The Ace / Comic Books

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• Asterix: Asterix is, despite his small size, the best warrior of the village. And he also happens to be one of the smartest characters in the whole series.
• The Avengers: Hawkeye was this during the early run of West Coast Avengers. In a scene in which he's fighting to keep the Quinjet he's piloting from crashing, the narrator comments that many Avengers get praise for doing one thing well, but not Hawkeye—because he does MANY things well.
• Batgirl:
  • Bette Kane is known to excel at anything she sets her mind to: swimming, gymnastics, tennis, high school studies and vigilantism.
  • Cassandra Cain is seen as such by her peers Stephanie Brown and Tim Drake, and her fighting ability in particular is considered unparalleled.
• Batman: Batman is the Ace to such a degree that it's practically a super-power. He's the world's greatest detective, non-super-powered melee fighter, physicist, chemist, engineer, tactician, strategist, pilot, you name it. But it's balanced out by him having serious issues. He also tends to lose badly when faced with a brand new adversary he's had no opportunity to study and prepare for.
• Batwoman: Not quite to the extent of her cousin Bruce, but even before becoming Batwoman, Kate Kane was one. She was both a star student and world-class gymnast in high school, and a high-ranking West Point cadet who excelled in academic, physical fitness, and military skills. In her vigilante career she's impressed the likes of Batgirl, Wonder Woman, Alfred Pennyworth, and Batman himself, just to name a few.
• Boxers & Saints: Red Lantern Chu is considered to be this by all of the people in the village of Shan-Tung.
• Captain America:
  • If you're looking for your resident Ideal Hero, then look no further than Captain America, the Captain Geographic and the Long-Lived WWII hero. Let's see... first, he single-handedly demolished the Red Skull and Hitler's efforts in America and aided in liberating Auschwitz, then after being frozen for seventy years, he returned no worse for the wear and became the de facto leader of the Avengers. True, he isn't in any way the strongest or most powerful of the heroes, but this is the man who can stare into the eyes of the Hulk and make him back the fuck down, gives Hawkeye an inferiority complex and has shown time and again he's not The Leader for nothing; he's an exceptional strategist, a ridiculously skilled athlete, one of if not the most skilled martial artists in the world and has a Heroic Willpower on par with Silver Surfer. The fact that he's so damn pure and idealistic only makes him more beloved. To put it simply, there's a reason he's the one everyone goes to for leadership in times of crisis.
  • Utterly deplorable as he may be, Red Skull is a fine example of this, much like his nemesis Captain America. He's a brilliant politician, orator, military leader, etc, who has read at least one book on almost every arcane topic and recalls them word for word, speaks several languages and is a world-class soldier, martial artist and dead shot who can offer Cap a fair match hand to hand. The only thing that holds him back is not only his unhinged personality, but his blind devotion to the Nazi ideals, which often conflict with his greater goals.
• DC One Million: The reason for Solaris The Tyrant Sun's second Face–Heel Turn was that every single descendant of Superman proved far nobler than him, causing great jealousy on his part.
• Daredevil: Daredevil is probably The Paragon for street-level heroes in the Marvel Universe. He's a highly gifted lawyer, strategist and quick thinker, a second-to-none athlete, a martial artist to rival the MU's best and his skill and control over his Super-Senses have allowed him to perform Beyond the Impossible feats. And even when he is beaten, he absolutely refuses to stay beaten. His Heroic Willpower is arguably his true superpower.
• Disney Ducks Comic Universe: Samuel Steele from Don Rosa's The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck is a perfect example of The Ace. Not only does he give Scrooge a run for his money, but he stands unscathed as a warehouse full of kerosene explodes in his face point-blank (while everyone around him ends up with Amusing Injuries), simply because it is not proper for a superintendent of the North-West Mounted Police to be 'blown up'.
