The Most Useless Superpowers

The comic world is littered with heroes possessing various god-like abilities. Heroes who could end all life as we know it with a thought, punt a hospital into orbit, or fart tornadoes. But for every hero with powers like these, there are heroes who couldn't even receive the short end of the stick without getting a splinter. Heroes with "superpowers" so specific in their nature or unwieldy that they're next to useless, heroes ...

This Marvel "hero" has powers roughly analogous to Nightcrawler, the original BAMF. However, unlike Nightcrawler, who can teleport himself and an unclear amount of extra stuff an almost infinite distance at will, Doorman can only teleport people to ... the next room, hence the wholly unthreatening name, Doorman.

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 the hilarious G.L.A.: Misassembled miniseries from 2005. This, despite sounding cool, is still a fairly useless ability in a world where Juggernaut and actual doors exists. The worst part is, Doorman can't even control this power, meaning people can pass through him against his will by simply walking into him, preferably with their middle finger raised to rub it in.

In Great Lakes Avengers #4, Doorman was eventually killed and resurrected with a host of extra powers, such as the ability to transcend death, be immune to harm, and summon a magic pair of skis. None did anything in the way of elevating his position in the Marvel hierarchy, because nobody can respect a hero whose main ability can be replaced by the thing that killed Leonardo DiCaprio in Titanic.

Gentle is a mutant from the Marvel universe with the ability to become infinitely buff at will, giving him the potential for limitless strength. Essentially, Gentle can expand his own muscle mass, dramatically increasing his strength and durability while reducing his ability to find T-shirts that fit. The buffer Gentle allows himself to become, the stronger he is, which sounds pretty sweet, right? The comics even note that there's no conceivable limits to Gentle's buffness, meaning he could theoretically go toe-to-toe with the heaviest hitters in the Marvel universe, fight the Hulk to a standstill, or backhand Thor through a brick-wall.

The thing is, 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 hypersonic bone fragments and testosterone from flexing just that little bit too hard.

That title isn't us being sarcastic — that's literally the way he's described in his first comic appearance, and when your official debut into a universe where Cyclops exists is the comic telling you that you're the worst X-man, you know you suck more than a nuclear-powered vacuum cleaner.

Basically, Hoskins is a mutant with the ability to detonate his body at will, with enough force to level a city, turn the Hulk into a pink smear or even destroy the entire world. One power Hoskins doesn't have, though, is the ability to survive this explosion, meaning he can't actually ever use his powers without killing himself and everyone around him. Professor X feels so bad for Hoskins in the comics, he gives him a suit of power-armor so he can actually help out during fights ... and presumably to stop him turning the X-Mansion into a smoking crater by pouting too hard.

This is an old, obscure Spider-man villain with a similar backstory to Sandman, only instead of being a small-time crook-turned-sentient cloud of sand, Waldemeyer is a teenager who was exploded so hard by a bomb he turned into a walkin', talkin' stack of bricks. We should probably mention that this particular villain hails from the earlier, stupider days of comic books.

As you can probably guess from his name and the glorious picture two inches above this sentence, THE WALL possesses all of the strengths of a sentient piece of concrete. These powers includes superhuman strength, durability, and bizarrely enough, the ability to control the minds of baseball umpires. All for the low, low cost of sacrificing his ability to form meaningful human connections ever again, and having no arms. What a bargain!

Wraith is a fairly unique example of a Mutant, in that he's one of the few whose powers never fully manifest themselves. The comics note that Wraith's power seems to be the one all horny teenage boys would give their left sac for: invisibility. However, for some reason, Wraiths powers never fully realize themselves, leaving him with the entirely useless ability to turn his skin — and only his skin — invisible. Seemingly just to rub it, the X-Gene in Wraith's body doesn't even let him control this power, meaning he has to walk around all the time looking like a fleshly skeleton.

Wraith's appearance is so unsettling, the first X-Men comic panel he appears in shows him being beaten half to death by a crowd of people for looking like a horrible monster. Wraith's ability to turn invisible is such a non-power, it actually makes him more visible to people, while simultaneously giving him no ability to defend himself from even most the ineffectual slaps of a half-hearted angry mob whom you know weren't putting any real effort into it.

It's not just the Legion rejects who wound up with useless powers. Occasionally, someone would make it onto the actual team with something wielding the superheroic equivalent of a screen door on a submarine. The prime example of that is Ayla Ranzz, Light Lass, who possesses the fearsome, awe-inspiring ability of ... making things less heavy.

