People with useless superpowers in comic books.
- Wheeler actually mocks Ma-Ti in the comic book adaptation of Captain Planet and the Planeteers #3, directly invoking the trope, "What kind of useless power is heart?" Of course, we then learn Ma-Ti can read minds. He then makes fun of Ma-Ti pacifying guards and making them go to sleep. Ma-Ti can also talk to animals - basically having Aquaman's ability, but with all animals and not just sea life. His power has the ability to have the target look into their own soul, which Wheeler also mocks. The main weakness of Ma-Ti's ability is that it has to be used indirectly against villains, unlike all of the others. When Ma-Ti tries using any of above Jedi Mind Trick powers on the Arc Villains or the Monster of the Week, it never works because they're either too evil or too powerful. Also, if there's no living thing around for him to use his powers on, then he's basically Brought Down to Normal and can at best act as Mission Control for the team.
- In the comics, Aqualad developed concerns similar to Aquaman's about feeling useless as a member of the Teen Titans, which became so severe that he later developed a psychosomatic illness. Once the cause of his problem was realized, Aqualad decided to relegate himself as a Titans reservist, who participated with the team only when they had a mission in the sea. He later got a costume change, a power upgrade and Took a Level in Badass, becoming "Tempest". Then he died. In the Teen Titans cartoon he was far more formidable too, being able to control water telekinetically. (Still, it did seem that the writers always "conveniently" placed him somewhere where he could make use of that; even indoors, there was always sure to be a large amount of plumbing nearby...) The second Aqualad was given the ability to create hard-water weapons and generate electrical blasts because the creators of Young Justice wanted to have an Aqualad who had powers that would be of use when not in the ocean.
- Fantastic Four:
- The Invisible Woman originally only had the power to… be invisible. It got so bad that one issue's main story was made shorter to allow room to try to justify Sue's existence after all the letters they'd gotten. The best The Man himself could do is "a pretty girl inspires the boys to fight harder." (They also pointed out that one time she invisibly tripped a lone, fleeing Skrull. They forgot to mention that her male teammates had each dispatched several fighting-mad Skrull.) After it became obvious that she was useless as an action hero in her current form, creators Stan Lee and Jack Kirby gave her the additional powers of making other objects/people invisible and projecting telekinetic force fields (making sure to call them invisible force fields instead of merely force fields every time they're used to try making it less obvious that it's got little to do with invisibility.) Wasn't until the John Byrne period that she found many different uses for the force fields, such as powerful attack (suffocating an enemy inside a force field, creating a field inside an enemy and expanding it until they explode, etc,) and as a mode of transportation. As such, Susan is now usually considered not only the most powerful member of the team, but one of the most powerful characters in the entire Marvel Universe, and her personality has changed accordingly, as she realized she didn't need to bow to anyone.
- For that matter, Reed's stretching powers can seem a tad useless in a lot of situations (he's never displayed the kind of limitless shapeshifting abilities of, say, Plastic Man). But Reed's real super-power is being the most brilliant scientist on Earth. It's actually been implied a few times in different continuities that his stretching is related to his super-genius: by contracting the neural connections in his brain, he can actually think and learn faster than a normal human brain should be capable of (he was already a genius, but his powers make him a super-genius). This is still only of limited usefulness.
- Every Silver Age team had a token female that was as useless as they could possibly make her, it seemed, and The Wasp, of The Avengers fame, takes the cake. Her power was to become very small. She had wings in her small form, and stingers that, well, stung, but didn't really stop the enemy. She was about as useless fighting villains as her namesake insect, and spent most of the time begging for help, needing rescue more often than civilians. Her tendency to go small right away means she can't even qualify for Badass Normal. Worse still, she was always right alongside her boyfriend Hank, who also could become small, and more usefully, large, going from Ant-Man to Giant Man and swatting villains like bugs. His intelligence means bug-size was useful for him, as he knew how to sabotage villainous weaponry, and he had his bug-control helmet. Hitching a ride on bug-back means he can pretty much fly, too. This made Wasp's uselessness even more glaring. Wasp's being good at unarmed combat and deductive reasoning came later, and she's still more remembered for her many costumes than for actually doing anything. However, like many on this list, she was made non-useless decades later: She eventually became a great fighter in her own right and she even led The Avengers for a time. She also gained the ability to grow, though this rarely comes up.
- This is completely averted in The Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes, where she is capable of taking down villains by herself.
- And in the Ultimate universe, where her neurological knowledge means that she can attack people's brains. In addition, in Ultimate Canon, she is a mutant and can do the "Wasp Stings" innately at full size, where they are painful and cause nerves to go numb.
