The superhero genre prioritizes abilities that help heroes fight crime and tend to ignore superpowers that don’t contribute to engaging in, and surviving, knock-down, drag-out fights. But if we were to look at the bigger picture, there is more to life than crime-fighting. Abilities of little utility in that specific field may be of far more use than any of the flashy powers.
I can think of several unappreciated powers that would improve everyday life…
Telekinetic dish-cleaning
Dishman has the ability to telekinetically clean dishes. While his efforts to create a conventional superheroic persona around that power enjoyed mixed success at best, as Dishman’s author was clearly aware, that’s more an issue of misapplication than it is inherent uselessness. Telekinetic dish-cleaning has obvious household applications and would be incredibly useful for any activity that generated massive amounts of dirty dishes (restaurants, hospitals, etc.).
I suspect we’d need multiple Dishmen to deal with the world’s dish problem.
Color modification
Would-be Legion of Superheroes applicant Color Kid was rejected because the snooty LSHers could not see useful applications for his ability to alter objects’ colors. Even in universe, this decision is baffling, because color is incredibly important in the DC Universe. Color Kid can change Kryptonite from deadly green to harmless blue, he can make objects immune to Green Lantern rings, and he could (in theory) depower Superman by turning the Sun red or depopulate the Earth by shifting sunlight from visible light to gamma rays.
In the real world, this is a fellow who can redecorate his house as often as some people dye their hair. He’s never limited to the blandly colored fashions offered today. I can think of dozens of ways color alteration by force of will could be useful in daily life and I am certain you folks can think of more.
Touch-based language acquisition
Starfire of the Teen Titans has, like every member of her species, the ability to learn unfamiliar languages by touching people who speak the language. Starfire being Starfire, the touch is often a kiss. I don’t think she can confer language with a touch, which is too bad, but she is never more than a handshake away from being able to communicate.
Again, not a flashy power but incredibly useful to everyone who does not live in a monolingual culture. Almost nobody lives in such cultures, although they might kid themselves that they do. Heck, I could use it every show at the theatre1.
Which reminds me of a long-ago comics peeve, which is that Doug “Cypher” Ramsey was killed off some thirty years ago because writers and fans couldn’t think of any use for an omnilingual character.
Ice cream creation
DC Comics’ Martian Manhunter has a multitude of seemingly unrelated superpowers: superstrength, invulnerability, flight, heat ray vision (despite being vulnerable to fire), shape-shifting, invisibility, super-speed, intangibility, and as one adventure revealed, the ability that inspired this essay: he can use “all the powers from the void of space” to create ice cream.
I admit that all of Martian Manhunter’s other powers are pretty neat. At the same time, how often have you really needed to be invisible2, or super strong, or able to walk around stark naked without anyone noticing? Not often, I bet. But creating ice cream out of nowhere has a million uses! …OK, it has one use but it’s a great use! Who doesn’t like ice cream3?
These are just a few of the seemingly minor or ludicrous superpowers that on reflection would be marvelous to possess. I am sure there are more. Feel free to mention them in comments below.
- Although knowing more languages would undermine my pretense that I do not know the meaning of certain epithets slung at me by irritated audience members.
- I am looking forward to the comments relating hilariously embarrassing incidents in which invisibility would have been useful.
- Perhaps the lactose intolerant. But I strongly suspect that the Martian Manhunter can create lactose-free ice cream. About the only power better than ice cream creation would be Hostess Fruit Pie creation, but that would just be silly.
I keep counting and coming up with four superpowers (dish cleaning, colour modification, touch language acquisition, and ice cream creation) in the article above. Is this an out of coffee error?
I suspect the fifth superpower, therefore, was the ability to erase anything written about themself. Clearly someone didn’t want you publicizing their ability!
