Quote Originally Posted by TeChameleon View Post
I do like what I read one time (secondhand quote)- that Hank Pym is a mad scientist trying to be a superhero. It really kinda fits- if you look at his life's story, there are some serious Dr. Frankenstein overtones to it, what with the self-experimentation and Ultron and all that mess.

And the Purple Man tends to be set up against street-level types because, like Mesmero, he's got an incredibly binary power- he either wins immediately or goes squish immediately against higher-tier opponents, although he had an interesting... battle..? against Nate Grey back in his X-Man days- grabbed control, somewhat to Nate's shock, since his power was pheromone based rather than psionic, so all of Nate's rather formidable defenses did nothing. Then he bragged about it being pheromone based, Nate used his TK to filter out the pheromones he had been breathing in, and Kilgrave went squish.

An interesting case would have to be the Blue and Gold team, Blue Beetle and Booster Gold. Booster's troubles are sort of self-inflicted, what with the whole 'greatest hero you've never heard of' thing he's got going on to keep time travellers from inflicting SID on baby Booster, but Beetle is good- very, very good, to the point that Batman trusts him as his backup without a second thought, and Guy Gardner, who rarely has a good word to say about much of anyone, thinks Beetle is smarter than Batman- and yet nobody really takes him seriously, in-universe or out.

Firestorm is an odd case, since he basically has to be written as being a bit on the incompetent side, because the dude's a walking deus ex machina- he can turn anything inorganic into anything else, or just fry it outright with nuclear death rays, along with flight and phasing powers (the phasing I never entirely understood, to be honest- it doesn't exactly match the rest of his powerset), and the whole nuclear death ray thing is considered to be at minimum 'fry South America off the map' level by the Secret Six, so, uhm, yeah.

Flash has gotten a bit more respect lately from fans and authors- Wally especially, once he started 'mainlining the Speed Force' could also play deus ex machina relatively easily. Crazy stunts like a race between Wally and Barry being mistaken for the Source (i.e. the DCU version of God...) show that yeah, you don't screw with the Flash.
Firestorm chooses to uses his powers only on inorganic stuff. He's fully capable of turning a human being into a block of potassium nitrate