Superpowers that don't seem obvious but are immensely useful for Comic Books.
The DCU:
- Aquaman is absolutely not as weak as Memetic Mutation would have one believe. A combination of Required Secondary Powers (he can swim like a fish and punch people while under 500+ atmospheres of pressure, which is Superman-level asskickery) and Fridge Horror (he commands everything that lives in the ocean; guess where Godzilla, Cthulhu, and the Leviathan live?) have had many writers portray him as horrifically powerful and outright feared by heroes and villains alike, and for very good reasons."He could control every creature that lives in the sea. But I don't think either of you know what that really means. Do you know, do you understand, do you have any idea how much life there is in just one single square mile of sea? I don't think you do... and if you multiply that by lots of miles in every direction... I'd never seen anything like it in my whole life... and God as my witness, I hope to never see it again."— The Brave and the Bold, Vol 3, #32
- Perhaps the most awesome (and funny) example is Aquaman's friendship with sea life used to defeat Namor in Marvel Versus DC. Poor Namor never knew what hit him when he had an orca dropped on him.
- A few writers give him the ability to command not only sea life but also any animal with any connection to the sea, even vestigial or ancestral. Considering life originated in the ocean and every animal has an aquatic common ancestor, that means he can control every animal that has ever existed, including humans. It even included Martians kind of impersonating humans (or possibly just humanoid aliens), most likely indicating that the author had forgotten about his own reveal.
- Justice League: The Flashpoint Paradox has the Justice League disarm Thawne/Zoom's 25th-century explosives he plants on the Rogues to destroy Central City. How does Aquaman do it? He travels to a nearby lake and tosses him in. When the Rogue, the Top, asks Aquaman if he's gonna do something, Aquaman calmly responds that he is... he is commanding a million aquatic microbes to eat the bomb's wiring. Once done, he grabs and crushes it. Simple and effective, being one of the few to stop the bombs before detonating.
- Batman:
- Among the massive roster of Batman's lesser-known enemies, there's the Carpenter, originally part of Mad Hatter's crew, who is a carpenter. Sounds pretty lame, but who do you think built all those evil lairs and giant traps the big-time villains love to use? Given the bill she presented Selina in Gotham City Sirens, she makes a good living off her work. There was even one instance where she saved Batman from a stage covered with booby traps she had made for the Director, then took out the Director with one of the traps he had commissioned her to build.
- Another of Batman's C-list foes is a guy called Signalman, who commits crimes and uses gadgetry based on signs, signals, and symbols. He's pretty firmly a joke, but every so often a writer will demonstrate that it's a very dangerous motif to operate off of when handled correctly, and Signalman has performed acts like hijacking Gotham's air traffic control system or using glow spots to disrupt the human nervous system.
- How many comic book-loving tropers don't think much of Justice League of America member Vibe because of his vibrational powers and Ethnic Scrappy tendencies? Check out this example of sheer power.
◊ And how about this sequence◊ in which he stabilizes time eras◊ during Crisis on Infinite Earths? The New 52 reboot of Vibe drops the Captain Ethnic elements and makes him a more fully realized character. His abilities allow him to sense breaches from other dimensions, making him the Justice League's guardian of The Multiverse. - This is a grand tradition for the Legion of Super-Heroes, or, more often, The Legion of Substitute Heroes. Most characters have only one power, and it's not always something very impressive.... at first.
- One of their first recruits was Triplicate Girl, with the ability to transform from one ordinary teenage girl... to three ordinary teenage girls. Useful for doing chores, but not much good in combat. At least, not until she became a master of Tri-Jitsu, a martial art based around the fact that you have six arms, six legs, and three potential points of attack to coordinate from. She is also an expert infiltrator. Go somewhere and be seen to walk back out... after leaving two of your selves hidden somewhere, have them gather information, and then reunite to share and correlate. To top it off, splitting in two or three is a pretty handy way to dodge attacks.
- Bouncing Boy can turn into a giant bouncy ball. It sure seems ridiculous...at least until a 200-pound near-invulnerable sphere ricochets off a wall and slams into you at about 80 miles an hour.