Marvel has a mutant whose power, not under voluntary control, is to be forgotten. I don’t it’s underrated though.
https://marvel.fandom.com/wiki/ForgetMeNot_(Xabi)_(Earth-616)
It seems to me that ForgetMeNot’s power is very similar to that of No-Girl (assuming No-Girl really exists and isn’t a running joke or something). But then, who could prove that they’re not the same person, if that person really existed? Oh, dear, now we have recursive memory dropouts…
I don’t remember that character.
I think there was one mutant whose only mutant power was that he was undetectable by mutant detectors.
Then how did they know he was a mutant?
I remember the old New Universe had one minor character who’s power was telekinetic control… of a single old Chevy hubcap. That’s it. He couldn’t control anything else, as far as he could tell, but he could control THAT, and used to ride on, and as a projectile like Cap’s shield, etc. It’s probably not actually underrated, but he certainly made the most out of an oddly specific power.
I remember that one. He first appeared in The War limited series.
There was a … I want to say David Langford-written super who had the power to keep his beer stein filled with fluid. Generally speaking, the liquid was beer. As one unfortunate person discovered, it didn’t have to be. It could be, oh, fresh blood.
A LOT of the Paranorms in that series had weird/silly powers because that was implied by the briefing the authors were given. Which is why mine ended up being a were-frog who could barely swim and a secret agent with weak static electricity powers that obeyed the real laws of physics, not comic book physics.
Leaks was fun, another power I particularly liked was Roz Kaveney’s Captain Kipple, who could summon weird garbage, some of it from parallel worlds.
Several of the stories from Temps are on line, accessible from the Wikipedia entry for the series.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midnight_Rose
If he could specify the type and RH factor of the blood, that could be incredibly useful.
To be more specific, he could drain fluid from another nearby source into his beer stein.
This turns out to be more useful than expected (eww).
It was Langford, indeed. “Leaks” appeared in the shared-world Temps anthology and was reprinted in The Silence of the Langford.
That one also mentioned the guy who could incinerate individual specks of dust with his mind alone. He learned to focus it on grains of gunpowder, and became Mr. Misfire, the Man Whose Opponents Shoot Themselves in the Foot.
There’s a very minor supporting character with a similar liquid conjuring ability in the Grrl Power web comic. He’s decided that trying to handle, for example, molten gold is more trouble than it’s worth – primarily because he’s met some vampires and his ability to pop back full of blood again in seconds makes him very popular. Some people are skeptical about his harem of affectionate undead women but the arrangement seems to work for them.
Yes, he appears in Langford’s “Leaks” and I think one or two other stories.
The main character in T. Kingfisher’s _A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking_ starts out thinking her own specific ability isn’t worth much, because there’s not much practical use to dancing gingerbread men.
But there is! Dancing gingerbread men can easily be trained to be Ninjabread Men.
The right mixture of air and flour is surprisingly explosive — more than one grain elevator has gone up that way. Maybe it’s just as well that she didn’t happen to stumble on that.
She can’t control flour. Only dough and baked goods.
I’m still sad about Cypher.
There was amazing potential story arcs given his friendship with Warlock.
Doug Ramsey lived within commuting distance of New York City, too. You know that the United Nations would waste no time finding or inventing a job for a kid who spoke all the languages.
In Ursula Vernon’s “World of the White Rat” books, a number of people are “wonderworkers”: people who have some kind of magical ability. These include things like the ability to apply “carnivorous tattoos”, which will chew on and eventually consume the victim under specified conditions, and suddenly smelling an overwhelming odour of sage if the person is in the presence of something important that they should pay attention to. One character suggests that absolutely everyone is a wonderworker of some kind, but that most people never figure out what their talent is. “Have you ever tried giving orders to hermit crabs? No? Well, how do you know that you can’t?”
35 years ago, a play staged at UWaterloo had a character who survived a lab accident and was convinced he had to have superpowers. Unfortunately he had no idea what they were and his friends’ suggestions (“the power to survive being baked in a giant bran muffin!”) were not helpful.