- She was, as chairperson of the Avengers at the time, on the superhero team in Secret Wars (1984) where a godlike being, the Beyonder, made the most powerful heroes and villains fight against each other for his amusement. The Wasp did manage to escape an entire team of X-Men, as well as the master of magnetism (Magneto), in one issue when, due to a misunderstanding, they tried to subdue and restrain her, by basically being too small for them to be able to hit her.
- It was established via retcon that the reason Hank Pym abandoned the Ant-Man identity to become Giant-Man was because he felt his shrinking abilities were a little useless on a team that included Iron Man, Thor, and the Hulk.
- Hawkeye: Hawkeye (2012) deconstructs this. Clint is shown to be quite the badass in his own right with his Improbable Aiming Skills and Trick Arrows, but the narrative makes a point of showing how just how out of his element he can be in superhero battles. For instance, he's immediately taken out during a battle with AIM that Spider-Man and Wolverine easily win without him, and Clint himself points out that his archery abilities are completely useless when it comes to rescuing victims of a hurricane.
- Not that Hawkeye didn't fight a few villains that fit the Trope, like Oddball. His power? He could juggle. He could juggle really well. Sure, he juggles spheres that contained stuff like tear gas and liquid adhesive that he used like throwing weapons, but again, the power itself was kind of lame. To make this worse, he actually formed a team of other villains who used juggling as their MO (seriously, he did) called the Death Throws, each of which specialized in a different type of juggling: Tenpin (juggled clubs), Ringleader (juggled rings), Bombshell (also juggled spheres, but preferred ones that exploded), and Knickknack (who could juggle objects of dissimilar sizes and weights, a difficult trick if you're a performer, yes, but as a villain, still lame).
- The X-Men had their fair share of members whose powers were pretty useless.
- For a lesser example (which just goes to show how bad these situations could be), when we first met Jean Grey, her powers were only good for levitating as much as she could physically carry. She was considerably more useful than day-one Sue and Wasp, but compared to Beast, Cyclops, and Iceman, her powers weren't so great. Even Angel (who at some points thought his flight power is not unique and thus lame) made more of a non-combat power (having flight alone should make you a bullet sponge, but with incredible agility, high flying speeds, and super-strong wings, he could kick some serious evil mutant posterior even pre-Archangel.) to the degree that Jean fell behind. However, she had incredible precision with her powers, and the 'school' theme means, like her teammates, she became stronger and more skilled with her powers as time went. Eventually, she became so powerful (the Phoenix Force helps, a lot) that she reached Humanoid Abomination levels...at least before the retcon hit. But even after that she's still one of the most powerful mutants.
- Kitty Pryde takes this role later. Having the ability to walk through walls is great and all, but she lacked any offensive capabilities. At one point, she joined the rest of the X-Men to save the Morlocks from the Marauders, and realized that while her powers meant that the Marauders couldn't hurt her physically, they still seemed to be able to hurt her by taking out her friends. She Took a Level in Badass as well, being trained as a Ninja and adding swords, guns and a dragon to her arsenal. Starting with Alan Davis' run on Excalibur, she developed the ability to phase through one opponent while striking another. She also gained the situational useful ability/side effect of causing electronics to malfunction when she phased through them. Kinda rough when your secondary power is only occasionally useful.
- In the classic "Days of Future Past" story-line, when her future-self is in control of her past-body, she gives a few indications of the more practical and dangerous applications of her powers, such as partial phasing while leaping through an assassin in order to disorient, disarm, and incapacitate him (She was once able to use this focus to remove the metal shard that threatened Tony Stark's heart). Young Kitty herself puts on an impressive display earlier, walking straight through her first Danger Room scenario (even over a Pit Trap) without a scratch. The senior members of the team are laughing their asses off while watching, thinking about how much time and effort Prof. X had invested trying to create a challenge for the rookie.
- Ultimate later upped the ante, having Kitty specifically train herself (off panel) to control her phasing ability; her theory that, if she can make her atoms separate enough to phase through things then she could condense them to gain invulnerability and super strength. This incidentally being what The Vision has done with his own intangibility in the main Marvel Universe all along.
