Cap's been around since the 1940s.
I started to clarify: "relatively recent" as in
"not 1940s, not 1950s, not 1960s, not 1970s, and not 1980s,
but outside of his classic era, perhaps 1990s on ..."
But, I didn't clarify that, so...
Most impressive, either way, that statue showing.
I presume he escaped those chains by flexing out or something similar, besides?
If Cap has a solid history in the past 15 years or so of doing stuff like THAT, he may well have eclipsed Kingpin in the strength department.
Just shows what the training, the prayers, and the vitamins can do for a bloke ... 😎
Cap's not bad, man. Show me a few more feats on the level of that statue lift, and you might convince me that Cap'll be where Slade stops. Still haven't seen anything to place Cap FIRMLY in the Kingpin bracket, though.
1. Too few feats.
2. Too many showings of Kingpin matching or exceeding Spider-man.
3. Cap bearhugged nearly into submission by Kingpin himself
(Cap was saved in the last instance, as you saw yourself, by his pet eagle, Redwing.)
Here, let me give you a better idea of the level of power the Kingpin operated on, the kind of level Slade himself implies HE might be truly on if that door kick is any indication, let alone the fact that he threw down with Wonder Woman or is described as having the strength of 20 men, as I've read in Slade's respect thread:
Much like Slade, though he was supposed to be an ordinary man, just a very BIG man, with a lot of very solid muscles, Kingpin frequently translated as Hulk-lite. Panel or two ago you saw him punching Spider-man across a room, then a missed punch from the Kingpin go right through a wall. Here, he demonstrates the grip strength this thread concerns itself with, and makes himself seem a larger-than-life figure.
He merely grabs the carpeting in the room they are in and firmly tugs and it seems for a moment as if Spider-man's entire world is closing in, everything about him being helplessly tossed about ...
Kingpin was also wont to throw about heavy weights. The kind that were just outsized enough to make a person double take without destroying suspension of disbelief.
Made you wonder: "If there really WERE a man that size, like some 400 or 500 pounds or so, and he trained his body a lifetime to develop massive strength, is it possible that he really could ...?"
(As it is, the weights appearing in the Strongman competitions shown on TV, where they lift cars and 500 pound refrigerators in PAIRS and pull trucks and even trains and airliners around are pretty close to this level ...)
Originally posted by Lord Feron
Classic Fisk was a beast.
Agreed.
I'm only sorry I can't show the scans I want yet from the "Mission: Crush the Kingpin!" storyline. There, Kingpin is so dominant that he nearly makes Spider-man pass out (presumably due to pain and loss of blood flow) by merely powerfully squeezing his wrist. Spider-man fakes unconsciousness for a moment in the hopes of catching Kingy offguard, knowing that he really WILL succumb if King keeps applying pressure like that. He manages to do so, but has to massage his wrist afterward to keep it from going completely numb.
Rare to see anyone just use pure physical strength like that at the street level to just tap people out. Perhaps part of the reason I'm thinking Slade is superior to Cap is that I've simply never seen Cap just forcefully dominate other people that way.
Kingpin himself doesn't have much to top something like the following for instance. This is just pure, muscular domination ...
breaking chains.
breaks a robot's arm
chucks a big block of concrete a couple of stories upward, hard enough for the block to fugging EXPLOOOODE.
Can throw his shield with enough strength that it catches up to a fugging ICBM.
Hurts Rhino, right after the latter shows an obviously good durability feat in the very first panel, so its not a jobbing sequence, it's simply a demonstration of contrast.
I'm trying to find the one where Cap punches Iron Man hard enough for the latter to go crashing into asphalt and make a decent sized crater.
Herald level starts with Steve. 'Lee Dat.
Originally posted by CosmicComet
Hurts Rhino, right after the latter shows an obviously good durability feat in the very first panel, so its not a jobbing sequence, it's simply a demonstration of contrast...
I can't give you THAT particular one.
Rhino is so jokingly maltreated by Marvel that he has his own disrespect thread on this forum.
If Cap had made him do all that with shield strikes I wouldn't give you an argument.
Without that, though ... you're telling me a guy that runs through brick walls, tanks Spider-man's best punches and got hit with a ROCKET launcher unfazed is going to reel from Cap's punches and kicks?!?
Nevertheless, you have proven to me MODERN Cap contends with Fisk this last series, despite his classic incarnation not doing so.
Even if the other showings can be written off, the debris toss can't.
Couple hundred pounds of granite tossed 2 or 3 stories up to destroy a machine gun nest?
Yeah, that's Kingpin level, and very firmly so.
Classic Fisk himself could not do much better.
And the combination of that feat with the others you showed protects it from being called an outlier.
Good job.
Some people may wonder at the inclusion of Harley Quinn.
She IS stronger than Batman and the other members of his family, however, perhaps even stronger than the members of his group combined, IF we're simply measuring pure physical strength and not skill in battle.
(She obviously can't contend with the batpeople in a fight except under the best circumstances.)
Here's one such proof of Harley's comical might, found in the pages of Harley Quinn #12:
Note in the previous post that Harley not only drags Batman from under a group of her henchmen with such sudden force that one of them is scattered all the way up to her, she also sends Batman himself airborne and then slams him clear through the floor.
That's merely the continuation of an odd tradition of Harley showing off her muscles ... how the meme was created I don't really know.
Somebody suggested Poison Ivy created the DC equivalent of a Captain America serum for Quinn. Ivy has a lot of experience with mixing herbs and elixirs and the like so there might be some truth to that.
At any rate, here's the first time I ever saw Harley in the pages of a DC comic (as opposed to the popular Batman Animated Series cartoon that spawned her), Superman/Batman #19, aka Supergirl #0 ...
Originally posted by -Pr-
Harley's no Captain America, but she is superhuman.Her fight with croc was pretty impressive too.
Actually, it's because of that fight with Killer Croc that I didn't rate Harley higher than Cap, for, until today, I had no reason to think Cap himself was truly at that level, just had his acrobatic and martial arts skill and really dense shield to provide him with the hitting power missing between the two. Until today I felt Harley would probably win a tug of war or armwrestling match between the two.
But I'd only seen classic Cap to this point, the one that Kingpin was bearhugging into submission, with Cap wondering how he'd make it through the encounter; not the one that could do something like this: