Superpower Lottery / The DCU

The DCU

• Animal Man: Animal Man started off with the ability to copy the abilities of any animal near him, but after an epiphany that he was connected to all life in the universe, he could take on the traits of any animal at any time from any planet... any planet at all.
• Aquaman: That's right, Aquaman. The Butt-Monkey of The DCU for decades, the Trope Namer for This Looks Like a Job for Aquaman and requiring one Plot Tailored to the Party after another to be at all relevant, he is absolutely not as weak as common opinion believes. A combination of Required Secondary Powers (he can swim like a fish and punch people while under 500+ atmospheres of pressure, which is Superman level asskickery) and Fridge Horror (he commands everything that lives in the ocean; guess where Godzilla, Cthulhu, and the Leviathan live?) have had many writers portray him as horrifically powerful and outright feared by heroes and villains alike, and for very good reasons. And that is before considering that he is also the king of a lost civilization with its own military force of (slightly weaker) super humans, giant ocean monsters and super advanced weaponry.
  "He could control every creature that lives in the sea. But I don't think either of you know what that really means. Do you know, do you understand, do you have any idea how much life there is in just one single square mile of sea? I don't think you do... and if you multiply that by lots of miles in every direction... I'd never seen anything like it in my whole life... and God as my witness, I hope to never see it again."
  • Aquaman's wife Mera is no slouch in this department either. As an Atlantean, she has super strength and durability, and has been shown as capable of jumping out of the water directly onto a flying plane. But her greatest weapon is her ability to control, manipulate and shape water to her will. Her feats include pushing back a tidal wave the size of a city, drawing the moisture out of a person's body, and collecting the water in a person's body to flood their lungs.
  • Garth, the original Aqualad, originally wasn't much to write home about, simply having the standard Atlantean physical stats but not on Aquaman's level. But then he became Tempest and learned magic from the sorcerer Atlan. Since then, Garth has gained the ability to not only manipulate water but also control it's temperature, meaning he can either heat water to the point of evaporation or freeze it solid. He can fire purple energy beams from his eyes, sense magical energies, travel through dimensions, wields minor telekinesis, summon demons, astral project and, if he possesses Poseidon's Trident, can travel through time.
• Birds of Prey: Black Alice has the ability to instantly steal anybody's magical powers. And we do mean anybody. From Felix Faust to the freaking Spectre.
• Blue Beetle: Jaime Reyes may be considered a combination of Spider-Man and Iron Man, but he's got more than just that. His alien scarab is a Do-Anything Robot which grants him vast destructive power and a wide variety of abilities whenever he needs it. He's got Super-Strength, Flight, Voluntary Shapeshifting, Arm Cannons, Adaptive Ability to face his opponents, Nigh-Invulnerability, and much, much more. To give you an idea of what else he can do, he can turn invisible when he needs to, or breathe underwater whenever the situation calls for it, or make a special surfboard to ride the winds inside a tornado. His ability to adapt to any situation also deserves special mention, as he can produce Kryptonite radiation, and his blasts are strong enough to harm The Spectre. He once Held Back The Phlebotinum against a villain (who was kicking his ass at the time), because he refused to use any weapon that, to quote his scarab, had "theological implications".
• Captain Atom:
  • Captain Atom is at least on the same level as Superman and Martian Manhunter. In addition to Flight, Super-Strength, and Nigh-Invulnerability, he can project any kind of energy (including light on the same wavelength as that of a red sun... or radiation identical to that of kryptonite), he's close to immune to energy-based attacks, and he can become intangible at will.
  • Eve Eden aka Nightshade has a similar power set to Richard Swift. Like Swift, Eve can create objects and beings made out of shadow, which she's used to create living shadow homunculi and two ravens which she used to serve as scouts. She can make herself intangibile by transforming into a two-dimensional shadow creature and also gains super strength in this form. She is able to teleport to other locations by passing through the Land of Nightshades, her realm of origin.