- Matter-Eater Lad can... eat anything. Hardly a power to write home about. However, seeing as Tenzil Kem's personal definition of "stuff" includes laser beams and doomsday computers, you might want to keep him around in case you need to get rid of something. In one story he ate a supposedly indestructible wish-granting device and so saved The Legion from the invincible monster it had created after everyone else failed. It drove him mad, but hey, he saved the universe! In at least one version, being able to bite through and chew up anything meant the Required Secondary Power of acidic saliva, providing a potentially nasty ranged attack.
- Chemical Kid can alter chemical reactions. In the New 52, he is terrified and asks why everyone is counting on him to subdue a rampaging Daxamite (Daxamites have all the same powers as Kryptonians). Element Lad talks him through slowing down the chemical reactions in the Daxamite's brain, causing him to pass out, then reversing the chemical reactions in his skin that let him absorb and process sunlight, taking away his powers. This means Chemical Kid can defeat Superman if he wanted to. "Altering chemical reactions" has every potential to be lethal if it can affect living organisms, which kind of depend on carefully balanced and regulated chemical processes to keep working. (Note, though, that things like transmuting elements or causing/affecting nuclear reactions don't technically fall under "chemistry".)
- Almost all of the Substitute Heroes qualify in one form or another. To wit:
- Color Kid is perhaps the best example of the trope. He can make things change color. Doesn't sound like much, but during his tenure, he turns green kryptonite into (harmless to Superman) blue kryptonite, switches the color of the sky and the ground (confusing fighter pilots), create clouds of "black" to blind opponents (and power up his teammate Night Girl, who loses her powers in daylight), change someone's entire body to match a wall to provide camouflage, and fire day-glo beams that blind and confuse opponents. Turning yellow sunlight into red might instantly de-power any Daxamite or Kryptonian opponent as well, depending on the writer's interpretation of how quickly that weakness kicks in.
- Chlorophyll Kid can accelerate plant growth, but he couldn't control any other aspect of them. But over time, he learned to control the direction and (to an extent) shape of plants he's speeding the growth of, making him much more useful in a fight and depending on just where a plant starts growing from, like say on or in an opponent, it was useful even before he started working on it.
- Infectious Lass spontaneously generates infectious diseases that she herself is immune to. Turns out being able to bring people to their knees with nothing more than a sudden stomach bug is pretty damn handy.
- Stone Boy can turn himself into an immobile stone statue. It's got a surprising amount of utility; his teammates can use him as a weapon by throwing him at or dropping him on enemies (or he can do the job himself with a Legion flight ring), and his stone form is nigh-indestructible, granting him some serious defense. Preboot Stone Boy even learned how to turn select parts of his body into stone and move when fully transformed.
- On a similar note to Spider-Ham below, in The Multiversity, Captain Carrot comes from an Alternate Tooniverse where everything runs on Toon Physics, which he brings along when he visits the other worlds of the multiverse, allowing him to survive things that would kill anyone else, like taking a hit from a Hulk-analogue or getting decapitated.
- New Gods has Glorious Godfrey. His power is to be extremely handsome and charismatic, and was basically an afterthought of Apokalips for decades — until Darkseid used his power as a WMD in Legends, having him become a television pundit named G. Gordon Godfrey and use his persuasive powers to convince everyone on Earth that superheroes were a problem.
- Plastic Man. Hoo boy, Plastic Man. Many villains underestimate Plas for his goofy demeanor and the stigma that stretching powers are useless. Well, Plas doesn't have stretching powers, he's a shapeshifter, and possibly the greatest in The DCU at that. He can change his size, shape, and density, enabling him to shrug off damage that could kill many members of the Justice League outright and raise the density of his fist to be able to explode your head with one blow (but he's too nice for that). His shapeshifting is so radical that he can pretty much hide in plain sight any time he wants by changing shape into everyday things, too, so you won't see him coming. He doesn't age, and he's effectively immortal — at one point, he was frozen, shattered into thousands of pieces, and scattered across the ocean floor. Once someone reassembled the pieces a few millennia later, he was just fine. Oh, and as a side effect to his shapeshifting powers, his brain changes shape so drastically and constantly that he's effectively immune to psychic powers. Let's not even get into Orifice Invasion. Pissing off Plastic Man is a terrible idea.Batman: He could kill us all. For him, it would be easy.
