book established that echidnas do have the tech to fully restore an ecosystem ravaged by nuclear weapons, this wouldn't be too big a problem, but they never mentioned this to Sally which makes it seem like they withheld that knowledge just to make her leave. Eventually Dr. Eggman caught up to their tech enough to attack them directly, getting most of the echidnas slaughtered, and the Brotherhood captured.
Another interesting aspect is roboticization. When the process was created by Sonic's Uncle Chuck, it was meant to save people who were dying until a way to save them was found. However, Robotnik found the thing, altered it and when Sonic's parents became the first two victims, Uncle Chuck fell into despair and retired in shame, not knowing that it was altered. Years later, an alien race called the Bern came to Mobius, abducted all of the roboticized Mobians and reverted them back to normal... then it turned out that it was banned after a testing on a techno-organic species killed them off.
At the end of David Hine's Spawn: Armageddon storyline, Spawn is recreating the universe after the cataclysmic battle between heaven and hell. When Spawn is asked if he wants to cure the common cold or end global warming, Spawn says no, for he has done enough for humanity and it is now time for them to solve their own problems.
In Sultry Teenage Super-Foxes, the US military develops an "alchemy ray", which they test by turning dog poop into gold... and then the head scientist remarks that it's considered "too theoretical" for them to get more funding. Linkara flips out at this, pointing out that such a device is infinitely useful since it could be used to safely dispose of nuclear waste (among other uses). The machine is destroyed in the accident that creates the titular heroes, rendering the whole debate moot.
Superior heavily averts this, with the titular character (a Superman Substitute) wasting no time in trying to solve the world's problems, including rounding up terrorist groups singlehandedly, preventing natural disasters, and carrying shiploads of food and water to impoverished areas. It's implied, though, that when he leaves at the end, the world mostly reverts to normal, as there's always going to be people who need food and clothing.
In Supreme Power: Nighthawk vs. Hyperion, Nighthawk lures Hyperion to Darfur in hopes that Hyperion will become more proactive on the country's suffering. Hyperion kills Sudanese President Al-Hamas, although the disposed President assures Hyperion that another brutal ruler will just replace him. The story ends with superpowered Africans ordering the titular characters to leave, saying that two people can't fix a country of millions of people.
Played with in The Uniques. The eponymous super-beings played a major role in all of their world's events since they emerged in the late 1930s, but in the end, no matter how many divergences they created, the end results weren't that different from the real world.