- Rogue has the ability of Power Copying any mutant she comes in contact with, and even with non-mutants can gain some of their memories and any special skills they may have (like playing football or martial arts) for short time. While this sounds cool in theory, Rogue's ability also has the side-effect of harming her target, which can range from knocking them out to killing them outright, regardless of whether said person is a friend or an enemy. As such, it's not uncommon for Rogue to remain almost completely covered up to prevent accidental use of her powers, and even otherwise, to rarely want to use her powers in fear of actually hurting someone she didn't intend to. Her powers are often shown as being so inconvenient that the only way writers seemed to have to make her useful to the team is for her to accidentally permanently kill someone and use their powers instead, like with Ms. Marvel or Sunfire. While sometimes Rogue's powers change to be more useful on their own (like when she could, for a short time, recall any power she had previously absorbed regardless of how long she touched her target), her abilities always seem to default back to the "almost kill to gain their powers so I never want to use it" method. To be fair, Rogue's powers are only lame because she doesn't want to kill and has no control over them to keep from killing; the ability to copy anyone's power in a world populated by superheroes, supervillains, and mutants would be an awesome power otherwise.
- Subverted with Cypher/Doug Ramsey, whose power is to understand ANY language, even body language, or code, making him now quite the badass as he can even foresee his opponents' movements (as long as he can "read" a pattern), or find the weak point of architectural structures. Any "language" was also shown early on to include computer languages, making him the best computer programmer the X-Men have ever seen. He's a character who was vindicated as Technology Marches On. Originally, he was an Omniglot without the skill or Made of Iron-ness to let him be a Badass Normal. Sentinels versus the ability to speak French without having to buy Rosetta Stone is every bit the Curb-Stomp Battle you'd expect, to the point that in the end it was decided that he was much more useful to the plot as a fallen friend to occasionally angst over not having been able to save. However, all forms of computer code being a language he knows instinctively is much more useful since he was brought Back from the Dead in The New '10s than it was back in The '80s (he stopped Master Mold in Second Coming just by communicating with his source code - and that was while the Mold was attempting to swallow him!), and also, Badass Normal via body language reading is more often used. He just came along two or three decades too early, but now his time has come. Unlike the others on this list, he didn't need his powers changed to take a level in badass - instead something else changed that his ability can exploit for awesomeness.
- Angel has similar problems to Hawkman and Aquaman. His power, at first, is to fly with his large wings and nothing but that. This also means that he's more hindered with wind physics than those who can fly without wings. He was variously given razor-sharp metal wings, the ability to shoot poisoned metal pieces from his wings, and a healing factor to make him more powerful. The current version is physically powerful for a similar reason as Aquaman: to actually fly with his wings and survive hundreds of miles per hour winds, he must be very strong and resistant to damage. Angel was largely rescued by Marvel in an issue of Thunderbolts where he flies rings around them in their own comic in an awesome "Taking them back to school" moment. Angel also has a little-remembered ability of extraordinarily keen eyesight, comparable to a hawk's. That may not sound like much, but being able to spot movement from a rabbit when you're flying half a mile up is no small feat.
- Toad. He originally had the power to jump high, period. He actually made good use of it (mainly as a distraction to set you up to be nailed by the more powerful Brotherhood members, but he was able to kick fairly hard with those leg muscles) and like many of these characters, has since received a beef-up (He's now mainly known for his prehensile tongue and the ability to spit slime at his enemies, on top of having very strong leg muscles). Although back in the day, the reason Magneto recruited him was more so he could have an expendable lackey than because of the usefulness of his powers.
- Wraith (Hector Rendoza; there are a few other Marvel characters named Wraith, who all have more useful abilities) had the ability to turn his skin invisible. That was it. He later found that he could transfer this power to turn skin invisible to other people, but seeing the muscles of other people is still just as useless as showing your own.
- Jubilee (Marvel Comics) has been a mainstay among the X-Men for a long time, often being paired as Wolverine's sidekick just because he's a badass and she's not. Her ability to shoot firework-like plasmoids from her hands rarely ever proved useful. Sure, they kinda burned like fireworks, but at the most they were only good as a signal flare or as a quick distraction. Also, since birth, her brain has always generated a natural psionic shield, which made her naturally invisible to telepaths unless they knew exactly what to look for when searching for her. She eventually lost her firework powers as a result of the M-Day and left the X-Men. As a member of the New Warriors, she used Powered Armor to give her super strength. This made her rather useful and effective in combat, but she eventually gave that up just to move on with her life. She would later be infected by a virus that turned her into a vampire. This gave her all the strengths and weaknesses typical to vampires: Enhanced strength, agility, speed, stamina, reflexes, fangs and claws, and the ability to turn into mist. By regularly feeding off Wolverine's blood, she temporarily gained his healing factor and could withstand limited amounts of sunlight. Whether she can use her fireworks again, after the Scarlet Witch has been brought back from exile and started to rectify what she did, is yet to be seen, though.
