Flight.
Fighting prowess.
Invulnerability.
Magic.
Lots of money.
"What are your superpowers again?"
"I'm rich."
These are just a few of the superpowers that have made our favorite superheroes, well…
our favorites.
So, what about the unsung heroes who don't have these popular powers?
Sure, these guys may not be able to save the world, let alone a small suburb.
But they have their place among the pantheon of heroes.
Right?
Here are a few superhero powers that probably shouldn't exist.
Leon Nunez
Marvel's Leon Nunez is a mutant who's so sad that he doesn't even have a superhero alter-ego.
When the Marvel Universe was reduced to just 198 mutants, they didn't even count Leon.
In a nutshell, Nunez is a mutant with the ability to give other people superpowers,
via tattoos that roughly correspond to that power.
Of course, giving someone a tattoo is an incredibly convoluted and time-consuming process, meaning
Nunez is pretty useless in an actual fight, unless you give him three weeks notice and
know exactly what you're up against.
And he'd better not screw up, either, or you could walk away with all of the powers of
a dude with busted legs or something.
But Leon has his limits: every time Nunez gives someone a magic tattoo it requires a
portion of his "will" to work, meaning every tattoo slowly saps away at his own strength,
as shown in the first nine issues of 2008's Young X-Men.
When he reaches limit of his abilities after trying to give someone the power of the Phoenix,
Nunez falls into a coma, and is never heard from ever again.
Doorman
You know how Nightcrawler can teleport himself and other stuff great distances at will?
Doorman can only teleport people to… the next room.
He has all the powers of a door, plus you have to feed him.
Advantage: door.
Even Doorman's dad thought his powers were stupid.
Technically, Doorman's body functions as a portal to a mysterious dimension filled with
Iron Maiden album covers, that can transport people through any solid object Doorman stands
against, as shown in 2005's G.L.A.: Misassembled miniseries.
This, despite sounding cool, is still a fairly useless ability in a world where Juggernaut
and actual doors exist.
The worst part is that Doorman can't even control this power, meaning people can pass
through him against his will by simply walking into him.
In GLA #4, Doorman is killed — and resurrected with a bunch of extra powers, such as immortality,
intangibility... and the ability to summon a magic pair of skis.
Good luck being cooler than Marvel's surfboard guy.
Gentle
Gentle is a mutant from the Marvel universe with the ability to become infinitely buff
at will, giving him the potential for limitless strength, while reducing his ability to find
T-shirts that fit.
The comics even note that there are no limits to Gentle's super-buffness, meaning he could
theoretically fight the Hulk to a standstill, or backhand Thor through a brick-wall.
Except Gentle's powers are kept in check by special vibranium tattoos all across this
body that prevent him from becoming too buff.
The comics note that every time Gentle roids out and uses his powers, his baseline strength
increases, which is an issue because his tattoos will eventually be unable to hold back his
rippling biceps and sick-ass delts.
This means that Gentle is destined to die like the rattiest of all gym-rats: exploding
in a mass of bone fragments and testosterone from flexing just a little bit too hard.
ForgetMeNot
There are lots of forgettable comic characters, but ForgetMeNot is without a doubt the most
forgettable.
He's a mutant with the power of imperceptibility, which is just a fancy way of saying he has
the power of being so unremarkable you instantly forget he exists.
The moment he leaves someone's perception, he ceases to exist to that person, with all
memories of his existence instantly and permanently erased.
X-Men Legacy #300 mentions that ForgetMeNot fought alongside the X-Men for six years,
but still, no one but Professor X remembered him regularly, even though his actions were
consistently heroic.
After the death of Professor X, someone finally realized he existed, because the toilet paper
kept going missing in the X-Mansion.
He's even killed because the good guys don't remember that he's also a good guy.
Then again, ForgetMeNot gets to ride trains for free because nobody remembers he's there,
so… at least there's that.
​Light Lass
It doesn't get more useless than this.
Ayla Ranzz, aka Light Lass, possesses the fearsome ability of… making things less
heavy.
Sure, plenty of writers have done their best to do some fun things with her weird power,
but at the end of the day, she's less useful than the guys who can eat rocks and… bounce.
She's also on the team with Star Boy, whose ability to make things heavier is a much more
useful version of mass manipulation.
The worst part?
When Ayla joined the future super-team the Legion of Superheroes in Adventure Comics
#308, she was originally Lightning Lass, with the ability to shoot electricity out of her
hands.
She filled the spot left when her brother, Lightning Lad, died.
After he returns from the dead a few issues later, Lightning Lass is basically written
out of the Legion… until Dream Girl zaps her with a machine that swaps her powers,
without ever actually asking her if that's what she wanted.
On the bright side, if you ever need someone to help you move, she's definitely the hero
to call.
Gunfire
In 1993, DC launched an event called Bloodlines that was designed to bring a whole roster
of edgy new characters into their universe by having a bunch of alien bugs show up and
experiment with random humans.
One of those many useless heroes was a guy named Gunfire, who managed to survive for
13 issues with the most '90s superpower ever: he can turn anything he touches...into a gun.
It's explained in the story as agitating molecules, which is essentially what Gambit does to turn
everything he touches into a bomb.
Except the world doesn't need two Gambits — one is plenty.
Also, for some reason, Gunfire sometimes carries a regular gun, which is kind of like the Flash
riding around on a moped.
As if getting his hands cut off by Prometheus wasn't enough, a pretty solid nail was put
into his coffin in the pages of Hitman #1,000,000, an issue set in the distant future where an
aspiring hero gave himself Gunfire's powers and ended up killing himself right after uttering
the immortal words "Oh my God, I turned my ass into a hand grenade!"
Starfox
The character of Starfox is...problematic.
Maybe even more problematic than his brother Thanos, and considering Thanos once literally
killed half the universe, that's saying something.
Starfox has the standard set of superpowers like flying and fighting, but his big gimmick
is psychically stimulating people's pleasure centers in order to send them into euphoria.
In other words, he's a walking hit of ecstasy, which has led to storylines where he's been
put on trial for assault, all because he's unable to turn those powers off when
he's interacting with people.
He's also been indirectly, inadvertently, and causing other characters
to fall in love with each other.
So that's kinda bad.
Even if you can get past that pretty dark, extremely uncomfortable interpretation of
his powers, he hasn't exactly had the greatest track record in actually using them as a superhero.
In Incredible Hulk #300, he experiences what might be his defining moment when he attempts
to overwhelm a rampaging, mindless Hulk with "waves of pleasure."
For his trouble, he gets punched so hard that he lands three blocks away.
Now, if he looked a little more like Black Widow, things may have turned out differently.
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