  • Captain Allen Adam from the post-52 Earth-4 of DC's multiverse is a Reality Warper in a world where everyone else is a Badass Normal. (Doctor Manhattan was based on the original Charlton Comics Captain Atom; Captain Adam, in turn, is a combination of Manhattan and Captain Atom.)
• Dial H for Hero: The final Big Bad of the DC Comics series H.E.R.O. was a serial killer who found the power dial, which turns its user into a random superhero when used, and gained the power to have any super-power he could think of. Robby Reed, the dial's original user, points the trope out, saying that while your average dialed hero is pretty good, every now and then the dial hands out what he calls a "jackpot" — and the bad guy in question won bigger than anyone before or since.
  Robby: Most of the time, the dial gives you one power, or maybe a couple of related powers. This guy's going to hit the superpower lottery. We're talking Superman levels of power. Nightmare levels.
• The Flash: While Super-Speed sounds simple enough on paper, it's more like an Imagination-Based Superpower in the hands of an author who knows how to use his Techno Babble. He's used his superspeed to time travel, travel between dimensions, become intangible (and make other people or things intangible), become invisible, cure himself of detrimental conditions, increase or decrease the speed of other people and objects (including turning someone into, effectively, a living statue), create whirlwinds strong enough to lift others aloft (sometimes just by spinning his arms), extinguish fires, melt large amounts of snow and ice, fly, throw lightning bolts, and power large machinery, among other things. At one point he started fabricating items from pure speed, whatever the heck that means. One of his famous tricks? Infinite Mass Punch. It's exactly what it sounds like. And it should be able to oneshot anybody that has a physical form, even Superman. Flash eventually taught Supes the same move.
• Green Lantern: Green Lanterns have variously been shown to use their rings to control time, teleport, create sentient life, duplicate others, themselves, and/or their rings (which in at least one story explicitly multiplied the power they had), become intangible, turn themselves into Kryptonians, temporarily recreate the entire rest of the GLC and pretty much anything you can imagine. Hal Jordan once survived being killed by pulling his own soul back into his body. In order to write workable stories they've slowly been depowered to "making any object they can imagine" which is still pretty awesome.
  • Sodam Yat. Take Superman, give him a Green Lantern ring, then merge him with the Ion symbiote which makes its host practically nigh-omnipotent and you've got Sodam. Shame about the lead poisoning...
  • As Kyle Rayner pointed out during the Nero arc, a GL ring can split atoms. Now imagine that power in the hands of a lunatic...
  • The Blue Lanterns are explicitly more powerful then the Green Lanterns, and can bring other ring users up to their level temporarily. It helps that they have a crippling Weaksauce Weakness, though (namely, their list of powers on their own is impressive-but-useless-in-a-fight, like the ability to rejuvenate suns, and having powers that rely on the power of hope is an iffy proposition when living in a Crapsack World).
  • And then there's the Orange Lanterns. They have all the powers of a Green Lantern, are a Hive Mind Virus, and can absorb other energy constructs with ease, something even Sodam Yat has trouble with. Thankfully there's (technically) only one of them (and that one is too isolated and self-absorbed to act on his own unless goaded into it by external events).
  • The Black Lantern rings offer their reanimated hosts the benefits of the standard power aura and energy constructs that most of the other rings can generate, a Healing Factor that makes Wolverine's seem reasonable by comparison, and immunity to magic. This is on top of any superpowers the host might have had in life. Then again, since the ring also turns its host into a flesh-eating murderous zombie that has to (and worse, wants to) rip out hearts filled with emotion, and considering the host's soul isn't brought back either, and that you have to be dead in the first place, getting one of these rings isn't really a case of "winning" the lottery.
  • The wielders of the Indigo Light (compassion) can absorb and redirect the powers of other Lanterns of the rest of the emotion spectrum. What really sets them apart: by redirecting the power of a Green Lantern they can remove Black Lantern rings, destroying the zombie Lanterns.
  • And then there's the White Light, which was the original source of the other seven colors, and can not only override any and all of them, but can bring people back to life. Not that that means much.