- When Martian Manhunter was taken over by a Superpowered Evil Side that lacked the standard Martian weakness to fire (rendering him a shapeshifting telepath with Superman-caliber Flying Brick powers and no weaknesses), Batman had a very simple contingency plan for such a scenario: send Plastic Man to fight him alone. In a similar vein, the literal contingency plan for Plastic Man going rogue is simply "Really hope it doesn't happen".
- Secret Six:
- Ragdoll underwent a surgical process that made him "triple-jointed", essentially making him the world's best contortionist. This allows him to (among other things) wrap around someone like a snake and crush them, fit inside spaces no actual human should be able to, and dodge attacks like nobody's business. Beware the Silly Ones indeed.
- The New 52 run introduces Porcelain, who has the ability to make things brittle like glass or even outright shatter. This makes for an exceptionally useful skill for breaking in and out of places, and even better at hand-to-hand combat (since you know, breaking bones). At one point, Porcelain was within an inch of killing frikkin' SUPERMAN.
- Superman: Super Vacuum Breath — essentially using Super-Breath to inhale air instead of expelling it out — sounded so silly that even pre-Crisis Superman and Supergirl (who thought nothing of their super-ventriloquism ability) considered it a ridiculous power. Still, it saves Superboy's life in How Luthor Met Superboy when Lex Luthor exposes him to Kryptonite, and while Clark is lying in agony, waves a flask of K-antidote over his face. Quickly, Superboy breathes in air, wrenching the flask from Luthor's hands and sucking in the antidote.
- Swamp Thing: Alan Moore thought about what a character with complete empathy with/control over plants could do and he reworked the character. The fast grow method leads to a striking Body Horror demise for one of Swampy's foes after he eats a burger containing tomato slices, lettuce, pickles, onions...
- Dove of the Teen Titans is a low-level Flying Brick, who also has the power of "perfect peace". In the Blackest Night crossover, this not only allowed the previous Dove to not come back as a zombie but also allowed the current Dove to destroy hordes of the otherwise-unstoppable emotion-powered zombies at once.
- Captain America: Some of the Falcon's powers include talking to birds and seeing what they see. It doesn't sound too promising until you realize that these birds can aid him in battle and act as his spies from everywhere. It's been implied that between Nick Fury and all of the resources of S.H.I.E.L.D., and Falcon with all of the pigeons in New York, Falcon has the better intelligence network. His powers also affect other creatures that have some sort of avian ancestry. An issue of The Avengers has him rescuing the team from a group of raptor-like aliens by using his abilities to force the creatures to flee. People also forget that his wings are pretty powerful melee weapons. This is lampshaded in Ultimate Nightmare when Black Widow jokingly says that Falcon wouldn't impress Unicorn by flapping his wings, only to retract her statement when he uses them to eviscerate the villain.
- Dazzler, Marvel's very own Fad Super, has the ability to absorb sound and convert it into light. This may not sound like much at first glance, but she can do things like blinding people with bright flashes (duh), creating a strobe effect that upsets equilibrium, creating holograms, and even Frickin' Laser Beams. She's also immune to sound-based attacks because they just make her stronger. Her ability is shown to be obscenely powerful, as Galactus once recruited her to retrieve one of his Heralds and exposed her to unimaginable sounds, including the explosion of an entire galaxy,note to boost her to sufficient levels. In fact, Black Bolt of The Inhumans, who's considered one of the top-tier powerhouses of the Marvel Universe, can have his voice absorbed by her but not his full-on "Quasi-Sonic scream" because it's not an actual sound attack but rather him manipulating electrons to create the attack. It's also suggested that one day, she could expand this property to cover other fundamental forms of energy. Ever set off a nuclear explosion with a boombox?
- Notably, Dazzler's solo series involved her teaming up with Black Bolt in a battle with the Absorbing Man, a guy who gives Thor fits on a regular basis. Black Bolt supercharged Dazzler with so much raw sound that she was able to completely overload the Absorbing Man's powers and knock him out. Keep in mind that the Absorbing Man is a guy who's tanked cosmic energy blasts and cyclones from Odin, Thor's father and a Physical God.
