So I’m busy getting psyched for Kick-Ass, which shows exactly what happens if you try to don long underwear and fight crime: you get a brutal beating. Many fictional characters have tried to walk the superhero road. Some are awesome. And some… some are not. Here’s 20 garboons who should have hung up the tights and called their therapists.

.

.

/

The Red Bee

Criminals are a superstitious, cowardly lot. But are they so cowardly that they’d let themselves be intimidated by a trained bumblebee named Michael? That’s what the Red Bee hoped – he kept his little honey-loving friend in a special pouch on his belt buckle and let him out to frighten very allergic villains. Until somebody killed him.

.

.

Vibe

The Detroit era of the Justice League of America is rightly derided by nerds for sucking and sucking hard. Out went the world-class dudes like Superman and Batman, to be replaced by Zatanna, a patrotic cyborg and Vibe, the most painfully “street” superhero ever. Paco Ramone was a street gang leader until he decided to go straight and use his metahuman ability to make things wobble to fight the crime he used to do. Then he died.

.

.

Extraño

I’m just going to let Wikipedia handle this one for me. “Extraño (Spanish for “strange” or “odd”) is a fictional gay Hispanic magician published by DC Comics.” Fictional gay Hispanic magician. To make matters worse, he was later attacked by an AIDS vampire named the “Hemo-Goblin” and given the HIV. Way to play into the magician stereotype.

.

..

Skateman

So if I were going to go after criminals, I don’t think I’d pack my rollerskates. And yet, that’s what Vietnam vet and roller derby player Billy Moon does in the only issue of Skateman that was ever published. Rumors have it that Skateman died in the 2nd issue by falling down a flight of stairs.

.

.

Maggott

The X-Men have included some pretty weird characters, but this guy was the gooniest. He could transform his body to get superhuman strength and endurance, but to do so he needed to release two huge parasitic worms from his stomach cavity and have them eat things. Unlike, say, fellow X-Man Colossus, who could transform his body to get superhuman strength and endurance by thinking about it.

.

/

Red Tornado

What is it with comic books and sad robots? Marvel has the Vision, a superhuman android who can become as hard as diamond but just wants to be loved, and DC has the Red Tornado, a superhuman android who spends all of his time whining about screwing up all the time. Dude: Windows 7. Install it, love it.

.

.

Night Thrasher

You have to give the guys who came up with Night Thrasher at least one point: they didn’t put “Black” in his name. Aside from that, the idea of an urban vigilante who saw his parents killed in front of him and didn’t turn into Batman, but instead rode around on a high-tech skateboard giving thugs karate chops, is the dumbest idea ever.

.

..

Razorback

Being in comic books must be awesome. You see an animal and instead of thinking, like a normal human, “I’d like to eat that animal,” you think “I’d like to dress up like that animal and fight crime.” Hence Buford Hollis, the man known as Razorback. Yes, he is a huge pig in a semi truck, thanks for asking.

.

.

.

Jack Of Hearts

You know when you get high and you can just spend like six hours doodling weird patterns on a piece of notebook paper? The guy who designed Jack of Hearts’ costume sure does. After being exposed to a vat of “Zero Fluid” (later marketed as Mountain Dew Code Red), Jack Hart dons this eye-bejaggering costume and fights crime until he blows up and dies.

.

..

.

Captain Marvel

No, not the alien Kree warrior who died of cancer. Nor the red-clad do-gooder who uses the magic word Shazam! to transform himself. This guy was a robot… with amnesia… who could make his arms fall off. Well I’ll just bet Al Qaeda is shivering in its boots hoping that this dude doesn’t come after them. Mercifully canceled after five issues, but not before he fought a dude who could shoot lighting out of his nose.

.

;

Tarot: Witch Of The Black Rose

It’s a stretch to call Tarot a “superhero,” but she fights menaces to humanity while wearing stupid clothes, so that’s enough for me. There’s been 61 issues of her solo title, each one full to bursting with massive hoo-has, idiotic writing and casual sex with dead people. If you buy this, you will die a virgin.

.

.

Squirrel Girl

This lunkheaded creation has actually garnered somewhat of a fan following in recent years for being so dang ridiculous. Doreen Green has the mutant power to communicate with squirrels, and this buck-toothed champion of justice has defeated Dr.Doom, Thanos and Terrax the Tamer all by her lonesome. This is because comic books are stupid.

.

.

Starfox

So there’s this guy, see? He’s one of a bunch of space demigods called the Titans and he just wants to help us out by fighting crime with the Avengers. There’s only one problem: his superpower is rape. Starfox (real name Eros) is gifted with the ability to make women fall in love with him. And he can’t control it… or doesn’t want to. Literally, if you see him coming to your universe, invest heavily in Trojan stock. The side effect of this power is that every single man in Creation wants to beat the crap out of him at all times.

.

.

.

Gunfire

Probably the biggest source of stupid superheroes is when companies try to create a bunch of new characters at once, hoping that some of them will catch on. DC’s 1993 Bloodlines event brought forth some twenty-seven of them, nearly all of them fated to die in background scenes of other crossovers. One of the worst was Gunfire. You know how everybody in the 90s had to have a gun? This douche did it one better – he turned everything he touched into a gun. Thankfully, he got his hands chopped off.

.

.

,

U.S. 1

You know what was the iPod of the late ’70s? CB radios. Long the domain of amphetamine-addled truckers, the CB became a cultural touchstone with the release of “Convoy,” the greatest song ever about convoys. So big ups to Marvel Comics for introducing a hero with a steel plate in his brain that lets him receive CB signals. I bet he felt really stupid when his nephew came over with his BlackBerry.