  • During the 1990s, Guy Gardner lost his Green Lantern powers and ventured into a South American jungle to acquire a new set of powers. There, Guy discovered that he was a descendant of an extinct alien race known as the Vuldarians. After drinking the Water of Warriors, Guy gained the abilities of flight, enhanced strength, speed, durability and regeneration. He also acquired the power to survive in the vacuum of space, could could augment himself to adapt for survival and could transform all or part of his body into weapons. Guy lost these powers after the return of Parallax.
• Justice League of America: Amazo, by virtue of his All Your Powers Combined. The DCAU version became something similar through a variant of Power Copying, and eventually becomes a virtual god.
• Legion DC Comics: Captain Comet is a metahuman "born thousands of years before his time". Being an Expy of Superman - even having parents with the same name and being raised on a farm in the American Midwest - his abilities are fittingly incredible. Not only does he have powerful telepathic and telekinetic abilities, but he also possesses a genius-level I.Q., a photographic memory and clairvoyance. Comet originally had superhuman strength and durability; after his resurrection his physical power was significantly diminished but his mental ones greatly increased. He also acquired the ability to teleport.
• Legion of Super-Heroes:
  • There was a character in the Heroes of Lallor named Duplicate Boy. His power? To have any power he wanted. Fortunately, he was only a supporting character and rarely appeared.
  • In a similar boat: Nemesis Kid, who had the power to give himself whatever power was needed to defeat a single opponent. (Didn't stop him from getting his neck snapped by Projectra, proving that all the power in the world can't beat awesome.)
  • Then there is Earth-Man (formerly Absorbancy Boy), who has the ability to temporarily absorb as many powers as he wants, turning him, in his words, into a "one-man Legion". Unfortunately for the Legion, he's a sociopathic xenophobe who wants to wipe out all species except humans.
• Martian Manhunter: The Martian Manhunter's full list of Post-Crisis demonstrated powers covers half the Stock Superpowers Index (and not in a Jack of All Trades sense: he's a Flying Brick on par with Superman, a shapeshifter on par with Plastic Man, one of the most powerful psychics in the setting... and that still is only covering the meat-and-potato basics for him), and his Silver Age version was even more arbitrarily powerful.
  • And yet he is still always a victim of The Worf Effect. "Oh my gosh if he defeated Martian Manhunter how can Superman defeat him?" Apparently the answer to this question is always "Easily". Sometimes his astoundingly Weaksauce Weakness to fire plays a role in that (in the worst instances, lighting a match is as effective against him as green kryptonite is against Supes), but other times it's just that for all his powers, Superman trumps him in the one that matters above all others: Popularity Power.
  • The best power he has since lost is the ability to gain the powers of whatever form he changed into! He would lose his standard set (except for the ability to shapeshift), but who cares? Used sensibly (which it generally wasn't), this gives J'onn the winning ticket in the Superpower Lottery all by itself.
• Plastic Man: Rubber Man is not a power that sounds particularly potent, does it? Well, it is when cranked up to eleven. Plas' abilities basically boil down to absurdly flexible and instantaneous Voluntary Shapeshifting (his only limitation being his inability to change color, though he's even overcome that on occasion), combined with an absurd threshold for punishment: Plas has survived being shot, stabbed, melted, frozen-and-shattered, spread across the sea floor for thousands of years, and riddled with rubber bullets, and is basically immune to Psychic Powers and Forced Transformation due to his inhuman physiology. Famously, Batman once concluded that he was stronger than Martian Manhunter, and that if Plas ever went rogue... well, his contingency plan for that was really just a backup for his plan A: "don't let that happen". His son Offspring is noted as being even stronger, though exactly how tends to be vague (besides the ability to change color).
• Shade, the Changing Man: Peter Milligan's version. He could create hallucinations, he could create physical objects, he could change himself, he could change others, he could bring himself back from the dead, teleport, make and grow interdimensional spaces, and even travel through time itself! A few reasons why this worked:
  • Non-heroic comic book. That means all other characters get no gimmicks, so their character development has to be focused on character. And so you had purely normal, believable personalities who were at least as interesting as the guy with the powers, or moreso.