- Seiji from the Muties miniseries has the ability to telekinetically animate his toys. It's mostly just good for making playtime more entertaining, right up until Seiji reaches his limit with his abusive step-dad and commands every toy he has to Zerg Rush him. And Seiji's got a whole army of toys.
- New Warriors:
- Deborah "Debrii" Fields has low-range telekinesis. She can levitate herself off the ground to allow for flight, and she can telekinetically move small objects within her immediate vicinity. Sounds rather weak, but she makes up for it by controlling every single small object near her with such precision that it's scary. Fighting in a junkyard, she effectively created a tornado of junk to batter her opponent and even formed a "mech suit" of junk around her body. Fighting her on a beach would mean her opponent would be up against a vicious sandstorm. And that's not even getting into the fact that even the human body has small parts, such as certain bones, muscles, and even eyeballs.
- Night Thrasher, the founder of the New Warriors, has no powers. He eventually evolves into a Gadgeteer Genius, but he's best known as the hero who rode into battle on a skateboard in the '90s. Though he drops it in later versions, his return in Contest of Champions (2015) has him reclaim his old board and use only it to take down an alternate universe telepathic Madame Hydra and a more ruthless alternate version of Elektra. He neutralizes both of them with only his skateboard, noting how it's a transport, a weapon, and a shield. He doesn't care how silly it sounds in concept — it's still really effective. Lampshaded by The Punisher, of all people:Frank Castle: I called it stupid? It serves as a weapon and a shield at the same time. Maybe I should get one.
- In Secret Avengers, the Scientist Supreme informs D-list supervillain Mentallo that his limited psionic abilities are quite laughable, but could be invaluable if utilized correctly. Cut to the next issue, where Mentallo throws the U.S. government into a state of emergency after mentally hijacking their entire fleet of Iron Patriot drones.
- Spider-Man:
- Peter once ripped part of Norman Osborn's face off when he stuck to it with his stickum' powers during American Son. Not how Stan Lee imagined it being used, but awesome regardless.
- On a similar note, Spider-Man's clone Kaine once used his sticking powers to tear off a piece of wall and beat the Rhino over the head with it. He would also use his sticking powers routinely to leave the "Mark of Kaine" on his victims, in the same manner that Spidey would later use them in the above-mentioned American Son example.
- Garrison Klum/Mr. Brownstone from Spider-Man/Black Cat: The Evil That Men Do can teleport matter... a few grams at a time. He uses those powers to become a drug dealer catering to wealthy clients wishing to indulge in heroin without any nasty needle marks. Naturally, he can also teleport drugs to people's systems against their will...
- Mysterio often catches flack for his goofy appearance, his over-the-top persona and his villain abilities coming from special effects wizardry rather than any physical attributes. Yet his use of said special effects is consistently dangerous, with him being able to make working robots, create realistic illusions and even nearly drove Spider-Man (and later, Daredevil) insane through his machinations.
- Spider-Ham is a cartoon pig with spider-powers (or more correctly, a cartoon spider bitten by a radioactive pig). This means that, as a cartoon character, he has the same properties as them. Bringing them to the more grittier and rougher worlds, such as Earth-616, this turns him into a Made of Iron hero. A good example is during Secret Wars (2015)'s version of Spider-Verse, when he coerces a Thor to punch him. He takes it, gets knocked through many walls, comes to a stop at a break room, and casually gets up and walks off, taking Electro's sandwich while he was at it. This also allows him to eat pork without it being considered cannibalism.
- Supporting character Razorback has the mutant ability to instinctively operate any vehicle — including alien Humongous Mecha that didn't exactly come with instructions.
- Ultimate Marvel:
- The Wasp sometimes gets crap for being "useless" and "lame," especially from younger fans. The Ultimates (2002) has her single-handedly defeat the Hulk in a single blow — turns out no matter how strong your muscles get, your brain is still as weak as always. An issue of The Ultimates 2 shows what happens when she uses those energy blasts of hers at full size. Finally, Ultimate Avengers #3 has Red Wasp single-handedly killing an entire room full of terrorists, demonstrating how incredibly deadly her abilities actually are. Turns out having the power to shrink and fry someone's brain from the inside out isn't something to laugh at, huh?
- In Ultimate Galactus Trilogy, Professor Xavier uses the improved Cerebro system to attack Gah Lak Tus with the sum of all of humanity's thoughts.