- Ironically enough, Jubilee's original powers were actually a subversion: she limited herself to only using the fireworks because her full power was far more destructive, and she feared hurting someone with it. Emma Frost once stated that had she ever utilized them to their full potential, she could detonate matter at the sub atomic level. This made Jubilee a walking fission bomb.
- Poor Barnell Bohusk, aka Beak. His mutation was less a "power" and more a freak deformity. Basically, he had avian physiology in all the wrong ways. On top of being legendarily ugly (his face was a horrific mishmash of human and bird), he also had light and hollow bones, like birds, making him quite frail without the ability to properly fly to compensate (he could glide and sorta fly, with very great effort, though it is possible that he could have become able to fly properly later on). At least he had enhanced eyesight and dangerous talons he could fight with, but none of that really made up for his weaknesses.
- Barnell's grandson Tito in an alternate future is basically his grandfather but he got the best of avian and human physiology. While Barnell's mutation made him look like a deformed chicken-man, Tito's mutation makes him look like a badass eagle-man who can actually fly.
- Bailey Hoskins, the Worst X-Man Ever, has the power to explode. Which would be awesome, except he lacks the Required Secondary Powers that would allow him to survive exploding.
- Legion of Super-Heroes:
- The Legion of Substitute Heroes is composed of rejected applicants to Legionnaires, who banded together in an effort to show their powers were not useless. Some members included Chlorophyll Kid, who has the power to make plants grow super fast (he also says he can communicate with plants; he can't, but that doesn't stop him from talking to them); Color Kid, who can change the color of objects; Infectious Lass, who spontaneously generates infectious diseases; and Stone Boy, who has power to turn into stone (at which point he becomes completely immobile. Eventually, he undergoes hypnotherapy in order to move in his stone form.) However, several members managed to prove their point and "graduate" into the LSH proper.
- Matter-Eater Lad is one of the ones who sounds useless in theory, but in practice... well, if there's anything you need to break into, or any dangerous item you need to dispose of, the guy who can eat his way through, and digest, anything... he's your man, er, lad.
- Likewise, Bouncing Boy is extremely useful because of one of his Required Secondary Powers; dude's good enough at physics and trig to ricochet off walls and into bad guys, which is pretty damn hard to do quickly.
- Some of the applicants were written so obviously planned-to-fail that it boggles the mind what made them think they'd be a contributing member in the first place. Double Header opened with the remark "Two heads are better than one!"... and immediately started bickering with himself. And Arm-Fall-Off-Boy could detach his arm and use as a club, apparently not considering that blunt instruments aren't that difficult to obtain.
- The Death of Lightning Lad: After the titular hero's demise, Antennae Boy applies for Legion membership. His grotesque ears can pick up radio broadcasts from stations anywhere and anywhen on Earth, but they also produce an extremely grating noise which he does not know how to turn off. Cosmic Boy unceremoniously tells him to get out.
- One of the Substitute Heroes eventually ended up as leader of the Legion: Polar Boy, whose powers (control over ice and temperature) were always pretty useful; he just sucked at controlling them. After training for a few years and mastering his powers, he became a powerful and respected hero.
- One of the Substitute Heroes' founders, Night Girl, had strength and durability roughly equal to Superman's. While this is impressive, she was rejected from the Legion because her powers only worked in the dark, making them rather impractical. She compensated by learning martial arts, and is quite effective if she teams up with Shadow Lass, who can generate darkness, or Color Kid, who learned to tweak his powers to manage the same effect. She also has the Required Secondary Powers of being able to see in the dark. Night Girl eventually became a respected hero.
- Stone Boy has also shown that he can fight reasonably well. It helps that all Legion members get a membership ring that allows them to fly—he can get right above a foe, turn to stone, and drop down on them.
- Color Kid poses a major threat to the Green Lantern Corps! They should have recruited him—if not to bear a ring, then as a supporting player who could nullify the color yellow whenever necessary. In one story, Color Kid's power actually proved vitally useful. He saved Superboy's life by turning a chunk of deadly green Kryptonite into harmless blue Kryptonite. He could also potentially blind enemies by changing the colour of their pupils to block light, depending on the exact mechanics of his power he could make himself and other objects invisible, and he could change the colour of air molecules to generate vision-obscuring clouds. The power actually has a lot of utility, it just sounds lame and wasn't used to the extent it might have been.