Luckily, the plot was on his side and he discovered what it was in time to save the day:
Actually one of the powers of Dalinar Kholin, Stormlight Archive was one-touch language acquisition. He could even transmit these acquired languages to others with a touch.
The guy in Misfits with lactokenisis was terrifying, but he could have used his powers for good, like making cheese.
I think the ability to conjure up ice cream on demand would definitely contribute to engaging in, and surviving, knock-down, drag-out fights. Conjure it onto someone’s face and blind them! Drown them in it! Find out what your arch-nemesis’ favorite flavor is and distract them with it!
I scream, you scream, we all
get kicked out of the libraryrun from the ice cream tsunami!If Dishman can extend his power to cleaning floor tiles, will it make them slippery to impede escaping bad guys?
After all, there are some restaurants that apply an extremely unusual definition of a plate or other serving container.
Invisibility would’ve been useful the night I got lit up by the County Police helicopter while drinking beer and smoking weed behind the church. Fortunately I was wearing my old army camoflage field jacket and knew that when suddenly illuminated at night, freeze. The others with me weren’t wearing camo and they scattered like cockroaches, drawing the attention of the police.
For all practical purposes I was invisible…
I discovered if I put on a yellow safety vest and an enormous orange foam-rubber hat in the form of a covid virus, I became almost perfectly invisible.
Are you sure that it wasn’t just repelling people six feet?
This picture of an inexplicably empty bathroom reminds me that most vampires have a little-known power that you’d think they’d use more: the power to make clothing and other items on their person invisible in a mirror. (One wonders how loose you could get away with making the attachment before it would stop working. What if you’re carrying a person? Is the person also invisible in mirrors, or is she floating there or what?)
Technically, the non-reflectivity of vampires in mirrors isn’t the vampires’ power, it’s the mirrors’. The idea, at least in one interpretation, is that silvered mirrors reject the image of vampires because silver has the power to banish or purify evil, the same reason silver bullets kill werewolves. (One version of the theory says that God granted silver that purifying power to cleanse it of the taint of being the coin in which Judas was paid.) This is also, I think, why vampires wouldn’t show up on film, because of the silver halide in its composition. Although that doesn’t work in universes where vampires don’t reflect in water or aluminum-backed mirrors, or where they don’t show up on video.
You remind me of something that bugged me in Dreamworks Dragons: The Nine Realms, a Hulu animated series that’s a modern-day sequel to the How to Train Your Dragon movies. One of the featured dragons has a self-camouflage ability that renders her completely invisible, and it’s often made clear that she can’t turn her rider invisible except by hiding her behind a wing — yet the dragon usually wears a saddle that does turn invisible with her, and the show never attempts to explain the contradiction. (But then, the show follows cartoon logic where the same rider can stick her large tablet computer behind her back and it will completely disappear into hammerspace until she reaches back to retrieve it again. Which looks weirder in semi-realistic 3D computer animation than in traditional 2D animation.)
Not listed: Most of the characters in Playing for Keeps by Mur Lafferty.
I think a teamup between Dishman and Martian Manhunter would be great- those ice cream dishes won’t wash themselves!
I’ve often wondered whether Infectious Lass could also cure diseases. Since the UP in the Legion era did not seem to have an anti-vax movement, I can see why no one ever thought to test her on it.
Seanan McGuire’s Velveteen super hero universe has official power level ratings for most superheroes. TPTB are not above manipulating the ratings for their own ends. To say more would be a spoiler
True vaccination originated by using one disease, cowpox, to give resistance to its cousin, smallpox. Attenuated – weakened – diseases, and now, programmed viruses, are used. I think one of the cool things now is a type of virus that doesn’t reproduce, so you get injected with it, it does things inside you, but it doesn’t run out of control.
There is a much cooler variant now in the process of approval in (at least) Europe and the UK: a self-replicating mRNA vaccine, that carries not only mRNA for the viral protein of interest but also a protein that replicates the mRNA within the target cells as well, so it keeps going and doesn’t need renewal for quite a long time (and a tiny dose will suffice).
