Superhero comics have existed since the 1930s. Since that time, the comic books industry has churned out a huge number of superhero comics, which is something that has caused some serious problems from the perspective of narrative. For example, the need to retain popular characters is the reason that the afterlife often has what can seem like a revolving door in superhero settings. Likewise, the sheer number of superheroes and supervillains that have been created over the decades means that there have been a lot of terrible characters with terrible super-powers.
Generally speaking, superpowers in superhero settings are the sort of thing that most people would like to have. For example, it doesn’t take super-intelligence to figure out why people would want super-intelligence. For that matter, even when super-powers are not necessarily particularly useful in day-to-day life, they can still have that essential cool factor. One excellent example is eye beams, which wouldn’t be very useful for most of the people who read superhero comics but possess an undeniable style.
Unfortunately, there are plenty of superpowers that are much less desirable, as shown by a Looper video. In some cases, these less desirable superpowers are intentionally so. For example, while the earlier mutants in the Marvel comic books tended to be good-looking people with often useful and interesting super-powers, some of the later creative teams introduced new mutants who got a much worse deal out of their genetic quirk in addition to the setting’s widespread racism against mutants. The video brought up the example of a man whose superpower was essentially being a skeleton covered in a layer of very flammable goo, but there was the case of Beak as well, whose superpower was essentially having a bird-like face, which didn’t do wonders for his social life. In other cases, these less desirable superpowers seem to have been the product of either poor oversight or a well-honed sense of humor, as shown by some of the other characters covered in the Looper video. For those who enjoy a good laugh at some of the goofier moments in superhero comics, said video shouldn’t be hard to find at all.
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