Bad Powers Good People / Comic Books

• The 99: Darr the Afflicter, a wheelchair-bound young man who has the ability to inflict pain upon others, and Wakila the Guardian, a little girl whose powers cause abusers to feel all the pain they've inflicted upon others.
• Alpha Flight: Purple Girl/Persuasion had a rough start but has consistently been one of the good guys since, despite the mind-control powers she inherited from her evil father. Though she eventually did a heel turn and became the Well-Intentioned Extremist villain the Purple Woman. As of Jessica Jones: Purple Daughter, she appears fully reformed and as the trusted friend of an organizer for a support group of her father's victims.
• Astro City:
  • The Confessor is a vampire who fights crime as an intimidating vigilante of the night.
  • Hellhound is a demonic Scary Black Man in leather and chains, but he only hurts wrongdoers and is friendly with other established heroes.
• Avengers Academy: The series plays with this trope; The Avengers recruit and train several teenagers with either bad powers or budding sociopathy to specifically prevent them from turning into supervillains.
  Mettle: Look at us. Big monster guy, the human electric chair, poison gas girl, assassin chick, t-rex boy, and Chernobyl in Abercrombie and Fitch. One wrong move and any one of us could be a murderer.
• Avengers: The Initiative: Terrence Ward a.k.a. "Trauma" is this trope personified. He has the power to physically change himself into anyone's deepest fear. This certainly makes him a formidable opponent in combat, but the most interesting use of this power is for therapeutic purposes. As an aspiring therapist, he could help troubled individuals to literally face their fears, or otherwise put their minds at ease with it. An example: Henry Gyrich is terrified of falling victim to Alzheimer's Disease. Trauma then changes into Gyrich's deceased father as he remembers him.
  "It's not in you, son... You're clean. Such a good boy, sticking with me to the very end..."
• Beast Wars: At one point in the side comic books, Razorbeast is infected by Angolmois energy, a powerfully corruptive, evil force that mutates its victims into savage berserkers. No surprise, since it's the raw essence of Unicron. He still has enough of his senses to turn his newfound power and fury against the Predacons as well as Unicron's heralds and use his mutation-enhanced strength for the forces of good, but it doesn't last once he runs out of unquestionable enemies to fight and his best friend has to put him down before he endangers humans or Maximals.
• Blue Beetle: The scarab is revealed to be an agent of the Reach, an ancient enemy of the Green Lanterns who created the scarab as a planet-killing weapon that bonds to and takes control of its hosts. Thankfully for everyone, the one that fell to Earth got damaged and couldn't properly activate, allowing its host Jaime Reyes free will. Even more fortunately, Jaime is a Nice Guy who categorically refuses to use the Scarab to kill — which poses a problem, since the Scarab isn't configured for not killing, but he makes it work as a hero. He eventually manages to get through to the Scarab itself, which betrays the Reach and joins Jaime in heroing.
• Briar: Roop has shown an affinity for necromancy, even successfully resurrecting Captain Bly. Nonetheless, he is a quiet and kind person.
• Common Grounds: You'd think a guy like the Acidic Jew would be a bad guy, right? Acid touch and all that? But no. He concentrates as hard as he can to keep his powers at bay, and is always there to help in the event of crisis; he saved dozens of lives after the Oklahoma City bombings.
• Death Vigil: Necromancers summon all sorts of nasty monsters from beyond the Veil to unleash hell on Earth. One of the most dangerous is a True Primordial, whose very appearance can kill standard humans. Allistor, a necromancer uneasily allied with the Vigil, has bound a True Primordial to his daughter and uses its power to keep other necromancers and monsters from doing more damage.
• Doctor Strange: Very few people seem to remember that Strange's official title at first was not "Master of the Mystic Arts" but "Master of the Dark Arts", and he was very often invoking names of demons and evil beings to lend him power, until various adventures haven't set him against them. Even today, when him using dark magic is portrayed in more morally ambiguous light, he is a good guy who isn't afraid of fighting fire with fire.
• Elementals: Ratman is a wererat and started out as a criminal, mostly because his rat-like qualities and rattothropy made him unpopular. He quickly changed sides after he developed a crush on Becky, who he subsequently strove to protect.
• Etrigan: Jason Blood is a former knight of the Round Table with the demon Etrigan trapped inside him. He is pretty much a good guy, and one of Batman's friends.
