10 Heroically Terrible Superpowers Writers Should Feel Embarrassed They Invented

3. Cypher

It's hard to believe, but there are people out there that are not only fluent in their native tongue, but have also taken it upon themselves to learn how to speak other languages. Like, they manage to retain more than just the mandatory three years of French from high school. Imagine if you had the ability to speak any language without having to pour all your free time (and cash) into learning them! Congratulations, you just came up with the Universal Translator, one of the many tools the space-faring members of Starfleet have been using since Captain Kirk's day. Or, worse yet, you've described Cypher, mainstay of various mutant teams since the creation of the New Mutants. For context, the New Mutants included Cannonball (who could fly and was pretty much invincible when he did), Karma (who could possess people), Mirage (who could do magic...stuff), Sunspot (Brazilian Superman) and Wolfsbane (who was a friggin' werewolf). So...what exactly did Cypher bring to the table? Well, other than being able to immediately understand and transcribe any language - even alien ones, which was useful, because in Marvel Comics alien threats usually wanna chat - he also had a preternatural ability to read computer code. Those are the skills of the New Mutants' social media manager, not an actual member of the team. Most people agreed, according to writer Louise Simonson: "He just stood around and hid behind a tree during a fight...every artist who ever did him said 'Can't we kill this guy?' We would get letters from fans about how much they hated him. We never got any letters from people saying they liked him until he was dead." Eventually Simonson killed Cypher off, but she shouldn't bear the shame of having birthed Doug Ramsey in the first place. That dubious honour goes to Chris Claremont, responsible for basically every big X-Men story, and iconic artist Sal Buscema. We all have our off days.