Times where Worf Had the Flu in Comic Books.
- The Ant-Man (2022) anniversary miniseries pits time-displaced versions of the three Ant-Men- Hank Pym, Scott Lang and Eric O'Grady- against All-Father Ultron, a version of Ultron who has taken the power of Odin in a distant future. It's explicitly stated that the only reason Ultron doesn't kill them instantly is that he's only just been resurrected and isn't fighting at full power, giving them time to work out a means of banishing him before he reaches his full potential.
- Averted in Avengers Arena. In response to the massive outcry over X-23 grabbing the Idiot Ball by attacking Apex (who was controlling a freaking Sentinel) head-on and predictably getting Curb-Stomped, despite her focus issue playing up her Awesomeness by Analysis, Dennis Hopeless attempted to invoke this trope in the letters column of the very next issue by claiming Laura had to act fast and didn't have time for a better strategy. The readers, however, weren't fooled, and it just made Laura come across as an even bigger idiot.
- In Batman vs. The Incredible Hulk, this trope is only enforced through Fridge Logic, as Batman 'wins' their first encounter through judicious use of his utility belt's knockout gas capsules. His ploy when the Hulk simply holds his breath is to kick him in the solar plexus, only working (as the narrative captions would have it) because the Hulk is so surprised at the fact of the blow rather then any physical pain and is forced to inhale the gas. Notably, when Batman tries this trick again, it fails, as the Hulk just waves the gas away with his hands.
- Batman: In Knightfall, Batman begins with an unspecified illness and the plotline is based around how he completely wears himself out by trying to capture all the inmates the Genius Bruiser Bane has released from Arkham, positioning himself for the Curb-Stomp Battle Bats will eventually receive. At least one earlier issue brought up that Bruce hadn't truly recovered from what happened in Batman: The Cult. A number of other problems had built up over time: his inability to capture Black Mask, beating beaten half to death by the spike-wielding Metalhead, his headbutting argument with Sarah Essen-Gordon, The Death of Superman: essentially a superhero Mid Life Crisis. Bane just picked the right time to run Batsy ragged.
- In Batman and Robin Eternal, Cassandra Cain makes short work of Dick Grayson. However, he was ambushed, already injured, and underestimated her skills. She does noticeably less well later against Jason Todd, who had fewer disadvantages. To complicate things, Dick says afterward that Cass was just testing them and wasn't fighting to her full abilities since doing so would've killed them. (It should be noted that Cassandra was, pre-New 52, often agreed to be the best (non-superhuman) martial artist in the world, with Lady Shiva, her mother, being her only real competitor).
- Batwoman: The titular hero's first encounter with Wolf Spider goes largely as expected: she, the more experienced fighter, quickly gets the upper hand and starts pummeling the crap out of him. However, he pretends to surrender and tosses a pair of hallucinogenic darts into her face. As she starts tripping out, Wolf Spider uses the opportunity to crack her across the jaw and kick her out a window into a dumpster. Needless to say, after Batwoman recovers she's rather pissed at being beaten by such cheap tactics.
- The comic continuation of Charmed (1998) does this to the final battle between Piper/Phoebe/Paige and Billie/Christy in the show, by explaining that Prue had been reincarnated and was unwillingly leeching off the Power of Three, meaning the Charmed Ones were not at full power.
- Doctor Strange lost to the Hulk during World War Hulk because he was channeling the powers of a demon that was too powerful for him to properly control, and because the Hulk tricked him and broke his hands to prevent him from properly casting spells.
- When Doctor Strange helped found the original Defenders, his immune system apparently took a vacation. The writers admitted to brainstorming "how do we keep Doc from wrapping up the plot in one frame" almost every issue. Lampshaded when Doc took a break from the Defenders to figure out why he was having so much trouble with his spells.
- Also in World War Hulk, Hulk defeated Black Bolt. Next year, Secret Invasion revealed he was actually a Skrull impostor. Possible subversion, as apparently Skrulls impostors were as powerful as the originals.