• Ghost Rider: The Ghost Rider, the Spirit of Vengeance, is a monstrous being empowered by the Devil whose exploits involve a whole lot of serial Mind Rape. He's one of Marvel's most iconic superheroes, thanks largely to a generous dose of Pay Evil unto Evil and to his altruistic actions towards anyone who isn't on his hit list. That Mind Rape ability? It's useless against people who aren't evil. The pain inflicted is based on how many sins/crimes the target has committed. It's basically divine punishment, in the sense that you can't hide what you did. However, he did use this on a clown who had been forced to pretend to be evil as he was working undercover.
• Hellboy:
  • Hellboy himself, obviously, derives his power from his demonic ancestry, and was supposed to bring about The End of the World as We Know It, but was raised by a kindly professor and chose to be good instead.
  • Liz Sherman has the power to burn things with her mind. When she was young she accidentally killed a dozen people including her family. For a while, she believed her power was evil, but later she learns to control it.
  • The spinoff series B.P.R.D. has Dr. Johann Krauss, a ghostly German scientist with the power to communicate with the dead and possess inanimate objects. He uses his powers to fight evil.
• Infinity, Inc.: Mister Bones. He is a walking skeleton (his skin and organs are transparent) and he has a deadly "cyanide touch" that can kill almost anyone he comes in contact with. Needless to say, he began as a villain. However, he has since reformed and is now the director of the DEO, a government department that deals with superheroes. He may not be unambiguously heroic, but is typically on the side of the good guys, or at least not actively against them. A big part of this is because his most famous victim, Skyman, was killed when Solomon Grundy forced Bones to touch him. Bones was deeply traumatized by the incident and it helped lead to his Heel Realization.
• The Incredible Hulk: The (second) Scorpion, Carmilla Black, has a Touch of Death, but later learns that this power is both the only thing stopping her from being mind-controlled by terrorist group A.I.M. and the only thing able to defeat their biological weapon.
• The Inhumans: Black Bolt can level a city, cause distant dormant volcanoes to become active once more, shake entire continents apart and generate tremors on the far side of the planet with a whisper. In fact, if he hadn't undergone rigorous mental training to prevent himself from uttering even the smallest sound (even while asleep) entire planets could be lost with a mere utterance of noise. He's got a power that an evil Omnicidal Maniac dreams of.
• Legion of Super-Heroes:
  • Infectious Lass, a member of the Legion of Substitute Heroes, causes plagues wherever she goes, but is really a nice person.
  • During the Legion's pre-Zero Hour, a young man from the present named Jamm was attacked by a spinal-fluid-sucking space parasite and inadvertently given mind-control powers. At first, he used his powers for his own amusement, including getting various female characters to strip. After getting an abject lesson in responsibility from the Legion, he returned to our time. Later, he and a band of other superpowered parasite victims encountered the heroes made comatose by a supersized parasite. Shaken, Jamm commanded the heroes to awaken, thus saving their lives.◊
• Man-Thing: The Man-Thing is incredibly strong and nigh-invulnerable. Also, if you know fear, his touch will cause you to burst into mystical flame and die. Suffice it to say, he's utterly terrifying to behold. Technically, Man-Thing isn't really a hero; he's usually not even sapient. That said, only villains tend to be burned by the touch of Man-Thing. You would think that a victim who went from being assaulted by criminals to having a Humanoid Abomination show up would be the most terrified, and thus attract Man-Thing's attack instincts, but in practice, it's villains' fear of justice that draws him.
• Rising Stars: Laurel Darkhaven uses her power to telekinetically manipulate small objects to kill people... but her final act is to use those powers to make soil fertile again.
• Runaways: Nico Minoru has a dark magic spell-casting staff that emerges whenever she bleeds. She's also the kindhearted leader of the group who is noted to be too trusting.
• Secret Warriors: Phobos, God of Fear, Son of War, is a Creepy Child with fear-based powers. He's an unambiguously heroic character, though he does cause a panic when he breaks into the White House during the Siege event at the end of Dark Reign. It turns out that he just wants to talk to the President about the cost of lives that putting Osborn in charge has caused (including the life of his father, Ares). Since the president has naturally been evacuated, he leaves a note on the desk in the Oval Office... written in what looks like blue crayon. And that's after seeing Ares ripped in half on national television. Some people would call that restraint, for a god.
• Spawn: Spawn is a Humanoid Abomination whose powers involve a large amount of Body Horror, demonic abilities, and, much like Ghost Rider, he got them from a Deal with the Devil. While morally ambiguous, he is one of the closest thing to a good guy in his universe, and while he gruesomely murders his enemies, most of them have it coming big time.
• Spider-Man:
  • Toxin is a morally upright police officer who ends up with a symbiote and decides to use it to do good.
  • After Normie Osborn bonds with the Venom symbiote in Spider-Girl, he manages to convince it to undergo a Heel–Face Turn.
