Marvel’s Luke Cage has superhuman strength and bulletproof, unbreakable skin, and that’s way too overpowered to be a “street-level” hero. What makes characters like Spider-Man and Daredevil “fun” is the fact that they are vigilantes who can be hurt; they can be shot or stabbed, and their friends worry about them because they aren’t indestructible. But when you have a character that’s indestructible, then all that danger goes away. Also normal thugs aren’t a threat to you.
Spider-Man once single-handedly humiliated the X-Men all by himself without breaking a sweat.
Power has nothing to do with being a street hero. Spider-Man is your friendly neighbourhood Spider-Man because he wants to, and because someone has to be.
Same with Luke Cage and Daredevil. All three have been members of the Avengers. They mostly stick to the streets because they’re needed there, and it’s where they feel comfortable.
I mean, the Avengers aren’t exactly picky about power levels.
You know, sometimes when the Avengers announce a new inductee I’m like, ‘Really?! You think that’s a good strategic addition?? This feels more like a popularity contest!’
Their choices kind of look to me more like a publisher’s idea of what will sell books & toys than a cooperative of gifted public servants. But I’m probably just being silly.
OK, let’s put it this way.
The street heroes the OP compares Cage to are Spider-Man and Daredevil.
We’ve already talked about Spider-Man. He’s stronger than most characters in the Marvel universe whose main power isn’t strength, has better mobility than most characters in the Marvel universe whose main power isn’t mobility, his spider sense makes it almost impossible to surprise him, when it comes to smarts he’s on the same league as Richards, Stark, or Pym, he’s got his own personal multiverse, and so on.
As for Daredevil? He’s a master ninja easily capable of winning against dozens of Hand goons at once, if we’re talking physical prowess. Cage would probably have a hard time with that, even with his invulnerability.
Not all powers have to be physical, though. One of his main antagonists is Mephisto himself. And he’s one of the few people on the whole Marvel universe who can resist the Purple Man’s control on willpower alone (the only other one that comes to mind is Victor von fucking Doom).
The reason he is a street level hero is because I believe he was created for that. It was important back then (and still today) to have a bulletproof black man in comics. Luke Cage was the first African American Marvel super hero to get his own comic (Black Panther being the first over black Marvel hero)
Spider-Man is a street level hero only because he chooses to be- dude has faced down cosmic level threats and come out on top. He holds back on almost all his strength because he’s afraid of killing someone on accident.
The only thing keeping Luke Cage from approaching Thor/Superman levels of OP is that he doesn’t really have a movement power. At best he can run really fast or jump really far, but he’s too conscientious to go launching himself all over the city like the Hulk. If he landed on somebody (or their car or whatever) he’d feel pretty bad about it, so it’s not really an option unless he’s in the middle of nowhere.
I don’t think his strength is within an order of magnitude of theirs. I don’t think his durability is either.
Granted, I wouldn’t be surprised if you showed me a comic showing otherwise. There’s probably a comic where he goes inside a star or something stupid, because there are always those kinds of writers. But based on his typical portrayal, I think he’s more of a brush off a car crash and pick it up guy than a survive a nuke and crush coal into diamonds guy.
I’m not a marvel-head, so I can’t rightly weigh in on much of this, but this kind of reads like an argument in favor of OP’s thesis. His mindset/power combo seems like it’d be better suited to work that isn’t set in high population/low space environments.
When people say “street-level hero”, what they typically mean is a hero who doesn’t have strong enough powers to be in the big leagues, think “fighting crime” rather than “fighting alien invaders/gods/interdimensional beings”
That explains the confusion on my end. Appreciated!
He’s been on the Avengers, so he must have been in instances to let loose.
Idk, his villains are just a bunch of arms dealers with special bullets that actually hurt him called “judas bullets”. He’s not even stronger than Iron Fist.
In the grand scheme of things Luke Cage is to broke to get a car and had low agility. I think I would rather run into Luje Cage who I had a decent cgance to flee from rather than the wall crawler.
I mean yeah I can agree with the gist of it… not really sure they tier them out quite like we have. (Why I think many found it kind of silly to have say, hawkeye and black widow in the original avengers). superheros generally are just set to be a match for… their respective villains.
Obviously the super hero universe thing people have to close their eyes on is the concept of the over the top OP heros nearby are generally equipped well enough that they could usually overcome all the “street level” villains over a lunch break.
To my knowledge that’s kind of it with Luke Cage though is more… he doesn’t have any major mobility or solving advantages. So effectively the way villains need to work around him is… don’t get close.
