There are hundreds of comic book characters you've never heard of, and for good reason,
too.
Some were incredibly racist, misogynist, or culturally offensive.
In the DC Universe, the Green Lanterns are members of an outer space police force who
are armed with Power Rings that can turn their thoughts and willpower into solid objects
made of light.
With a roster that numbers over 7200, there are plenty of weird ones, but none of them
have been as troubling as Arisia.
In her first appearance, Arisia is a young teenager.
After she gets assigned to Earth, her crush on Hal Jordan leads her to subconsciously
use the ring to reshape herself into a sexy adult body with a revealing costume.
Once that was done, she was free to act on her crush, and while Hal was initially surprised,
the two wound up dating for a few years, and even living together.
There have been plenty of hasty retcons about how she’s much older in Earth years, but
a teenager from outer space is still a teenager.
The one thing you have to give to The New Guardians is that it meant well.
Unfortunately, its attempts at creating a diverse cast and dealing with the real-world
issues of 1988 went bad more often than not, leading to regrettable characters like Extraño
and Snowflame, the villain who worshipped cocaine.
But while Extraño has been redeemed by later portrayals and Snowflame has garnered his
own sort of fan-base by being one of the most insane concepts ever printed in comics, nobody’s
in a hurry to bring back the Hemo-Goblin, the AIDS vampire.
His one and only appearance was New Guardians #1, but it’s one more than anyone ever wanted.
In that issue, it was revealed that a white supremacist organization had created a racist
vampire to fight minority heroes.
The good guys were able to win by beating him to a pulp, but then it was revealed that
he had AIDS, and his accelerated vampire metabolism had caused him to die of the disease by the
time he was taken to a hospital.
The worst part?
In the fight against the heroes, he’d managed to infect two of them with the disease.
At the time, even getting a mention of AIDS in a superhero comic was groundbreaking, but
characterizing it as a disease spread by a blood-sucking Nazi vampire who infected the
book’s extremely flamboyant gay character was maybe not the best idea.
It’s usually pretty easy to draw a distinction between characters who are inappropriate by
accident and those who most definitely cross a line on purpose, but we have to give special
mention of Bueno Excellente, who “fights evil with the power of perversion.”
This guy is the definition of inappropriate.
He’s a member of Section Eight, a team put together by an alcoholic would-be superhero
named Sixpack whose members included weirdos like the Defenestrator, a Schwarzenegger-esque
tough guy who carried around a window that he could throw people through, and Dogwelder,
who… well, the name says it all on that one.
He welded dogs to people.
Look, it’s a really weird comic.
Even among them, however, Bueno Excellente stands out.
His only “power,” such as it is, is to assault other men, including a heavily
implied encounter with Green Lantern.
Amazingly, he’s the only member of Section Eight besides Sixpack to survive a battle
that wiped out the rest of the team, but his appearances are thankfully few and far between.
Considering that he’s a walking assault joke, that’s definitely for the best.
Jamm is the single worst character to come out of DC’s 1993 Bloodlines event, and that’s
saying something.
The story ran through 27 different comics, with the idea being that every book would
introduce a brand-new superhero to the DC Universe.
There were a couple of notable exceptions, but the vast majority of the characters were
along the lines of Gunfire, the man who can turn anything into a gun.
Jamm appeared in Legion of Super-Heroes, where he literally crawled out of the garbage can
to get the power to make anyone do anything he told them to.
He was portrayed as an idiotic skater dude who leaned on catchphrases like calling things
“prodigious.”
The only saving grace is that everyone else in the comic found him as annoying as the
readers did, making it pretty clear that we were supposed to hate this guy.
Not that hating him was difficult.
After ordering the Legion to take him to the 31st Century, he tested out his powers by
ordering women to take off all of their clothes.
That only stopped when he tried it on a robotic duplicate of Marie Antoinette, who was unaffected
and slapped him instead.
Fortunately, he only made a couple of appearances, but if you’re looking for him, you should
probably check out that garbage can.
It’s where he belongs.
Most inappropriate characters don’t last long before someone realizes that having a
obsessed mind-control teen or a powered superhuman is a bad idea.
Starfox, on the other hand, has hung around for a full five decades, and he’s even been
an Avenger.
On his native Titan, Starfox is known as Eros, and as his name implies, he has the power
to induce a euphoric state of pleasure in anyone around him, making them regard him
as their closest friend… with benefits.
There are, of course, exceptions to this, he once tried to overwhelm a rampaging Hulk
“in waves of… pleasure” and got punched into next week, but since he can’t turn
it off, he’s basically just a walking thirst trap who frequently indulges in the results.
The implications of this aren’t even subtext, either.
In a 2005 story in She-Hulk, Starfox was actually put on trial for multiple cases of
assault, and the only defense was that the women he’d slept with had wanted to.
The trial never finished, and Starfox was taken back to Titan, but considering that
his own defense attorney wound up punting him right in the ol “moons of Saturn”
after realizing he used his powers on her back when they were both Avengers, it definitely
wasn’t going well.
Oh, and also, he’s Thanos’s brother, meaning that the Mad Titan who once killed half the
universe is actually not the worst member of the family.