No doubt the antivaxxers will yell about how this INFECTS THEM WITH DEADLY VACCINES, but that’s nonsense, unless they’re literally injecting the contents of other people’s cells into their own cells with tiny needles or something. (Don’t do that.)
That wouldn’t be particularly useful for most vaccines, as vaccination doesn’t wear off. The issue with e.g. flu or Covid vaccines is that the virus mutates to escape the immune system.
My Hero Academia and especially its spin-off My Hero Academia: Vigilantes has a lot of weird and goofy powers that get some creative applications.
One of those “Would you rather” Internet post things tried to monkey’s-paw the ability to fly by saying you could only hover a few inches off the ground and travel at a walking pace. My first response was “Tell me you’re not mobility impaired without telling me you’re not mobility impaired.” With proper footgear so I don’t drag my toes or (further) shorten my Achilles’ tendons, that ability would ROCK.
In My Hero Academia by Koohei Horikoshi, the protagonist’s mother has a so-called useless superpower: she can telekinetically pull very small masses toward her from as far away as across a room (IIRC). At least one fanfic author has pointed out that she only has to know approximately where her target is: she doesn’t actually need eyes on it. And the valves of a heart don’t weigh very much. And the character is so very small and round and harmless and anxious and sweet.
Hovering and not touching the ground would be very useful in a commercial kitchen, where the ground quite often has slippery things on it.
It would’ve been useful for me last week when I had to walk on snowy/slushy sidewalks because my car battery died from the cold.
IIRC we only see her use it on unencumbered items. Doing an Aztec Surprise (which would also have to go through the rather sturdier rib cage) is likely be beyond her capabilities. And is also a Villain type application of the power.
I don’t think Jenny was proposing ripping the heart out, just pinching the valves shut or something to cause a heart attack.
My usual “flying” mode while dreaming is limited to that kind of slow-moving hover/levitation.
I’ve had dreams like that, though I’ve occasionally had the higher-up kind of flying dream too.
I was always upset they killed off Cypher. It made no sense. It’s a beneficial superpower to use in the real world and make good money. Flying is cool unless you’re delivering packages or something, how often do you use it? Invisibility would only be useful for me to avoid people at parties. I make to much noise when I walk for someone not to hear me. Also, why is it only telekinesis with dishes? I would love to have telekinesis because it would help my balance and I’m short.
Well, Marvel brought Cypher back, one or more times. Eventually they decided to bring everyone back.
He had the physical abilities of a teenaged male. As I recall, he jumped into a fight he wasn’t supposed to be in, and some bad guy shot him, with a plain ordinary gun.
I think he must have been killed by the Beyonder as well. With the rest of the team. And then un-killed.
Both incidents had interesting treatments of how characters were affected by these traumas.
Also, Cypher was shown to have had unprotected fusion with the alien Warlock too often, being infected, in a small way, with Warlock’s turn-into-electronic-machinery virus. Having been warned most times that this was a stupid risk to take. But it did give him powers.
Yes, this. The readers saw that there was leftover Warlock bits inside Cypher’s body; it would in no way be a cheat for the techno-organic parts to reboot the defunct organic masses any time the plot need him back. He was basically buried with a “Press here for resurrection” button.
The Krakoa Era had the most important application of Cypher’s powers. The living island Krakoa provides a secure home for mutants, instant travel all over the world and Solar System, medicines to bribe the rest of the world into acceptance, almost everything needed for a mutant utopia. And only Cypher can communicate with it.
Also, I would presume Cypher would be needed as an interpreter between mutant refugees who speak different languages.
He actually creates a constructed language called Krakoan, for all the mutants to use regardless of their native languages. Later he complains that even though the telepaths allow any mutant to instantly learn Krakoan, it’s not being used as widely as he hoped.