- In Empowered, Ninjette eventually gets into a Badass in Distress situation after being ambushed by a gang of rival ninjas and has to be rescued by Emp, a reversal of how events normally go. However, it is implied she only lost the battle because the initial ambush involved them shooting her with a dart containing sedative drugs and they used a special technique that made them able to ignore pain, allowing them to keep fighting through injuries that would incapacitate a normal human. Despite this, Ninjette still managed to kill and critically injure several of them before being overwhelmed.
- Several defeats and cases of Badass Decay of villains who were revealed to be members of The Intelligencia in Fall of the Hulks were explained to be staged for heroes as distractions from their true schemes.
- Fantastic Four: "It was just a Doombot." Really!.
- Similarly, The Flash, when in the Marvel Universe during the JLA/Avengers crossover, was unable to run as fast as he usually does (and, eventually, loses his Superspeed altogether) because 616 lacks the Speed Force. Otherwise he'd probably knock every Avenger not named Thor unconscious about .5 seconds into the required "Crossover Fight".
- Hulk was on the receiving end of a Curb-Stomp Battle at the hands of Zeus. That wasn't because of this; rather, that battle was the flu to set up for the next story arc, which required the Hulk to be significantly weaker than his powerlevel at the time normally allowed.
- When Erik Larsen subjected the Hulk to The Worf Effect at the hands of the new, improved Doctor Octopus, Peter David, who had been writing Hulk comics at that point, wrote him beating Octopus with two fingers, saying that last time he simply "had a bad day".
- Similar to the eternal Doombot excuse, Prometheus explained his embarrassing performances since his first, when he took on the entire Justice League, by explaining that in the intervening time someone had stolen his gear and impersonated him.
- In Marvel Versus DC, one fight that attracted particular opprobrium from fans was Lobo — a character who can go toe-to-toe with Superman and at the time could regenerate from a single drop of blood — losing to Wolverine (who at the time didn't even have his adamantium skeleton, though his healing factor was significantly boosted as a result). This was explicitly down to Popularity Power — the results were voted on by fans — but the match-up was so uneven the writers had to have Wolverine's victory take place off-panel; to be fair, the Lobo victory sketches had the same exact layout, except Lobo is smoking the cigar. A little while later Lobo mentioned that he'd actually been bribed by "some bald guy" (Professor X? Lex Luthor?) to take a dive in the fight.
- The Mighty Thor: The titular hero is said to only use about a fifth of his full strength when fighting humans, even insanely strong ones like the Hulk, out of fear of accidentally killing them. One of the few exceptions (he specifically noted he wasn't holding back) was when he fought Iron Man after Civil War (2006), and even after Iron Man's numerous upgrades in the past few years Tony didn't last thirty seconds. He didn't kill him or severely hurt him, though. He just turned his suit of armor into scrap metal parts, while verbally abusing him and calling him out on his recent misdeeds.
- An issue of New Avengers had Wrecker narrating a fight between the titular team and The Hood's crime syndicate, explaining that he wouldn't have lost to Luke Cage, who is significantly weaker, if Doctor Strange hadn't confused him with his magic.
- In Paperinik New Adventures Moldrock is a serial offender: he has explicitely enough power to casually alter the ecosystem of an entire planet and centuries if not millennia of experience with them, but every time he appears during the series there's something holding him back:
- The first encounter happened while he was stuck in the Pentadimensional World, an artificial dimension made to keep him imprisoned that heavily drained his powers (indeed he wouldn't have had any power at all had all his men not allowed him to absorb them), allowing Paperinik to fight him to a standstill.
- After he broke out he took time to let his powers replenish, but by the time he attacked in "The Mark of Moldrock" then restored the bodies of his four generals (and even gave them new abilities) and had to create and maintain around Duckburg a barrier capable of sustaining a nuclear strike, reducing his powers to a fraction of what they should be. He was still so powerful Paperinik considered facing him as a suicidal endeavour, though he was weak enough that they managed to get Trauma close enough to hit him with his Psychic Powers.