- The Vision's power is to talk... but she talks in all the alien languages available, and in some cases, for aliens who developed language in exceedingly inhospitable environments, mere words are weapons in themselves.
- The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl has the power to control squirrels, and has become a Running Gag and Marvel's Lethal Joke Character by defeating the most powerful supervillains in existence... off-panel. The off-panel thing is becoming mostly subverted, as she easily defeats Wolverine in a sparring match, shown mostly in silhouette but still visible, and she was also shown ripping killer Nazi mechas to shreds, chewing through steel doors, and burrowing through multiple layers of sewer. In her case, this is crossed with Flight, Strength, Heart, as she actually has a pretty useful (if not overly impressive) set of abilities due to her squirrel nature — superhuman strength and agility, superhuman senses, the ability to leap huge distances, and nasty claws. Yet, she manages to draw mileage even out of her actual "Heart" power — the ability to talk to squirrels — since apparently, being swarmed by dozens, if not hundreds of tiny clawing and biting critters can be surprisingly effective◊. Then came "Squirrel Girl Beats Up the Marvel Universe", in which her evil...ish clone Alleene outlined and executed a terrifyingly simple plan to cripple all humanity with her squirrels.
- X-Men:
- Jubilee's original power set makes her a frequent source of ridicule since on the surface her fireworks seem incredibly useless. But then you remember that she's manipulating plasma. Emma Frost once stated that had Jubilee exercised her powers to their full potential, she was capable of detonating matter at the sub-atomic level, making her a walking fusion bomb. And the only limitation on where she manifests her fireworks seems to be range. You know what happens when a firework goes off inside your skull? Luckily, nobody except one Omega Sentinel has ever had to find out.
- Doug "Cypher" Ramsey of the junior team New Mutants originally had the power of comprehending languages, and that was it. Then he died and came back, with his powers expanding to all forms of "language". This includes computer language (making him a master hacker and programmer; he once managed to disable an entire Sentinel facility just by communicating with Master Mold in this way), arcane languages (letting him cast spells), body language (giving him the ability to fight all the New Mutants at the same time and win), and even the structure of buildings, allowing him to pinpoint their weak spots instantly. Took a Level in Badass, indeed. Many fanfic writers anticipated the potential broader interpretation/application of his powers even before his demise. Canon finally caught up with them.
- E-list member Fabio Medina has the ability to generate golden balls of organic matter. He can shoot them pretty fast and hard, but it's hardly anything special, so he mostly stuck around in the background with the Atrocious Alias Goldballs... until people started looking into his powers a little more deeply, and discovered that his actual power was to generate what were essentially giant inert eggs. With a little tinkering and help from others, these eggs could then hatch, and be infused with the DNA and minds of others. He ended up on a team including characters like Elixir, Hope Summers, and Proteus because all of them working together could bring the dead back to life.
- One of the Captain Planet comic books actually has Ma-Ti lamenting over how lame "Heart" is as a power after Wheeler makes fun of him for it. Later in the issue, Ma-Ti uses his ring to reach and understand the hearts of all the creatures in the forest to help the other planeteers, including bears.
- Amelia Mintz from Chew can write or talk about food so vividly that it can cause people to actually taste it. While it definitely makes her a good restaurant critic, it doesn't look very useful in other situations... until she sends several armed terrorists to the hospital by loudly reciting an unabridged review of a particularly bad restaurant. And then she was revealed to be able to induce fatal food poisoning.
- Empowered: Emp's suit gives her a long list of powers, most of which (besides the obviously awesome ones like Nigh-Invulnerability or Super-Strength) are rather random. Top of the list is probably her invisibility, which sounds great, but it actually only makes the suit itself invisible. And even that's unreliable, as when she tries to make her mask invisible she makes everything but her mask invisible. But since everyone knows that Emp loses all her powers when her suit is torn, she is able to trick a villain by letting him think her suit is completely gone, only to reveal that it's merely invisible. Cue No-Holds-Barred Beatdown.
- Lanfeust:
- Cixi's powe is to change water's state between liquid, solid, and gas. Said like this, it doesn't seem that powerful, but it becomes horribly creepy when you realize humans are mostly made of water. At one point, Big Bad Thanos has her causing a man's blood to boil until he is literally burnt from the inside.
