There are hundreds of superhumans in comics, films, TV and the like. Past a certain point, the good powers are taken, but the stories keep coming. Villains are built to lose and usually get stuck with the off-brand powers, but they don't have a monopoly. Minor heroes and bystanders get saddled with the weird stuff, too.
Major heroes with too many powers also fall into this category. Sometimes, even the highest-profile hero has a dud power hidden in his background. The trick, intentional or otherwise, is in making these duds useful!
10 Frog-Man's Electric Springs Beat Everything
Eugene Patilio is the son of the small-time Daredevil villain, Leap-Frog. As an out of shape twenty-something who inherited a super suit, he shows up more often than you'd think to fight crime. Unfortunately, his suit is only a little bit super—its electronic springs let him jump and bounce around. He hasn't mastered the suit's controls, so this is even less impressive than you'd think.
What Frog-Man has mastered is the art of the ricochet. By falling off buildings and caroming off of walls and people, he's managed to help defeat Speed Demon, Toad, the White Rabbit, the Walrus, and Flag-Smasher. Okay, only a few of those guys are legit super villains, but White Rabbit's currently having a moment. Overall, it's still better to be lucky than good.
9 Superman's Super-Ventriloquism Saves The Day
Silver Age Superman had a panoply of random powers. Whenever the writers needed to solve a problem, they'd make up a new power. Obviously, the more powerful a character gets, the harder creating credible threats becomes. In response, the writers started threatening Superman's identity.
In the picture above, Superman used super ventriloquism to fool a Nosy Peter named Dr. Vandt, but his friends were usually the ones who wouldn't stop cracking his super secrets. Supes not only constantly used super ventriloquism to throw Lois Lane and Jimmy Olsen off, but also employed an army of robot duplicates. It would have been easier to fake Clark Kent's death and move to another city.
8 The Spieler Dance-Fights on Air
When Marvel's Runaways traveled back to the 19th Century, they met the superhuman teens of that era, known as Wonders. Lillie McGurty, called Spieler for her air-dancing, was the friendliest of the lot. The charismatic Lillie needed music to fly and spent as much time plummeting as flying. However, when she stumbled on a brawl between strike-breakers and singing workers, she proved that just out of reach is the perfect place to kick in heads from. Well played, Lillie!
7 The Riddler Cracks the Dark Knight's Code
If Batman's perennial foe The Riddler has a superpower, it's his genius for setting and solving puzzles, riddles, and enigmas. Riddler's strategic and technical genius shines in stories like Zero Year, but his obsession with riddles has mostly been a weakness. It forces him to telegraph his crimes to the Dark Knight.
In Hush, though, Nygma proves that his compulsions are a superpower. He manages to distract the Batman from his mastermind status by committing a decoy riddle-crime. Next, he does the impossible and uncovers Batman's identity, solving the Riddle of the Bat. Riddler's pulled off this feat multiple times in other tales, too. Hush isn't a perfect story, but it showcases Nygma's best use of a bad power.
6 Cypher Makes a Super Best Friend
Doug Ramsey joined The New Mutants with great powers, but terrible powers for fighting crime. He could communicate with anything, including machines, read any language, correctly interpret any gesture. In the real world, he'd be amazing—the world's greatest computer programmer/translator/researcher/lawyer rolled into one person. When you roll with a bunch of professional kickpunchers, though, it seems weak.
Cypher joined the X-Men's farm team because they'd met an alien who spoke binary. Dubbed Warlock, this techno-organic shapeshifter turned out to be a nice guy. The two bonded, with Warlock protecting Doug as living armor. Warlock was so powerful that he was a threat to humanity, but Doug brought out the heart of gold in the weird machine-thing.
5 Matter-Eater Lad Eats His Way Out of Prison
Another underestimated character, Matter-Eater Lad isn't a feared supervillain only because he's a decent guy. His powers let him ingest and consume anything he can wrap his mouth around, which is terrifying. The DC Universe is lucky he's a hero, or he'd be "that guy who ate the Justice League."
Once you add some common decency to the character, his power's just weird. A member of the Legion of Super Heroes, his participation in most fights was pretty limited. He's the best at prison breaks, though, and tunneled out of Nardo's Space Stalag using his mouth. Super gross, but effective.
4 Aquaman Gives Martians Seizures with His Fish Powers
His detractors call it talking to fish, but Aquaman's aquatic telepathy is as much about commands as communication. That said, it's a bad power whenever he's on land. Fun fact: a startlingly large percentage of crime happens on land, so it's usually not the asset Aquaman's strength and magic trident are.
However, it saved the day when the Justice League took on faux-heroes the Hyperclan. White Martians shapeshifted into superhuman forms, Hyperclan attempted to replace the JLA as Earth's superheroes before trying to murder them. Aquaman squared off with Zum, an overly-talkative speedster. Aquaman used his fish control powers to reach into Zum's brain and give him a fight-ending seizure. Whether this is something Aquaman can do to anyone, just Martians, or Martians with shapeshifted brains isn't clear, but good job getting creative Aquadude!
3 Crime Cannibal Is Super Smart About Not Eating Folks
Crime Cannibal is from The Tick's early 90s spin-off Man-Eating Cow. The shockingly fun series, penned by Clay Griffith, introduced this hero who supplemented super strength with the power to eat criminals. As he put it "some guys are strong, some guys smell real good. I eat people." Crime Cannibal stopped being a dark justice type before his introduction, though, and turned vegetarian. As it turns out, not using his meaty powers was a more effective against evil.
Crime Cannibal's reputation as a man-eater gets him into plenty of trouble, but it's also super useful. He uses it to intimidate criminals, and even to infiltrate the forces of evil. When the guy who ate The Phantom Ploughboy says he's turning bad, even level-headed villains tend to believe him!
2 Captain Carrot Uses Wimpiness to Defeat a Space God
Captain Carrot, the Superman of Earth-26, is a swole-normous anthropomorphic bunny. He leads his Earth's super team, The Zoo Crew, with awkward panache. However, sometimes having a cadre of allies with classic powers from magic to super speed isn't enough. Sometimes you have to use your worst ability to win.
Captain Carrot's biggest weakness is his reliance on "cosmic carrots." Usually, they give him a 24-hour charge, but, when the Zoo Crew fought the Bunny From Beyond, he intentionally used up his power in the doomed struggle. Imprisoned in bonds intended for the enormous Captain, when he lost his powers he shrunk back into tiny Roger Rodney Rabbit and easily escaped. Powering back up, he was able to surprise the massively powerful alien with a haymaker. He finally tricked the Bunny into banishing itself into another dimension, but the A+ is for seeing the value in his weaker self.
1 Eye-Scream Breaks Into the Danger Room
The mutant Eye-Scream has one of the worst powers in super history. "The Man of 32 Flavors" can change his body into living ice cream. He could ooze through cracks when it was warm enough. Jealous of the X-Men's much cooler powers, he tried to kill them while they were fighting Obnoxio the Clown (don't ask).
The key to his evil plan was using his drippy-sticky abilities to sneak into the Danger Room, which he did. Xavier managed to freeze him into a solid sundae by using the Danger Room's environmental controls. He's since teamed up with the likes of Stilt-Man and Frog-Man's nemesis, White Rabbit.