  • Shade's powers were just as often the plaything of his own issue-riddled subconscious. And the more adept Shade got at using his powers, the more colossally his fucked up mind could fashion a Mind Screw.
• Shazam!: Captain Marvel and his Evil Counterpart Black Adam. In addition to the standard Flying Brick power set, which enables them to go toe-to-toe with Superman or race The Flash, they're also The Needless and The Ageless in their superpowered forms (Black Adam is 5,000 years old), have powerful Healing Factors, are invulnerable (or at least incredibly resistant) to Mind Manipulation, and possess vast mental capabilities that include Super-Intelligence, a Photographic Memory, and the ability to speak basically every language on Earth. Oh, and unlike Superman, they have no Kryptonite Factor and are not vulnerable to magic.
• The Spectre: The Spectre's powers are whatever the authors feel he should have. Sort of justified in that the Spectre is more or less an extension of God (as in, the actual God, not some Sufficiently Advanced Alien pretending to be God).
• Starman: Richard Swift aka The Shade. You'd think that being able to create constructs and sentient beings out of shadows, cause an absence of light and teleport vast distances in a short amount of time would be impressive enough. But he is also virtually unkillable (demonstrated when he survived getting his heart torn out by a Black Lantern). His powers are considered to be outside supernatural forces such as magic and continued to work when the Genesis event depowered everyone else. A future version of himself was able to create corridors through time made of shadow. It's been stated by Dr Fate that even the Spectre would have a tough time dealing with the Shade.
• Superman:
  • Superman has so many powers that an entire title's worth of X-Men could be fielded with them (generally include Eye Beams, Flying Brick, Nigh-Invulnerability, Super-Breath, Super-Speed and Super-Strength). They also tend to be at the highest end of the power spectrum for each, rendering him immensely powerful even among other equally strong and widely powered individuals. While quite a few writers have managed to sort it out and write engaging stories with him in defiance of his closeness to being a Deus ex Machina, even other characters in the setting comment on (or become envious of) his many powers. The short form: With Superman around, the other guys in the Justice League can probably leave Supes to do his work.
  • The Silver Age Superman was given basically anything you could stick the word "super" in front of as a power and while modern Superman can juggle battleships, the old one could juggle planets.
  • Infamous character Superboy-Prime explicitly has the Silver Age level of power while modern Superman, while still pretty darned OP, has been scaled down from "destroy a solar system by sneezing" level. The insane, godlike absolute height of Superman's power... in the body of a bratty teenager. This is not a good thing, obviously.
  • Supergirl is Superman's cousin. She has all of his powers, and she's as powerful as him. And if that weren't enough, she has a Red Lantern Ring during the Red Daughter of Krypton story arc. In Supergirl (2011) #32 she says she might just be the most dangerous thing in the universe, and she is pretty right. In several continuities, her parents sent her to Earth hoping that she would be protected by her incredible powers.
  • Lampshaded in Many Happy Returns:
    Kara: Did you hear that? People screaming... and some sort of roaring...
    Superboy: I don't — Are you hearing...?
    Linda: I got nothin'.
    Kara: And now I can see it, right in Metropolis, with my telescopic vision!
    Superboy: Her what? Is there any power she doesn't have?
  • The original Power Girl is an Alternate Universe older Supergirl. She gets Superman's full combo platter, except her Kryptonite Factor only exists in an alternate universe. During the Lazarus Planet event, Power Girl gained telepathic powers but lost them during a fight with Johnny Sorrows. However, she also gained the ability to punch holes in reality to access the astral plane.
  • The Earth-born angel version of Supergirl was a Flying Brick with Psychic Powers (telekinesis and, for a while, pyrokinesis) and shapeshifting.
  • And then there's Matrix, an Artificial Human version of Supergirl from another dimension. In addition to being a Flying Brick, she was also a telekinetic, shapeshifter and could turn invisible.