- In one story, Dream Girl, whose dreams are always prophetic, was in an attempted mugging against herself and Karate Kid. She contemplated leaving the Legion because her power is useless in a fight. She is reminded of the value of her power the following night when she saves Karate Kid's life because one of her prophetic dreams warned her that he was going to die, of wounds he unknowingly suffered in the attempted mugging.
- Fire Lad was a rejected member who joined the Substitute Heroes. His powers were not lame at all (he could breathe fire); the reason he was rejected was because they were dangerous and, like Polar Lad, he had a hard time controlling them. (And true to the fears of the bona-fide Legionnaires who rejected his membership, he caused almost as many disasters as he prevented.)
- Chlorophyll Kid also suffered from the same problem. His ability to "grow plants really fast" was powerful enough to let him create giant botanical monsters, but his inability to control them led to them becoming a threat to allies and enemies alike.
- In Pinocchio, Vampire Slayer, while Pinocchio's ability to make his nose grow when lying might appear of limited use, it gives him an automatic armory of stakes to use against the vampires he is fighting with his allies, and he later uses it to vault himself over a wall by making his nose long enough to use as a pole.
- Tyrone Jessup of the teen paranormal group Psi-Force had the ability to leave his body in intangible astral form. While this was useful in some situations, it still looked pretty weak next to abilities like powerful telekinesis, mind control, healing everything short of death, etc. A later writer made a point of powering him up a bit.
- The Top Cow Productions comic book series Freshmen has a team full of this. Each character's ability is based on what they were thinking of when a Mad Scientist's machine blew up. While some powers are more traditionally useful (the ability to control other people's minds, the ability to cause earthquakes) some are hard to use particularly well (for instance, the Drama Twins: Renee can telekinetically pull stuff and Brady can telekinetically push stuff; to actually use telekinesis effectively requires them to be touching each other and coordinate), or have disastrous side effects (the Intoxicator can cause everyone around him to be as high or drunk as he is). Then there are things like the ability to understand and talk to plants (while being a vegan), the power to make someone fall in love with you, the powers of a squirrel (a weird haircut, a constant desire to hoard nuts, and a limited ability to glide), having an incredibly sticky body, having a 15-foot-long indestructible penis, and an incredible ability to build dams and having super-intelligence... while being a beaver. However, the team's "leader", an incredibly nerdy comic book fan named Norrin, has no abilities (except for a fairly useless utility belt): he was out getting a pizza when the machine exploded. Surprisingly, at least once in the first story arc everyone's power is put to use. Except the Gag Penis. And we can all be thankful for that.
- Played straight in normalman. Everyone on the planet Levram has superpowers, but not only do some of them never figure out just what their power are, some people can, for example, turn toast green.
- The Umbrella Academy:
- The Kraken's power is apparently the ability to hold his breath forever. It probably makes him the world's best swimmer and a top athlete, but it doesn't quite compare to, say, re-shaping reality at will. He compensates with excellent knife-fighting skills, to the point where he takes down a pack of Vietnamese vampires with a pair of knives. Gerard Way actually said in a lecture at SVA that he made him "fucking useless" on purpose, but at the same time also said that, in a world where no-one else had super powers, something as simple as that is a big deal. Hargreeves, for all his intense dislike of the boy, ranked the Kraken as #2 among the children, placing him right under his favorite pupil and above the Reality Warper, the psychic, the time traveler, the boy with a Lovecraftian Superpower, and the White Violin in that order.
- Vanya has the power to... play the violin really well. She ends up being so upset over this (plus a good amount of ostracization and emotional abuse from her peers and father figure) that she eventually becomes the main villain and, using a deadly violin, becomes a Musical Assassin powerful enough to destroy the world.
- Turner D. Century. With the amazing power of hating young people, plus a flying bicycle and an umbrella that shot fire. In keeping with his "let's be nostalgic for 1901!" gimmick, Turner rode a flying bicycle built for two. But he had no one to ride with, so the second seat was occupied by a life-size doll dressed like a woman. Is being pathetic a super power? It is when you are this pathetic. Still, he was pretty effective as a simple arsonist in his debut story. A flying vehicle and a flamethrower isn't too different from the Green Goblin's flying vehicle and pumpkin bombs shtick, and the head of his "passenger" was a disguised explosive. Still looks goofy, though.
- The Ten-Eyed Man. With the amazing ability of having eyes in his fingertips.
- His appearance in Batman: The Brave and the Bold (the only show a villain like this could appear on) is one big lampshading of how ridiculous the character is and how easy it is to defeat him. We see Batman following him only for Bat-Mite to show up, start reciting Ten-Eyed Man's origin story, express his appreciation for obscure characters getting the occasional nod and throw a cactus at him which he grabs rendering him completely helpless. Total time: about 3 minutes.