  • Eddie Brock pulls a Heel–Face Turn as well and becomes Anti-Venom. Then he loses the Anti-Venom symbiote and becomes a Well-Intentioned Extremist on a quest to destroy all symbiotes... which lasts about five seconds before he becomes Toxin's new host.
  • The US army chose Flash Thompson to become the Venom symbiote's latest host, putting it to use in the service of his country. Eventually, he made the transition into a superhero (unlike Normie, Flash hasn't convinced the symbiote to change; he does his best to keep it in check through willpower and drug-induced sedation).
  • The Venom symbiote was originally a very clear-cut example of this trope; while most of its species were straight up parasites, this particular one genuinely cared about its hosts and did not attempt to control them. It was happy to be a hero with Peter, but when Peter rejected it (he was spooked about the symbiote being alive and puppeteering his body while he slept), it ended up bonding with the unstable Eddie Brock, and their combined hatred of Peter twisted the symbiote into a monster. After a long time and both parties getting over their many issues, Eddie and Venom have reunited as heroes.
  • After being "inverted" in AXIS, Carnage makes a Heel–Face Turn. Having spent most of his life as a bloodthirsty psycho, he's not very good at being good, but bless him, he's trying.
  • In Spider-Boy, Bailey was given his powers to act as a Living Weapon for Madame Monstrosity. His powers include paralyzing fangs and the ability to take on a monstrous man-spider form. But he's a good kid choosing to help others and encouraged by heroes like Spider-Man, Daredevil, and the Fantastic Four.
• Strontium Dog: Johnny Alpha has Mind Rape among his powers, and he is The Hero.
• Teen Titans: Raven is the daughter of the demonic Trigon and was intended to serve in destroying the world with her dark powers. Instead, she opposes him and fights for good with the other Titans.
• The Unbelievable Gwenpool: Gwenpool has awareness of everyone's backstory and secret identity, and later becomes a Reality Warper. Future Gwen states that's the universe trying to tell her to turn bad. She refuses to turn to the dark side.
• X-Men:
  • Rogue's touch can put people in comas (usually temporary, but sometimes permanently). She started out as a villain, but threw herself on the X-Men's mercy when the psychic echoes of Ms. Marvel's personality threatened to drive her insane; after spending some time with the team, she soon developed into a hero in her own right.
  • During the Punisher's "Angelic" phase, he had a run-in with Wolverine where they tried to stop a special Morlock with the power to spread death around her, killing anyone around her without a healing factor. To stop her from reaching the surface and killing the whole of New York, Wolverine and Punisher tried to stop her and in the end the angels called her to heaven. The worst part was that she wasn't evil: she was sealed in a tube by her parents when she was a child due to her powers and just wanted to be free, seeing people trying to help her as devils and people trying to kill her as angels.
  • Then there are guys like Random from X-Factor. Random has the charming ability to turn his arms into guns.^note Technically, he can change to any form he can imagine, he just doesn't see why he'd ever need a different one. He can generate dozens of barrels from one arm and just start blasting away. Sure, he comes from the Dark Age, but he is actually meant to be a Totally Radical, happy-go-lucky guy who shoots a lot of people every day. You don't see him much these days, for a few reasons; one of them is that he has basically the same power and personality as the despicable villain Bushwhacker. He was eventually subjected to a Retcon that said he'd been Evil All Along, working for Beast's Evil Twin.
  • Wither from New X-Men: Academy X was an example until his Face–Heel Turn. The poor guy had an even worse case of Power Incontinence than Rogue's, decaying anything he touched, including his girlfriend. X-villain Selene, whose immortality makes her mostly immune to Wither's powers, seduced him and added Wither to her coven by convincing him that the nature of his power made him a natural predator.
  • In Ultimate X-Men (2001), when a teenage boy's mutant powers first manifest, he discovers that his only power is to unconsciously vaporize all living tissue within a mile. Without realizing it until it was far too late, he became responsible for hundreds, possibly thousands of deaths, including those of his mother, his dog, his girlfriend, and every single person in his school. To prevent the nature of this incident from becoming public (and thus, demonizing all mutants irrevocably), he had to be put down by Wolverine, whose healing factor kept him from being vaporized. Wolverine does not enjoy doing it.
• Young Avengers: The series has a minor antagonist named Melter who is a kindhearted guy and really wants to help people, but his power is to melt them. It doesn't help that the superhero team he assembles features mostly antiheroes and psychos and that their influence starts to get to him. Once he breaks off with them, he ends up in the hands of the Mandarin, who leads him to a full Face–Heel Turn.

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