• Doctor Strange: Doctor Strange, while his power has been toned down in many stories, is canonically a resident Ace of the Marvel Universe; he's a genius level intellect, a gifted martial artist, a talented athlete and (usually) by far the most powerful sorcerer in the setting, to the point that at his peak, even the strongest of heroes or villains would be no match for him, with even beings such as Dormammu, Uatu the Watcher, Eternity or freaking Galactus being wary of his power. In fact, he was this even before he became a sorcerer, being one of the top surgeons in the world with an incredible track record, though he eventually realised the mystic arts was his true calling. His knowledge in the arcane and the multiverse is unparalleled and he has thousands of years of experience, owing to being The Ageless. It's quite telling that for him, kicking the asses of unknowable Eldritch Abominations is more of a day job than anything else.
• Fantastic Four: What happens when The Ace is a bad guy? Well, in that case you probably get Doctor Doom, who is: one of the Marvel Universe's greatest geniuses; an Omnidisciplinary Scientist who has done everything from curing diseases to building robots to creating fully functioning time machines; a sorcerer almost on par with Doctor Strange; the semi-benevolent dictator of a small Central European nation; the builder and wearer of a suit of armour to almost rival Iron Man's; a skilled musician and appreciator of the arts; and even when denied all of the above, he's still physically fit enough to kill lions with his bare hands.
• Herbie Popnecker (a.k.a. The Fat Fury), as a sort of comical early deconstruction of superheroes, would qualify as a preeminent example, though he doesn't look or act the part, and his parents are oblivious. Invincible, endlessly talented, loved and trusted by his allies, respected and feared by his enemies, irresistible to women (on one occasion, much to his chagrin), famous throughout the universe, there's simply nothing he can't do with ease.
• Green Lantern: Hal Jordan could be categorized as this, what with most other characters recognizing him as one of the greatest of his contemporaries.
• Guarding The Globe: Best Tiger. The world's greatest marksman by a ridiculous margin, he wears a blindfold so his work won't be boring. He infiltrated a bunker that only Magnattack should have been able to access. He once incapacitated ten men with one bullet (and no, they weren't standing in a line). His Guardians of the Globe teammate Knockout thinks he really is blind, and that his kung fu is so good he can somehow pass for a seeing man, and he deduced that Outrun wasn't herself because he could hear the difference in how she shaves her armpits. As he puts it, they don't call him "Good Tiger" — he's the best. He is, however, antisocial in the extreme, and has no life outside of being Best Tiger. The Best Tiger is always hunting.
• Jupiter's Legacy: The Utopian is the premier superhero of the setting, being one of the most powerful, apparently one of the first, and a leader for the superhero community in general. However, he is not quite respected as others see him as increasingly old-fashioned.
• Kick-Ass: While Kick-Ass is not one, but Justice Forever gladly accept his offer to join the team based on his reputation as one. Although he is one of the more competent and likely the most experienced heroes.
• Lucky Luke: Lucky Luke might be the most notable example from Franco-Belgian comics. A "poor lonesome cowboy" and gunslinger with impossible aim and reflexes (he can draw faster than his own shadow, after all!), he's always in control and usually two steps ahead of everyone else. This is purely Played for Laughs.
• The Mighty Thor: Thor is practically the perfect warrior among the Asgardians. He's the strongest and most accomplished member of his race with centuries of battle experience, one of the biggest winners of the Superpower Lottery in the Marvel Universe, the beloved son of Odin and heir to the throne of Asgard, a founder of the Avengers, and one of the most respected heroes of Earth. As seen in the God of Thunder run, races who worship other pantheons pray to him for aid, and often, he answers.
• Monstress: The comic has a backstory example in the Shaman Empress, who was apparently far and away the most powerful Arcanic ever. She was also a scientist of the highest calibre and developed technology and magic that Lady Yvette claims "...makes anything we have currently look like the Dark Ages." Unfortunately, the Shaman Empress took everything with her to the grave, and this has led to adventurers of all stripes looking for her tomb, including Maika's mother, Moriko Halfwolf.
• Nightwing: Similar to his mentor, Nightwing, who is acknowledged as the world's greatest acrobat, the best leader in the DCU, to the point where villains will team up with him because he asked nicely. This is in addition to being an extremely skilled, non-super-powered melee fighter and detective. He's also considered one of the friendliest people around, and is shown to be on good terms with almost every superhero in the DCU. Within the Batfamily, he's also this, being the only person Bruce treats like an equal, the guy all other Robins have to live up to and the guy who made a better Batman (for Gotham, at least) than Bruce himself.