- Heck, the comic is filled with examples of the trope. For example, after Thanos manages to take over Troy's capital, a man whose power is reading the future in animal entrails (e.g. a haruspex) uses said power (shown earlier to be somewhat useful but nothing special by the setting's standards) to run a very efficient underground insurgency, and one of his best elements is a big, middle-aged woman with the power induce horrible, crippling indigestion in people just by looking at them (something she does to mooks with great relish).
- Mega Man (Archie Comics):
- The Robot Masters built by Dr. Light in the classic Mega Man series are always initially used for some sort of industrial applications, before being repurposed by the Big Bad for combat. Most of these uses are either obvious or well explained in the games' backstories, with one glaring exception: Time Man, who was designed for time travel experiments, but who can only slow time down. This is justified in that he's a prototype from before the perfection of time travel theory, but it still leaves him without an obvious Mundane Utility. The comic, however, reveals one use that would be invaluable to anyone involved: surgery.
- We see Bright Man prior to the plot of Mega Man 4, where his only power (made to explore dark places) is being able to generate light on the level of a decently powered lamp. Wily, though, quickly realizes that a bit of rerouting turns him into a walking flash grenade.
- In PS238, the titular Superhero School has the Rainmaker Program, to help students find uses for powers not suited to combat. Uther can make anything edible? He can be the world's greatest chef! A little girl who's the human incarnation of Hestia, the Greek goddess of family? She could be a marriage counselor, a family therapist, etc.
- Rising Stars has Laurel Darkhaven, who can telekinetically manipulate very, very small objects. Such as your carotid artery. She becomes a government assassin. She later uses the ability to control "very small things" to telekinetically sift every inch of arable soil under the entire Middle East in order to make the entire region fertile again. The results can be seen from orbit! Turns out many powers are like this because of implications or aspects directly hidden. Poet's powers are supposed to be just minor energy abilities, but they're actually control over the Power itself...
- Secret Weapons focuses on rejects from the Harbringer super-empowering project, whose powers were dismissed by the founder as useless. However, over the course of the series, they discover greater use for them:
- Nikki can talk to birds, which allows her to spy across the whole of Oklahoma City and track enemies. Combined with her acrobatic skills she's the most capable member of the Willows rejects.
- Avi can only turn into an immobile marble statue, but that still allows him to become bulletproof mid-fight. By jumping above enemies and then turning to stone he can also easily snap limbs.
- Owen unpredictably creates random objects out of thin air. But he is slowly figuring out how to control his power, allowing him to block projectiles with suits of armour and conjuring a grand piano above an enemy.
- Stormwatch: Team Achilles has a character whose superpower is to make plants grow really fast... and he works as an assassin. The thing is, most people at any given time have seeds in their digestive tract from the vegetation they've eaten, and growing those up to full plants in a few seconds leads to a nasty death from internal injuries and/or choking.
- The Transformers: More than Meets the Eye:
- During the Shadowplay arc, we are introduced to Glitch, an Outlier with the powerful ability to... short out machinery, and just temporarily so most of the time. An ability that he has trouble controlling and actually hurts him nearly every time he tries to use it purposely. It proves useful sometimes, like when he deactivated the security mechanisms of a building he and his team were doing a heist in, but more often than not it's a nuisance, as Glitch can accidentally damage important equipment just by touching it. Cut to some years later, and as Tarn, he has full control of his powers, to the point that he has not only learned how to weaponize it to lethal levels, but also he's now able to kill fellow Cybertronians with just the sound of his voice, quite literally talking them to death. Turns out that when your entire species is mechanical in nature, being a Walking Techbane is actually pretty damn scary.
- Minimus Ambus is a particular variety of Point One Percenter called a Loadbearer, a Cybertronian whose body can withstand dozens of augmentations without collapsing under the strain. What good is this? Plenty. Not only does it let him operate as the legendary Ultra Magnus by way of Powered Armor, but he survives getting his head crushed by constructing a larger version of his own body and hiding inside that. Then, he takes it one step further by going full-on Humongous Mecha courtesy of the Maximus Ambus armor, armed with enough firepower to put any tank to shame.