Oh, that’s right. Professor X could telepathically teach people English in a matter of minutes, which he used in bringing the All-New, All-Different X-Men together from around the world when the original team went missing on Krakoa.
I have spent far too much of my life coming up with bizarre yet strangely useful superpowers.
For example, what team (where not every member flies) would not appreciate a member always able to find a good parking place? Or to cause traffic lights to always be in their favor?
How about the ability to sharpen a pencil with a glance?
Color Kid inspired this one: The ability to alter the flavor and texture of any substance! Imagine if you could make your unpleasant medicine taste like a chocolate shake! And you could do things of more socioeconomic significance, to make the rocks surrounding some buried object (or vein of ore, or supply of some fossil fuel) as soft as marshmallows.
Finally … and this is kind of gross, but that’s the point — the ability to accurately projectile-vomit on demand. The Legion of Substitute Heroes desparately needs the services of Barf Boy.
Every time someone plays with the “Bizarro Legion of Superheroes” idea there are plenty of goofy and useless powers. (Third Girl? Velcro Boy?) The only Bizarro more dangerous than the original is Antimatter Vomiting Lad.
a member always able to find a good parking place? Or to cause traffic lights to always be in their favor?
Mr. Solon Aquila, the Lucifer-like character in Alfred Bester’s story “5,271,009”, has exactly those abilities, and many more along the same line.
Color Kid inspired this one: The ability to alter the flavor and texture of any substance! Imagine if you could make your unpleasant medicine taste like a chocolate shake! And you could do things of more socioeconomic significance, to make the rocks surrounding some buried object (or vein of ore, or supply of some fossil fuel) as soft as marshmallows.
In the webcomic P.S. 238, one of the super-powered children attending the school in question has the power to turn rocks into food; they still look like rocks, but they are edible and delicious. As his teacher says, he has a great prospective career ahead as a restaurant chef, although he notes that he has to figure out how to solve the “still look like rocks part” first.
Two words: Red Lanterns
@lou – I’m afraid they came along after I was mostly done with comics (long story). What is their seemingly-useless power?
Basically there were lanterns based on different colors of the spectrum (ROY G. BIV), but each color was tied to an emotion. Red was rage, and the power from the red came out lots of time as a sort of vomit.
Also: A lot of characters in the Wild Cards series…
“Worm”
https://parahumans.wordpress.com/
“An introverted teenage girl with an unconventional superpower, Taylor goes out in costume to find escape from a deeply unhappy and frustrated civilian life. Her first attempt at taking down a supervillain sees her mistaken for one, thrusting her into the midst of the local ‘cape’ scene’s politics, unwritten rules, and ambiguous morals. As she risks life and limb, Taylor faces the dilemma of having to do the wrong things for the right reasons.”
Recommended, very dark.
I like “Taylor Varga/Luna Varga” much better. Highly recommended if you like snarky lizards.
https://forums.sufficientvelocity.com/threads/taylor-varga-worm-luna-varga.32119/
Taylor Varga is fun, but the author seems to be unable to finish any of his stories which is a little annoying sometimes.
I think Worm deserves a specific content warning:
The bullying is _very_ well written, to the point that it made me have to nope out.
In Justine Larbalestier’s How to Ditch Your Fairy, our protagonist has the ability to always snag a great parking place. Since she’s not old enough to drive, she’s stuck having to ride with everyone else who wants good parking, even if she wants to do something else.
If Color Kid decided to get out of the super business, he could make basically as much money as he wanted in the bespoke yarn industry.
“About the only power better than ice cream creation would be Hostess Fruit Pie creation…”
If would have to be the old school Hostess Fruit Pies, because the new ones would only be created by a villain.
Except I don’t think the creation of Hostess snack products would count as an underrated power, since comics readers in decades past were given abundant examples of the many ways Hostess products could be wielded to defeat supervillains of all sorts.