• The Punisher: The Punisher. Hardly any superhero or supervillain has been able to really kill him. Why? Because Frank Castle is that damn good. He's a master of basically every weapon ever devised by man, a skilled interrogator, a masterful tracker, trapper and strategist and has a Determinator resolve to make Cap himself envious. He's the very epitome of Badass Normal.
• Rex the Wonder Dog: Rex is quite possibly the first and only instance of this being applied to a non-talking, non-anthropomorphic dog. Rex can and has done everything and anything. He can drive boats and cars. (?) He's a great fisherman. He can ski. He can rope cattle. And he once killed a Tyrannosaurus rex using an atomic bomb. (?!) All without opposable thumbs. Did we mention that he's a lauded investigative reporter and camera man? Or that he's a decorated World War II veteran and Super-Soldier? And that nobody seems to find any of this the slightest bit strange? One only hopes that this was just meant as a huge satire. He can talk now, after having drank from the Fountain of Youth some time in the late '80s, but by that point his glory days were behind him.
• Superman: Superman himself has to count sometimes too, especially in certain stories like Our Worlds at War which were seemingly written just to show how much better than every other superhero he is.
• Tintin: Tintin can knock out guys that are twice as big as him, drive motorcycles, planes, and tanks, survive gunshot wounds, and do a lot of other crazy stuff and still live on. And he is also really smart and very much a Nice Guy.
• Transformers:
  • The Transformers: More than Meets the Eye set up the obscure character Thunderclash as this, in particular contrast to the Ragtag Bunch of Misfits that were the crew of the Lost Light, having met up with them after his ship was damaged "rescuing some orphans from an exploding sun". He even founded the Thunderclash School of Heroic Arts, the only confirmed graduate of which went on to be one of the most famous Autobot generals of his generation.
  "You see, Thunderclash wasn't just a teacher, a trainer, a leader, a mentor, a role model, a counselor, a thinker, a sage, an idol and an inspiration — he was a friend."

  • This is itself a reference to Thunderclash's era (early-90s Euro-exclusive G1), where, for whatever reason, the toy bio writers seemed reluctant to give anyone a personality besides "ridiculously hypercompetent" or any tech spec stat below 7. Rotorstorm and Rapido have also been portrayed as this in their appearances since then (though the former is something of a Broken Ace).
  • In The Transformers: Robots in Disguise, Prima is remembered by history (what little speaks of him) as the greatest of the Thirteen. Ultimately, this turns out to be a great big lie. Prima was actually not that great, and the one time he's shown fighting, it lasted as long as it took his enemy to cleave Prima in half with his own sword.
• Wonder Woman: Steve Trevor is a high-flying, death-defying manly man—but unlike many other such characters, who are often womanizing pigs, he has the utmost respect for Wonder Woman and consistently defers to her.
• X-Men:
  • The Grey-Summers family tree is a particular example of this. Politically, they're the most powerful family on Krakoa for a reason, and that reason is mainly Asskicking Leads to Leadership.
    • Scott Summers a.k.a. 'the General of the Mutants' is a military commander and strategist capable of running rings around Captain America, and the one that everyone defaults to following in Steve's absence. He's matching both him and Wolverine in a fist-fight, as well as being able to beat up entire gangs with his eyes closed after his glasses have fallen off while keeping track of his movements so he can find them again, and successfully eking out every resource left to him to keep the mutant species alive after the Decimation against enemies on all sides. He's also Tall, Dark, and Handsome and astonishingly attractive to stunningly gorgeous women (examples include his wife, Jean Grey, his previous wife Maddy Pryor, briefly Betsy Braddock, Emma Frost, and as a time-travelling teen, Bloodstorm, an alternate teenage vampire version of Storm). Oh, and Cable, mentioned below? He taught him everything he knows about war. And that's before you take into account the immensely powerful optic blasts that make even Wolverine show grudging respect.