- And even the cactus is overkill. Anything it hurts to have in your eyes (therefore, anything period!) can stop him. The plant he was tricked into grabbing in his original comics appearance was a totally unremarkable one. Made sillier yet by Character Shilling: TB&TB plays him as a ridiculous villain with much Lampshade Hanging, but the comic pretended he was super-dangerous. He's gotta have his hands imprisoned in a box or "breaking out of here will be child's play for him." No, he hadn't been established as some master escape artist before; his almighty power of normal vision at the cost of the ability to touch stuff makes him a terrifying threat to humanity. Yeeeah.
- He was brought into Grant Morrison's Batman run, where Bruce Wayne defeats him using Shrimp Scampi sauce, which burns his fingers. He was only hyped a threat only by his apparent lack of sanity and general oddity.
- 52, also written in part by Morrison, featured the Ten-Eyed Men of the desert, who were explicitly shown to have trouble against opponents. Their ability was mainly played up for Body Horror.
- Great Lakes Avengers: The entire concept of this group is that they are LAME. Deadpool and Squirrel Girl notwithstanding.
- Mr. Immortal's only power is to come back to life. Something Deadpool takes advantage of, to the extreme, whenever the two are together. Before Deadpool joined the team, he was able to make good use of his power when the villain Maelstrom invented a machine that would destroy the entire universe. Mr. I convinced Maelstrom that if he destroyed the universe, then nobody would be left to study whatever may remain. Maelstrom became depressed by this, contemplating suicide. Mr. I formed a Suicide Pact with him, shooting himself in the head to show he was serious. Maelstrom shot himself afterward, then Mr. I woke up and shut down the device. He can also instantly heal any persistent injuries by killing himself.
- Doorman: The power to become a portal, but only into the next room. Unfortunately, that means while his power can let his teammates into a room, he can't follow them. (He's also a psychopomp with vaguely described powers.)
- Flatman: with the power of being two-dimensional. (He can also stretch à la Reed Richards.) With the addition of how his costume looks, he's quite often confused for Reed Richards too.
- Big Bertha: with the power to become really, really fat. (With accompanying strength and durability à la Blob.) She has to throw up her fat to get rid of it, but in her normal form she's a very famous supermodel. Her career funds the GLA, so there's that too.
- Tippy Toe: Squirrel Girl's sidekick squirrel, and a full member of the team. He's just a squirrel. A talking, fourth-wall breaking squirrel, but a squirrel all the same.
- In the Howard the Duck section from Civil War: Choosing Sides #0 we have the man that can grow a full beard in a minute!!
- Angelo "Skin" Espinoza from the X-Men comic Generation X, whose power was... extra skin. He wasn't much of a Rubber Man because his bones and organs didn't stretch with it, and it couldn't change color either, so he couldn't really shapeshift. On top of that, having extra skin hanging off of him made him none-too-pretty, and if he stretched it too far or otherwise overtaxed it, he could be in agonizing pain for a considerable amount of time after. He made a few creative uses of his power in combat, but still got the short end of the Superpower Lottery compared to his teammates.
- One of his teammates was Synch, whose 'synchronistic aura' let him borrow other people's powers. However, proximity was needed, so he has exactly the same power as the guy next to him. Sometimes it was more useful for finding certain mutants by using his aura as a sort of power detector. He once was put in critical condition by being beaten up by non-powered mundane thugs when not accompanied by superhumans. However, he could sometimes use the powers in ways the original users hadn't worked their way up to yet, and it was theorized that he'd eventually learn to retain powers, but that never happened before he died (as in dead-dead, not comicbook-dead.)
- Prodigy from New X-Men: Academy X had similar limitations. He could absorb the knowledge of those around him, but not actually retain any of it once they left. He later learned that his mind had psychic blocks in place to prevent him from keeping any of the knowledge he absorbed, for fears that it would cause him to become an amoral tyrant. However, once he lost his powers following House of M, the Stepford Cuckoos removed his blocks, allowing him to access all of the knowledge he'd absorbed beforehand.
- Played with by the villains in Mark Gruenwald's Squadron Supreme. Some, like Pinball (can inflate his jumpsuit into a ball and roll into people) and Remnant (generate flying fabric from thin air) were pretty useless. On the other hand, Inertia, whose only ability was to transfer momentum from one place to the next, facilitates the epic beatdown of the Captain Ersatz equivalents of Superman, Flash, and Wonder Woman at the same time.