Not for nothing (and as someone else said), Cypher became one of the most important X-characters for almost the entirety of the Krakoan era (only recently ended), and now he’s married to a muscle-bound warrior lady, so he’s doing just fine.
Anyway, in the early aughts, J. Michael Straczynski (Babylon 5, Sense8, writer of the single best run of Amazing Spider-Man, which also included the two worst, most infamous story arcs) wrote a 24-issue series called Rising Stars about 100+ kids in utero that gained superpowers during some kind of cosmic event. One of them would grow up to develop telekinesis, but only on a minor scale… so she became a government assassin and would essentially pinch her target’s veins shut.
Personally, I’ve always thought that Cypher’s power would be AMAZING to have in the real world!
On the subject of ice cream creation, a reminder that Soft Serve, a mutant who is the best there is at what she does, and what she does is poop ice cream, is canon these days, appearing in the background in the Krakoa era.
‘The Boys’ has many and varied super powers. Some useless, some not, some rather obscene (but that’s just ‘The Boys’ being ‘The Boys’)…
Think of the chaos that results if Color Kid starts changing downtown traffic lights from red to green, or green to red. This could be the start of his major supervillain arc!
I believe messing with traffic lights was part of the evil plot in The Day They Invaded New York. The baddies turned every light green, calculating this would cause traffic jams across the city.
In the “National Lampoon magazine many years ago, in their fumeti skit section, where they took pictures of real life people posing in comedic skits with comic book word balloons, they depicted a “Fartman” character with the power of creating super farts at will, which could overwhelm villains with pepper spray clouds of concentrated stink, or by lighting his farts, create a devastating wall of burning Methane fire, and use his farts as a form of jet propulsion, enabling him to fly. But the strip ended him with him saying he never uses his fart powers, and works as a civilian in an office, because it’s the MOST EMBARRASSING super power in the world! However, that didn’t stop Howard Stern from portraying him in his traveling stage show!
My first thought was the 1994 if game The Superhero League of Hoboken.
There are a bunch of superheroes with dubious powers led by
My second thought was about invisibility and the X-files episode “Je souhaite” – spoilers follow.
Anson Stokes gets three wishes and his third wish is to become invisible at will.
Anson Stokes: I got it. I got it, I got it, I got it. Okay. Okay. Are you ready? Because I am ready. I am absolutely ready. Okay, here goes. I wish that I could turn invisible… at will.
Jenn: You’re kidding.
Anson Stokes: No, no. This is perfect. Yeah, I could have an advantage that nobody else on earth can have. I can, um, you know, spy and learn secret information, pick up stock tips.
Jenn: Sneak into a women’s locker room.
Anson Stokes: Not just that, okay? I’m talking about James Bond type stuff. You know?
Jenn: Your wish is breathtaking in its unoriginality.
Anson Stokes: You don’t have to like it, all right? You just have to do it. Right?
Jenn: Done.
Anson Stokes: My clothes are going to turn invisible, too, right?
Jenn: You didn’t specify clothes.
Anson Stokes: I know, but… screw it. [He starts stripping off his clothes]
Jenn: Oh, God. Turn invisible please.
Anson Stokes: [voice] Yes! Oh, man, this is awesome! Hey. Hey, brother. Hey, Leslie? I’m over here. Oop, I’m over here. Can you see me? [He runs out the front door and trips over the garbage bins] Oof. Ow! Damn it.
It does not end well.
The supervillains in Dr. Horrible have powers, but they are not necessarily explained.
Except Moist. Who is a very damp person.
There is slightly more explanation of their powers in the comic book. But the only one I recall off hand is Johnny Frost who can freeze stuff.
Even if color changing doesn’t affect any other property (such as type of radiation) there’s practical uses, assuming that it can be done at range: changing the color received/recorded by security camera, control panel buttons, what a person sees to ‘blind’ them in order to subdue them, or completely change their perception of the environment. A subtle but useful ability, methinks.