  • Superboy-Prime isn't the only Superboy to win the lottery. Time travel and an Overnight Age-Up have revealed Kon-El will develop all of Superman's Kryptonian abilities, plus his tactile telekinesis will develop into full-blown telekinesis with which he can affect entire city blocks—and block magical attacks, one of Superman's few weaknesses.
  • There is also Kal Kent, the 853rd century Superman from DC One Million. "Faster than a speeding Tachyon, more powerful than a collapsing star, and able to leap between planets in a single bound". Full Kryptonian powers "evolved into the far future" with a bunch of add-ons like telekinesis, telepathy, and ten additional senses.
  • The end of DC One Million features the triumphant return of the original Superman, still alive and, after centuries of development, even more powerful than his descendant.
  • Bizarro and Bizarrogirl are imperfect Kryptonian clones/counterparts. They have the Kryptonian powerset, but some powers are opposite or reversed: flame breath instead of arctic breath, freezing vision rather than heat beams, and Bizarrogirl has petrifying vision in contrast to Supergirl's X-Ray vision.
  • Maxima is the product of selective gene manipulation by Almeracian scientists to produce powerful offspring to rule their home planet and her powerset more than lives up to this standard. On top of being near Kryptonians in all physical stats, she is able to teleport herself or others, create force fields, control metals, manipulate inorganic matter (usually to change her clothes on a whim), project Eye Beams, has powerful telepathy that allows her to read, scan for and deceive minds and telekinesis.
  • Superman villain Hank Henshaw, alias the Cyborg-Superman. Originally an Energy Being who could infest and control all forms of technology, Henshaw upgraded his act by using Superman's birthing matrix to create a cyborg body that incorporated Kryptonian alloys and organic parts cloned from Superman. Then he upgraded again by adding Apokoliptian technology, again when he became Grandmaster of the Manhunters, and again when he joined the Sinestro Corps. The end result is a killing machine possessed of all Superman's powers, plus technopathic control over an army of robots, the ability to instantly manufacture any Kryptonian or Apokoliptian weapon, a Green Lantern ring, and a complete inability to die. That last one is a real problem, as he'd really like to die now, please.
  • Doomsday's power is evolution. Whatever kills him, he comes back immune to that. Beat him to a pulp? He comes back much tougher. Throw him into space? He wakes up being able to live without air. He'll even develop defenses to get around those actively attacking him — he once was able to extend his bony knuckle protrusions and poison Superman and bellowed out fire to strike down the Martian Manhunter.
  • Vartox, an alien superhero and rival of Superman in the pre-Crisis days, who once admitted to Superman that he periodically discovered powers he didn't even realize he had.
• Swamp Thing: As an Avatar of "The Green" (the plane of existence for the hive-mind and life force of all plant-life on Earth), Swamp Thing can inhabit and animate vegetable matter anywhere, including alien plants, even sentient ones, and construct it into a body for himself. As a result, bodily attacks mean little to him, he can easily regrow damaged or severed body parts, and can even transport himself across the globe by leaving his current form, transferring his consciousness to a new form grown from whatever vegetable matter is present in the location he wishes to reach. He even grew himself a form out of John Constantine's meager tobacco supply on one occasion.
• Teen Titans:
  • Starfire is a member of the Tamaranian race, aliens whose bodies can absorb ultraviolet radiation, granting them super strength, super durability, flight and the ability to survive and travel through the vacuum of space. While being held captive by the Psions, Starfire was subjected to experiments that evolved her powers to the point she can release ultraviolet energy in the form of powerful blasts called "starbolts". She can release all of her stored energy in as a powerful explosion that has been compared to a small supernova. Starfire has also displayed the ability to drain power from Kryptonians, as they also get power from the sun — this ability was demonstrated in part nine of the New Krypton arc. Combine all of this with her extensive martial arts training and Starfire is easily one of the deadliest Titans around.