- In "Event Horizon" he has been tortured and drained by Korinna for weeks, then when he escapes he takes on the entire army of Corona and wins while taking care of not killing anyone. This allows Paperinik to knock him out cold thanks to his suit having been supercharged with gigawatts of energy and channeling it all in a single blow that Paperinik didn't actually expected to take him down (he just wanted to make clear he'd never surrender to him).
- Preacher; the flashback history of the hero's dad. All sorts of horrific things end up happening to Daddy simply because his army buddy was too damned stupid to go get the flu treated.
- Rachel Summers of the X-Men was the host of the Phoenix Force for a long while. Her relatively weaker power compared to her mother's stint as the Phoenix's host was due to Rachel actively suppressing the Phoenix's power. She mentioned at one point that she only allowed the Phoenix to use at most one percent of its power.
- Red Sonja lost a fight to Dark Annisia, then Annisia revealed Sonja had caught a deadly plague. It is later revealed that it is not a plague at all, but a poison, and Sonja had been fed some during the party the night before the fight.
- Red Sonja defeats rumored-undefeatable opponents on a weekly basis. The defeated use this excuse.Sonja: Every spoor of a mud village has an unbeatable local swordsman. They often say they "slipped" after I thrash them.
- A sort of double example for The Spectre. His level of power means that any time he gets involved in a big event, he could kill the villain instantly. Given that this would make for dull stories, he tends to lose encounters with big villains. The writers do usually give some sort of in-universe reason for it. In Blackest Night he couldn't smite Nekron, because he didn't have a soul at all.
- Spider-Man:
- Early in his superhero career, Peter is actually beaten and unmasked by Doctor Octopus in front of his friends and family. However, Peter's powers are on the fritz at the time due to a bad viral infection, which silenced his spider-sense and reduced his strength to that of a normal teenager, so no one believed that he was actually Spider-Man, but was just dressing up as Spidey in order to distract Doc Ock. Much later, when Peter reveals his secret identity to the world during the events of Civil War (2006), Doc Ock goes ballistic because he had known this information for years and never realized it was the truth.
- A borderline case occurs with the death of Gwen Stacy, as Spider-Man was suffering from an unspecified illness at the time. This tends to be omitted in almost all retellings of the story, however; given that Gwen's neck snapped due to the abrupt stop from Spidey's webbing, it's questionable whether the illness was a factor at all in her death.
- Spider-Man's sense of responsibility compels him to fight the villain of the month while impaired countless times, he's done it while sick, (that one in particular happens a lot due to Peter's tendency to swing around New York in Spandex in WINTER) with a sprained arm, while he's lost his powers for the 20th time... Basically, Spidey falls under this trope All. The. Time. Some writers consciously invoke the trope to even the odds between Spider-Man and low-powered villains, but sometimes it's purely to add artificial suspense.
- In The Death of Jean DeWolff, Daredevil has to pull Spidey away from the Sin-Eater before he murders the man in rage. He does so and defeats the web-slinger, but he notes that if Spidey was thinking clearer, that wouldn’t have happened.
- Squirrel Girl's defeat of Thanos had Uatu present to confirm that "that is, in fact, the one true Thanos, and not a robot, clone or simulacrum". Then it was later established that Thanos can make duplicates of himself perfect enough to fool the Watcher. (Which brings up the question of what's the difference between beating Thanos and beating a perfect copy of Thanos.)
- Superman:
- When Supergirl first returned in 2004, she was shown outperforming Superman to the point where it was speculated by Batman that she might actually be more powerful. Later, Batman thought it might be that Superman had been holding himself back all these years out of fear of causing death or destruction (which Supergirl in fact does in the early issues because she doesn't know her own strength.)
- In one Bronze Age story, Superman starts having Does Not Know His Own Strength moments, and fears his powers are growing beyond his ability to control. In fact, the reverse is true: the Parasite is slowly draining his powers, but he made a point of first draining his sense of self-control that normally keeps them in check. Since he was no longer pulling his punches, they seemed more powerful even though his baseline strength was actually dropping. By the time he figured it out, the Parasite had already drained a good chunk of his energy.
- In The Strange Revenge of Lena Luthor, Supergirl gets weakened enough after getting Kryptonite dust sprinkled on her face that she gets beaten by a common crook.