Admittedly, plenty of creators over the years have done their level best to do some fun things with it, but at the end of the day, it's just not that useful, especially compared to everyone else on the team. It's bad enough that she's less useful than the guy who can eat rocks, but she's also on the team with Star Boy, whose ability to make things heavier is a far more useful version of mass manipulation.

The worst part? When Ayla joined the team, she actually had a much cooler power. She was originally Lightning Lass, with the ability to shoot electricity out of her hands, and filled the spot left vacant when her brother, Lightning Lad, died. After he returned from the dead, however — because, you know, comic books — a rule in the Legion's charter about not having two members with the same power led one of her teammates to zap her with a machine that swapped lightning for lightening, 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.

For a while there, it didn't seem like there was much of a downside to being a mutant in the Marvel universe. Sure, you may have been hated and feared by people who built giant purple robots made of racism to kill you, but in the '90s, everyone you saw on the page was a beautiful, super-ripped hero surrounded by equally beautiful people. Even the Beast looked cool, and he was the one who was meant to have turned himself into a monster.

When Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely arrived in 2001 for New X-Men, however, one of their goals was to bring back the idea of the Xavier School taking in all mutants, not just the ones with powers that made for an exciting action story. That's how we ended up with characters like Glob Herman, a rotund teenager whose skin was not only transparent, giving him visible bones and organs, but also composed of a substance that was frequently compared to paraffin wax.

Unfortunately for Glob, paraffin wax is pretty flammable, which is why it's frequently used for making candles. That's something that he might've wanted to consider before joining in with a student riot at Xavier's and getting set on fire. It turns out that being a giant wax-covered skeleton that's easy to set on fire isn't exactly a great asset for the X-Men's action-packed pursuits, but it's fine. He survived and — perhaps surprisingly — is still kicking around that merry mutant corner of the Marvel Universe.

U.S. 1 is one of those comics that always comes up whenever snarky writers talk about the worst and weirdest obscure superhero books, but here's the thing: if you read that comic, it's actually pretty great. Writer Al Milgrom and artists Herb Trimpe and Frank Springer were clearly fully aware that they were doing something ridiculously goofy.

Of course, they had to be. U.S. 1 was, after all, a licensed toy comic that was meant to tie into a remote-controlled big rig. That's not exactly the sort of thing that brings in the grand, sweeping mythology of Transformers or the endless array of characters you got from G.I. Joe. Thus, they did the only thing they could and created Ulysses Solomon Archer, a kind-hearted trucker who got a metal plate in his head after a crash and gained the incredible ability to telepathically control his 18-wheeler. He couldn't control every semi truck, just his own. And that's not the weird part.

No, the weird part is that there was one issue that was actually narrated by the truck itself, in the only time in the book's 12-issue run that it was even hinted at that the truck might be sentient. Still, it's a good enough superpower to give him occasional cameos in the wider Marvel Universe, showing up any time someone needs a trucker who can drive in outer space. Which, believe it or not, comes up surprisingly often.

Starfox is ... problematic. Maybe even more problematic than his brother Thanos, and considering Thanos once literally killed half the universe, that's saying something.

He's got the standard set of powers that you see in the Eternals of Titan — super-strength, invulnerability, all that good stuff — but his big gimmick is psionically 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 sexual assault on account of being unable to turn those powers off when he's interacting with people. He's also been indirectly, inadvertently, and non-consensually causing two other characters to fall in love with each other.

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 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.

As the co-creator of characters like Spider-Man and the Question, Steve Ditko's contributions to the history of comic books are both important and pretty well-chronicled. His later creations, however, not so much, whether it was the incomprehensible adventures of hard-line objectivist Mr. A, or the string of bizarre vigilantes like the aptly named Odd Man.

The Missing Man, who made his debut alongside the Rocketeer in 1983's Pacific Comics Presents #1, is one of those weirdos. In his handful of increasingly weird appearances, his name is variously given as Syd Vane and Syd Mane, and he battles crime with the uncanny power to not have a torso. He's just a pair of spindly arms and a couple of cartoony legs capped off with a slightly unfinished face and big glasses.

If you need more information than that, well, there isn't any. It seems that along with a body, the other big missing piece of Missing Man was any explanation whatsoever for what his entire deal was.