.

.

Manikin

Okay, so time travel is a pretty cool power. But this dude has about the opposite of it. Whitman Knapp can summon three of his “genetic relatives” from the history of human evolution – a protoplasmic blob (useless), a caveman (useless), and a super-smart future dude (pretty useful). So the question is why doesn’t he just stay as future dude all the time? Did he really need to hit things with a club so badly?

.

.

.

ShadowHawk

So finding things to make fun of in the early days of Image Comics is like shooting fish in a barrel, if the barrel is actually the barrel of your gun. But one of the dumbest concepts was ShadowHawk, an armor-clad vigilante who was attacked by gangsters and injected with AIDS blood. His war against crime was characterized by breaking his victim’s spines – classy.

.

.

.

Dazzler

When comic book companies decide to be topical, bad things happen. Hence the Disco Dazzler, a spangle-suited soft-rock singer who was developed by disco label Casablanca and Marvel to bring some of that Saturday Night Fever to the printed page. The disco fad died, but Marvel stuck with the character, loosing one of the worst fashion disasters to ever fight crime upon the world.

.

.

.

Thunderstrike

So there’s this guy, right? The Mighty Thor. Pretty awesome, giant hammer, Norse God? They’re making a movie about him. But in the nightmarish 90s, the powers that be at Marvel decided that Thor wasn’t hip enough, so they carted him off and replaced him with… THUNDERSTRIKE! Who was just Thor in a sleeveless leather vest with a goatee. Dig that tagline: he’s trading the Rainbow Bridge for the Brooklyn Bridge. Because all the real menaces to humanity live in Park Slope.

.

.

.

Wild Dog

With the Punisher becoming one of Marvel’s most popular characters in the late 80s, DC decided they needed their own gun-toting dispenser of bullety justice. Who they got was Wild Dog, a former college hockey player who… shoots criminals. While wearing his old hockey jersey and mask. Luckily Gotham City’s police are all idiots.

[Edited 3/23/16 8:54am]

[Edited 3/23/16 9:06am]

pick one

I remember reading a DC comic in the early '70's about a kid who had every super power imaginable. However, each time he used one it took five years off his life. So he had to either figure out how to solve stuff without using his superpowers, or sacrifice some lifespan.

It was a horrible comic and a horrible premise.

Blankman...

Meteor Man,

I read U.S. 1 i liked it

KingBAD said:

I've been a fan of Dazzler since the beginning. She was originally modeled after Grace Jones in the late 70s and then changed to resemble Bo Derek instead. She doesn't wear that dated disco jumpsuit and roller skates anymore, hah.




And in the six years since the original article was written, Squirrel Girl has become a critically-acclaimed book.

Why You Should Be Reading The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl: http://www.slate.com/blog...arvel.html

I have some of those comics!!!

I need to re-read that "Starfox" one though!

Sexton: I want to see J-Lo play Dazzler in a major motion picture...but in all her Disco glory.

how did this not make it in here yet???

there may be some shit you don't want folks to hear in this vid... (whatever y'all write for that)

I only recognized Dazzler and Red Tornado, and even they are basically unknown to me except for a few appearances that I remember.

This list is like the 1 Dollar Store of superheroes.

.

They´re like the Watchmen,but with even less superpowers.

kpowers said:

Never underestimate... the power of the handicapped!!!

I seem to recall a couple of Marvel characters who were basically ex dope fiends. It was during the Reagan war on drugs, maybe 1985. I definitely remember thinking "is that the right message for the youth of today, that dope gives you super powers?"

Aha - Cloak and Dagger! That was them.

[Edited 3/24/16 16:21pm]

The Wonder Twins were disappointing.

KoolEaze said:

I only recognized Dazzler and Red Tornado, and even they are basically unknown to me except for a few appearances that I remember.

This list is like the 1 Dollar Store of superheroes.

.

They´re like the Watchmen,but with even less superpowers.

KingBAD said:

pick one

Excuse you, but Snake Eyes [the mute ninja] & Scarlet [the redhead white female ninja] were badass!

purplethunder3121 said:

EmmaMcG said:

purplethunder3121 said:

How could you?? [Edited 3/25/16 16:07pm]

Couldn't stand 'em when my kid had to watch 'em on TV. On the other hand, the cartoon of X Men on Saturday mornings was a must see for me, too.

purplethunder3121 said:

I hated this iteration of the turtles, too. The Eastman & Laird originals were badass, though.

XxAxX said:

I've seen Color Kid included in lists of crappy superheroes for years. In the books, he was even depicted as a Legion of Superheroes reject. That always struck me as shortsighted. One who has the ability to change the color of objects could theoretically do most things an invisibility, illusion-casting, or light/darkness-manipulating character could do. That's actually pretty expansive.

[Edited 3/25/16 19:25pm]

TonyVanDam said:

The Wonder Twins were disappointing.

I think it was gleek who was holding them back

Lammastide said:

I've seen Color Kid included in lists of crappy superheroes for years. In the books, he was even depicted as a Legion of Superheroes reject. That always struck me as shortsighted. One who has the ability to change the color of objects could theoretically do most things an invisibility, illusion-casting, or light/darkness-manipulating character could do. That's actually pretty expansive.

[Edited 3/25/16 19:25pm]

That reminds me of when Marvel tried to reinvent Cypher, the mutant who had the power to translate languages into one that can also read body language and he became a Taskmaster-type of character who beat the New Mutants by anticipating what they would do next in a fight.

How can Fartman not be the worst???