10 Worst Superpowers Of The 21st Century

Everyone knows that there have been some truly terrible superheroes in the long history of comic books. From the early days of comics onwards, some creators seem to simply give up on any sort of logic behind the use of a character's powers. 

In some cases, this led to characters with completely mind-boggling abilities like Matter Eater Lad or Arm Fall-Off Boy. In others, we were left with characters and comics looking to profit from a popular trend, like Dazzler (a disco singer) or Vibe (a sick breakdancer). All in all, comics have given us characters with some utterly bizarre, and in some cases downright disturbing, super powers.

Things may be better nowadays, with at least some thought going into the creation of new characters. But to this day, comic books still offer up the occasional 'super' power that makes you wonder what on earth was being served in the canteen the day.

Some of these are created as a tongue-in-cheek one-off, but many of the heroes on this list are intended to be genuine, credible characters, and have appeared in multiple books and storylines. As a result, there's no real excusing how stupid, impractical, or downright bizarre their powers are. 

Whether it's too impractical to be useful, or comes with a downside that massively outweighs the benefits, here are ten of the worst new superpowers introduced on the 21st Century so far.

For a new generation of mutants, these guys really set the bar low. There was the speedster who prematurely aged every time he uses his powers. There was the blue-skinned girl who flew around naked and turned into goop if she reached a certain speed, or even if it was particularly windy. There was the feral mutant whose power of adaptive evolution left him with a vocabulary of five words (unless he needed to eloquently defend himself in a court of law). There was the artist who turned into a full-on, Akira-inspired body horror. The only member of the team with a decent power set was the temperature-controlling Idie, who left halfway through to join Wolverine and the X-men.

With the cancellation of their series, and their role in the Marvel universe circumvented by the events of Avengers vs X-men, the Five Lights have been reduced to little more than background characters for the X-men. But, for a time, they even beat the Great Lakes Avengers as the team with the worst powers going.