- Not directly referenced, but it may be significant that in Superman's first two post-Crisis battles with Mongul, Superman was operating on lower power than usual; he had been drifting through space away from any reliable sources of solar energy when he was first taken to Warworld, and basically just come back from the dead during their battle in Coast City.
- It has happened to Doomsday every time after Dan Jurgens stopped writing him. The Death of Superman had him take out the ENTIRE Justice League of the time singlehandedly and fight Superman to a standstill to the death of both of them. He would later nearly kill Darkseid in another match and wipe the floor with Grant Morrison's Justice League. After his death and resurrection post-Our Worlds at War, he gains intelligence and as a result becomes so scared shitless of dying again that he becomes unable to fight with reckless abandon and even later learns compassion, both resulting in Doomsday becoming much weaker and getting beaten by opponents that otherwise wouldn't be able to scratch him.
- This usually happens on Superman's part whenever he fights Batman. For example, In Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, Superman was not only weakened by his age, as indicated early on in the story, plus being at ground zero of a nuke so powerful it caused a nuclear winter by itself just a few days before and said nuclear winter limiting the amount of sun rays he could receive, but he was also holding back because Batman is his friend. This even gets confirmed in the sequel comics, where it's revealed that Superman was indeed holding back all along and when Batman realizes this, he has a most appropriate reaction.
- Played in advance in the Superman vs Predator mini-series. Under normal circumstances the Predators would have posed no threat whatsoever — so the story had Superman catch alien flu just as he arrived in the jungle where they had landed.
- A better explanation happened in Superman vs Aliens. The battle took place on a planet circling a red star, and since Superman's might mostly comes from the radiation of a yellow star...
- And when Superman fought Muhammad Ali, the aliens behind the Let's You and Him Fight had made sure it was under red star radiation.
- In Superman vs. the Amazing Spider-Man, Spidey initially holds his own because Lex Luthor and Doc Ock had unknowingly (to him) sprayed him with a blast of Red Sun Radiation. Superman is about to use a full powered punch when he realises that the impact would subject Spider-Man to the Chunky Salsa Rule and stops it short, the sheer blast of the punch knocking Spider-Man through several buildings (through their windows.) Spidey gets angry and charges Superman, only to have the Red Sun Radiation wear off just as he lands his first blow. As he puts it a couple of panels later:Spider-Man: Oboy. Oboy. I think I just broke my hands...
- Retroactively done to every single Superman vs. The Flash race. Superman tries to convince Barry Allen not to return to the speed force and states that he's been able to keep up if not win in all their races. Barry simply tells him "Those were for charity, Clark," and leaves him in the dust instantly. Fastest man alive indeed. This is an odd case; Superman really was about as fast as Barry back when those issues were actually written, but Superman was powered down substantially in 1986. Even if a lot of that power has returned he is not back to Silver Age power levels, so when those Silver Age stories became canon again, this explanation became necessary.
- In Justice, Captain Marvel is faster than The Flash.
- Ultimate Fantastic Four: Thanos fights Thor, and states that if the fight had been when Thor's pantheon had human followers, Thor would have won. Since he doesn't, Thanos wins.
- In Wolverine Origins, Dog only attacks James (the future Wolverine) after James exhausted himself cage-fighting during the previous night. Dog had also slipped one of James' opponents a set of brass knuckles to make sure James would be injured even worse. And James still nearly kills Dog after Dog makes him remember that Dog was the one who fired the shot that killed James' father.
- One of the more infamous fights in the history of the X-Men is the battle for leadership of the team between Cyclops and Storm — who at the time had no powers. Storm won by stealing Cyclops' visor. Without the control of the visor, any attempt to continue fighting would've run the risk of killing Storm (or any of the audience), so he gave up. Several years later, Cyclops' ex-wife Madelyne Pryor announced that she'd used her psychic powers to make Cyclops lose. This is a relatively easy Retcon since Cyclops spent much of the fight distracted by a major argument he and Madelyne had just been having, so to say he didn't exactly have his mind on the battle was very easy to change into a result of Madelyne's direct influence.