- Teen Titans: Year One has this as a frequent point of contention between Aqualad and Kid Flash, both of whom think the other's powers aren't up to snuff.Kid Flash: "Go talk to a fish!"Aqualad: "Oh, like running fast is really all that!"
- This is also a bit of an issue in Invincible, where Shrinking Ray feels he is often neglected by his teammates in the Guardians of the Globe because of his powers seeming less than formidable. This isn't exactly helped by the fact that he barely ever gets any lines or character development beyond this frustration.
- In the Doom Patrol Doom Force Special, a parody of X-Force, Shasta the Living Mountain agonizes over the fact that his power, turning into a mountain, has ridiculously limited application. This is probably also a parody of how in team books at least one member tends to have a complex about the perceived poorness of their powers. Since he's the Sacrificial Lamb, he dies, but since his teammates are Darker and Edgier, they not only don't mourn, they're actually happy he's dead because of his stupid powers.
- Independent character Dishman has the power to telekinetically clean dishes. He has yet to find a practical use for this beyond impressing women with the fact that he actually does household chores, but still seems to think it's interesting enough to base his hero identity around it.
- Usually, being able to shrink is an okay power so long as you have something to back it up; Ant-Man, the Wasp, the Atom, and Shrinking Violet have all had moderately successful careers. However, Doll Man was a guy who had the shrinking ability and nothing else. Often, adventures involving him were the type where his specific skills were required. While he was a moderate hit for Quality Comics in the Golden Age (enough to earn himself a love interest sidekick, Doll Girl) interest in him waned quickly. (DC Comics has tried to revive him a few times by upgrading his powers, but interest has yet to be rekindled.)
- The Man O Metal was the brainchild of H. G. Peters, co-creator of Wonder Woman, and his powers, while not lame, were kind of limited. Originally a blue-collar worker in a steel mill, an accident where molten steel was dumped on him somehow gave him the ability to turn his skin to blazing-hot metal. The problem? It doesn’t last long, and he needs to contact open flame to use it. One would think this guy would carry a cigarette lighter with him, but for most of his heroic career (which wasn’t long, as Peters had little time to expand it once Wonder Woman became a smash hit) he relied on accidental sparks from radiators, ovens, backfiring cars, and cigars, among other things.
- The team of the Red Shadows of the USSR in Suicide Squad is treated as a joke — for good reason. The most prominent and ridiculous member is called Bolshoi — a failed dancer who couldn't make it into the Bolshoi ballet and instead tried to become a Badass Normal in the Cold War superhuman scene. Since he got horribly maimed and nearly killed by Captain Boomerang of all people, you could say Bolshoi failed epically in his quest.
- In Avengers: The Initiative, Dragon Lord's power of conjuring and controlling dragons by mixing potions in his cauldron - while potentially awesome - is derided by the Taskmaster as "not a superpower, son, that's home economics", and the fact that his teammates have to provide cover for him while he prepares for summoning is cited as one of the reasons his squad of trainees is ineffective. (He never seems to think that he can do the preps before the fight.) After his death, the Irredeemable Ant-Man is amused that the cremated Dragon Lord is "mixed up in a little jar" because "he'd like that."
- The original Eel in Marvel Comics' sole gimmick in his early career was being really slippery. Eventually this was deemed too low-key to make him a believable danger to guys like Captain America and Daredevil, so he was given electric powers as well. Similarly, C-tier Spider-Man villain Slyde wore a full-body suit that made him super-slippery and allowed him to run at up to 30 MPH. Unlike the Eel, he's never been augmented or redeemed in any way.
- In Wildguard: Casting Call, some of the first round auditionees were... not very impressive. Adhesor sticks to things, for instance. Toughlon, while strong and durable, also has the useless ability of being non-stick like teflon (hence the name). The dolphin-like Dorsal Head complains about being pigeonholed as "only useful in a 'water' situation" despite this not being the case. Little Miss Sunshine can emit rays of light that aren't harmful to anything but vampires.
- Members of the newest incarnation of Infinity, Inc. tended to fall into this, due a depowering at the hands of Lex Luthor not quite sticking. Gerome McKenna went from having nuclear powers to being able to create a single duplicate of himself, while Erik Storn ended up with the power to turn from a stuttering man to a confident, self-assured woman.
- Inferior Five: The Blimp has the ability to fly... very, very slowly. Actually, he can only float in midair. He needs a stiff breeze to push him in any kind of direction. Just redefines the concept of "useless", doesn't it?