    • Jean Grey, his wife. All-Loving Heroine, highly intelligent, one of the Marvel Universe's most powerful psychics (usually only surpassed by X-Man, the very strongest of her time-jumping/alternate reality children - and even he doesn't cross her lightly), favourite host of Phoenix Force, capable of picking fights with everyone from Knull to Galactus even without the Phoenix, and an extremely effective team leader in her own right. She also tends to be the X-Men's moral centre, and seen as their Superman equivalent While Teen Jean finds deeply aggravating, as she feels everyone expects her to be either the perfect person or the Dark Phoenix in waiting, she is this precisely because she's not perfect and has a stunning capacity for empathy.
    • Cable a.k.a. Nathan Summers. Marvel's ultimate soldier, a time-travelling warrior and messiah who earned the genuine respect of Apocalypse for being his deadliest enemy despite the fact that Apocalypse is a borderline Physical God and Cable's powers are usually greatly limited by keeping the techno-organic virus in check. He's exceptionally resourceful, ridiculously intelligent, referring to the New York Bar Exam as 'laughably easy', and building and maintaining a colossal space station (which he later reconfigured as the giant floating city-state of Providence), and turning a prototype forcefield concept and a processor/filter for electronic information into a functional replacement for his vast Psychic Powers. Oh, and he once juggled ruling Providence, an experimental utopian city-state, acting as invited interim President of the Central Asian republic of Rumekistan, and leading an X-Men team (though that all backfired on him). As a result, even when he's functionally powerless, he's widely considered to be terrifying - and since he nearly killed one of the most powerful Avengers' rosters of all time while borderline powerless and dying. His main problems are being dedicated to his mission to the point of emotional unavailability, excessive ruthlessness (which made Deadpool a good foil to him, as it forced him to set a consistently good example), and being a habitual Manipulative Bastard. Also, a messiah complex.
    • Nate Grey a.k.a. X-Man, is Cable's Age of Apocalypse counterpart and half-brother (he was created from Scott and Jean's DNA, Cable is the son of Jean's clone), and was literally designed to be this. He has all Cable's potential powers unfettered and up to eleven. This means that he's a colossally powerful Reality Warper, the strongest psychic on Earth, a strategist capable of running rings around Norman Osborn (nearly ending Dark Reign in about a day before Osborn's then-current Plot Armor kicked in), and routinely developing tricks that no other psychic had previously even considered, such as yanking Charles Xavier's astral form into the real world. Unfortunately, this just taught Onslaught how to pull that particular trick. Even deprived of the vast majority of his powers, he's acknowledged as the resident expert on time-jumping and reality warping by the New Mutants - a team no stranger to either of those things.
    • Rachel Summers is no slouch either. Aside from Psychic Powers on par with her legendary mother, if not stronger (though thanks to her Hound conditioning, she's notably vulnerable to Mind Control), she's a time manipulator capable of leaving her brothers in the dust, and was so good at handling the power of the Phoenix despite her phenomenally Dark and Troubled Past (it's comparable to Magneto's) that the entity itself recognised this and granted her full control over its power, believing she would use it more wisely than it would. As she once points out with a smirk, after nicking some of the power of Korvus Rookshir's 'Phoenix Sword', "the Phoenix likes me."
  • Storm - routinely referred to as a storm goddess, even by The Mighty Thor himself (who holds her in high regard), capable of manipulating cosmic weather, and a universally respected leader. Not only that, but she took leadership of the X-Men while powerless, demonstrating how off it Cyclops was after Jean's death by beating him in a fight (and this is the man who later stalemate Wolverine in a fist-fight), and claimed leadership of the Morlocks by beating the physically superhuman Callisto in a knife-fight. And then she became Queen of Wakanda. Now, currently, she's Regent of Arakko, ruling an entire planet of battle-hardened mutants, many of them Apocalypse's relatives, who've spent thousands of years fighting an endless war with Amenthi demons and consider Klingon Promotion to be pretty much the only acceptable means of promotion.
  • Wolverine would like to remind you that he's the best at what he does, and what he does isn't very nice. His daughter and Opposite-Sex Clone, X-23, may be even better. However she's tempered by a lot of emotional issues because of her Dark and Troubled Past.

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