    • Starfire's sister Blackfire initially had all of Starfire's powers, except the flight due to a childhood disease that cost her that ability. After having her powers removed by Hawkman, Blackfire sought out the Psions to restore her powers. Not only did she regain them all but she also regained her power of flight. Blackfire's energy blasts have been noted to be considerably stronger than Starfire's and she has shown more versatility in use of her powers, like vibrating electrons. Blackfire is also an accomplished martial artist.
  • Raven started out as a Support Party Member for the Titans, with her abilities limited to teleportation, empathic healing and astral projection. The 2003 animated series added several abilities to her powerset to make her a more action ready character such as telekinesis, flight, shadow manipulation and other forms of sorcery. These abilities were added to comic Raven's powerset.
  • Lilith Clay initially had the power of telepathy and precognition. Over time, her powerset has been upgraded to include telekinesis and teleportation. Her Rebirth incarnation is dubbed an "Alpha-class" psionic.
  • Beast Boy's ability to take the form of any animal in existence is incredibly versatile to the point of being overpowered. Not only can he take the form of both prehistoric and modern day animals, but he can also take the form of mythical creatures like The Phoenix or even sapient and non-sapient aliens like when he transformed into a Gordanian during the Starfire rescue mission to the Vegan system. Beast Boy has also shown the ability to take the form of creatures that don't even exist, like when he chased after Madame Masque. In Tom Taylor's Titans run, Beast Boy develops the ability to replicate himself while in beast form. According to Marv Wolfman, Beast Boy can also take the form of ordinary humans but chooses not to because it offers no advantage to him. Add in his strong healing factor and Beast Boy is a surprisingly formidable Titan.
• Touch: Cooper Santiago can give anyone powers with the touch of his hand, but he has no control over what those powers are. Of the three people he touches in the second issue, the first develops impressive super strength, the second merely has his skin turn fluorescent and is useless for saving lives and the third develops impressive powers of telekinesis, but ones which have a negative effect on his health.
• Vixen: Vixen has the same powers as Animal Man. She's also been shown to be able to duplicate the abilities of mythological animals such as dragons or even the abilities of other metahumans. The DC Universe being a Fantasy Kitchen Sink sure helps.
• Watchmen: Doctor Manhattan (main page picture, in center), who is basically a nascent Energy Being who is just discovering that he is more or less a Physical God. This in a setting completely devoid of superpowers above Badass Normal. He is however also hamstrung by being omniscient along his own personal timeline, meaning he always knows the events of his past and future with perfect clarity and thus has no free will. Every action he takes is utterly deterministic because he views his future actions as having already happened. Furthermore, his mere existence has significantly altered the course of history - and with the exception of some new power sources and the early adoption of electric cars, not for the better. He would go on to top all that by interfering in the DCU timeline to create the New 52.
• Wonder Woman:
  • Not only does Wonder Woman have strength, speed, and impact resistance within a hair of Superman (Depending on the Writer at least), but she has a huge array of gear and minor abilities. Most people know about the block-anything bracers and the lasso that's unbreakable and made of truth (which is a "downgrade" from its old 'compel the target to do anything' powers, though recent writers have revealed it works by reaching down and grabbing someone's soul, which is fun), but did you know her tiara can cut anything? That she can speak with animals, and heals at an accelerated rate due to her connection to Gaia? That she's immune to fire? That thanks to the goddess Athena sharing her visions that she can see through illusions? That's not a complete list.
  • Donna Troy and Cassie Sandsmark have the Flying Brick powers and combat training that Diana possesses as well as a magic lasso of their own each. Donna's can mind control her enemies while Cassie's can channel Zeus's lightning.
  • Nubia, a reoccurring Amazon character, would qualify, in at least some incarnations. The pre-Crisis version had the standard Amazon powers of enhanced strength, speed, stamina and durability and was a well trained combatant. She also possessed a magic sword given to her by Mars which was considered the only weapon that was a match for Diana's lasso. The post-Crisis version of Nubia had enhanced superhuman physical abilities, flight and 3000 years of combat experience due to her immortality. She could also travel to different realms of myth and possessed the ability to turn anyone to stone with her gaze, a power that was bestowed upon her by the Gorgons.

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