- In Sergio Aragonés Destroys DC we are introduced to a lineup of would-be super heroes with useless powers, such as DejaVu Lad, who has the power to make events repeat themselves. He gets to do his intro six times before they throw him out.
- In "The Dream Team Scheme" in Mad House Comics Digest #5 intellect-challenged Captain Sprocket decides to earn some respect by forming his own team. Unfortunately, all he can get are grade-Z superheroes like Roller Surfboard Man, who can do any roller surfboard trick in existence, and Super Pizza Pie Man, who can hit his target with a pizza of any size at a 50-foot distance.
- The Herder from Bazooka Jules can emit a sound that only sheep and cows can hears and that's it. He can't communicate with them nor can he control them. Jules and her boyfriend are less than impressed when he explains his powers to them.
- Discussed in Rising Stars. The "specials" are 113 people who were all conceived or in utero when a meteor detonated over their town. They all got powers, some flashier than others: a couple had super-strength and flight, a few others had various energy manipulation powers, and some had more specialized powers like complete invulnerability or Super-Intelligence. One woman, however, displayed absolutely no powers, even though she had been born at the same time as everyone else. The possibility is raised that she simply never happened on the situation where her powers would manifest. For example, maybe she could make roses grow, but only roses, or maybe she could telekinetically control butter knives. Ultimately subverted when it turns out she can bring people back to life and merge animals and people into hybrids.
- In Ordinary, an event occurs that gives superpowers to everybody, barring the protagonist. Many of these powers are completely useless. For example, the main character's best friend becomes a talking bear, the thoughts of the president of the United States are broadcast for all to see during his speeches and a news reporter's teeth glow to unnatural levels. One minor supporting character is discovered to have the superpower of creating pints of beer.
- Deconstructed in PS238. Since colour-changing powers or the ability to make rocks edible aren't useful in fighting crime, PS238 hosts the "Rainmaker" program for metahumans with noncombat powers. They are taught how to apply their powers towards civilian projects and working in the private industry. And then deconstructed again when we learn how the Rainmaker program got its name: During the Cold War, the US took the first non-combative metahuman they could find (who could create rain) and turned him into a test subject to learn what creates metahuman powers.
- In IDW's The Transformers: More than Meets the Eye:
- The rather unfortunate Ambulon's alt-mode is the leg of a Combiner. A single leg. So he never bothers to transform. When it comes to the crunch, he can help look after the sick, and it helps Ratchet figure out that Red Rust lies dormant until somebody's first transform after catching it.
- Rewind turns into a memory stick. After several million years of ribbing about an alt-mode that has to be carried everywhere, he's kind of sensitive.
Rewind: This is how it starts. Let's all have a go at Rewind because he turns into a memory stick, and not a - a super space tank or whatever!- Glitch is an Outlier, a Transformer with a special ability that's not related to his altmode. In his case, he can render nonsentient machines inoperable with a touch. There were two problems with this: one, he didn't have much control over this ability and tended to use it accidentally a lot; and two, every time he used it it caused him pain. Eventually he got over this and became Tarn, the leader of the Decepticon Justice Division, and his control over his power had evolved to the point where he could kill Transformers just by talking to them!
- Spider-Man supporting character Kaine, the second Scarlet Spider, has the ability to talk to spiders. He despises the ability, both because it's virtually useless and incredibly silly (and from a meta-context, it's a callout to Spider-Man's short-lived power upgrade in The Other, which was also largely disliked). In spite of this, he has the bad luck to keep ending up in situations where talking to spiders is the only way to save the day.
- Though C-list villain Stilt-Man's exosuit does provide him with a few actual useful powers, like superhuman strength and the ability to resist Spider-Man's webbing, it's mostly well-known for its bafflingly silly ability to make his legs longer.
- Warlock from New Mutants gets most of his powers from being a Technarch, a race of biomechanical aliens. However, he's also a mutant. His mutant ability is... the ability to feel emotions, unlike the rest of his Straw Vulcan race. On the plus side, he has all the Technarch abilities (shapeshifting, energy-draining, above-human-normal strength) to fall back on.
- DC's Metal Men all have abilities based on their respective metals. Gold and Platinum can stretch into long, thin strands or coils, Mercury has a liquid body, Lead can block rays and radiation, Iron is the toughest and strongest... and then there's Tin, who has all the powers of tin. He's frail, light, weak, melts at low temperatures, and what few abilities he has can be duplicated or exceeded by at least one of his teammates. His only real quality is that he's courageous and selfless to a fault, which means that just about every appearance he has ends in him Taking the Bullet and getting reduced to scrap before being rebuilt in the next issue to do it all again.
