Captain America: The Winter Soldier pre-release thread

We saw Peter MacNicol's Asgardian character bend a metal knife and snap off handcuffs like they were brittle plastic in a recent Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. episode. And he was just a "normal" Asgardian.

 

Heimdall was able to crash a Dark Elf ship just by sticking his sword into its hull twice -- and another one of those same ships was durable enough to smash apart heavy stone columns and statuary without taking significant damage. So while it's safe to say the sword itself must've been pretty extraordinary to do that much damage, Heimdall still needed to be strong enough to drive it through such a resilient hull. He also takes an explosion to the face and just looks vaguely annoyed, and then jumps about 30 feet or thereabouts to land on his feet on the Bifrost. So yeah, I'd say he's fairly superhuman.

 

I couldn't find the scan but in the Bucky Barnes-Captain America run; Bucky remarks that Steve was 3x stronger and faster than he was. Bucky who as Winter Soldier and Captain America was considered a peak human.

This was back in the Death of Captain America arc. Issue #34.

 

Heimdall actually used two long knives he keeps on the back of his belt and yes Asgardians are well considered to be all superhuman, with denser bones as well.

 

^I think that's implicit. If Heimdall's muscle power could destroy a class of ship that was untroubled by repeated collisions with thick marble columns, it stands to reason that Heimdall's muscles are more than strong enough to shatter stone.

 

Do we need an exact figure? The point, as I understood it, was simply to establish whether a typical combat-trained Asgardian such as Loki was significantly beyond the physical strength of Captain America.

 

So we've re-established Asgardians as having (a) superhuman strength and endurance and (b) superior materials-fabrication technology by Terran standards. They just like to make it look really old-school.

 

^ Time to match the best of Asgard against the best of Krypton!

I wonder who would come out on top?

JK

 

Difference in emphasis. You said there was no clear indication how strong they were. In the context of the earlier discussion and the question that prompted it, I took "how strong" to be a matter of whether they were in the same strength range as Captain America or a substantially greater one. One doesn't have to pin it down to the ton in order to demonstrate that it's the latter.

And really, bench-pressing figures are a pretty arbitrary standard. Bench-press is a specialization. An athlete who's trained specifically for that exercise is going to be able to lift more than an athlete with equivalent innate ability, size, musculature, and training who's specialized in some different discipline. So it's not really the most accurate measure of whether two individuals are equally strong, and thus one shouldn't take the exact numbers as anything more than a convenient approximation for comparison purposes. What matters is the comparison itself, how one character's strength ranks in proportion to another.

 

Mixer, meet Christopher...

(Said with a "" to you both.)

 

I'm not arguing, I'm clarifying why my interpretation of the question is focused differently than yours. This isn't about you and me; this is a public discussion of a topic of general interest, and there's no harm in different people contributing different perspectives to the discussion. There's no "right" answer that wins the thread; there's an ongoing conversation evaluating the issue from different angles.

I mean, we're talking about comic-book characters. This should be fun and light-hearted, not contentious.

 

Random observation. In the new trailer Cap fights and defeats 10 goons (renegade SHIELD agents?) in an elevator. It's a great scene but I think the confined space was a disadvantage for Cap's assailants. They probably got in each other's way.

 

I'm thinking in that situation he's probably the renegade one.