Superpowers have been a staple of comics from the beginning, with the most popular and enduring heroes showcasing some incredible powers. Comics fans have put a lot of time into debating what the best and most powerful powers are, and deciding whether they would want to have the power of flight, super strength, invisibility, or one of the many other incredible options.
However, not all superpowers are as cool or impressive. There are plenty that are... less useful. Some of these powers don't make much sense, some are very, very specific, and others just seem like they wouldn't come in all that handy for fighting crime. Or doing much else with them, for that matter.
10 Talking To Squirrels
Squirrel Girl is a fan favorite, and luckily for her, she does have some very useful powers alongside her less useful ones. Squirrel Girl is super strong, super agile, and has some enhanced senses. All useful. She can also communicate with squirrels. Being able to chat with these furry rodents certainly sounds cute, but how handy can a squirrel really be when you're fighting crime? Squirrel Girl clearly thinks they can help, as several of her squirrel buddies have been official members of the Great Lakes Avengers, at her insistence.
9 Being Emotional
Is being emotional really even a superpower? Unfortunately for DC's Rainbow Girl, that's the power she got. Officially, her power is the 'emotional spectrum', whatever that means. She can use colors to change her mood. Unfortunately, her powers are unpredictable at best, and she mostly just has mood swings.
Even if she could control her power better, it's not clear how having emotions would help her to be a superhero. It's no wonder she was rejected by the Legion of Super-Heroes, and her appearances in comics have been few and far between.
8 Being French
In the 1970s, the popularity of Superman and a wave of nationalist spirit prompted Marcel Gotlib and Jacques Lob to create their own superhero. Superdupont was a spoof of the all-American heroes like Superman and was intended to poke fun at the national attitudes of France. Superdupont's enemies were a group called Anti-France, who he fought with his skills in savate, or French Boxing. The character was one giant joke on how France is viewed by the outside. He wore a beret, he drank red wine, he smoked Gauloises cigarettes...funny, but was he any good as a hero?
7 Tentacle Arms
The X-Men and their associated characters have had some bizarre superpowers over the years, possibly just because there have been so many of them. Callisto got one of the odder powers, and possibly least useful, with her tentacle arms. Callisto was introduced as the leader of the Morlocks, a (literally) underground group of mutants whose powers prevented them from passing as humans. After being put through biophysical alterations by Masque, she had tentacle arms for a while. Unless you're an octopus, tentacles have pretty limited uses.
6 Being Really Good At Skateboarding
Robbie Rodriguez, or El Guapo, was a stuntman turned superhero with X-Statix. He technically didn't have any actual superpowers but did he have a symbiotic relationship with his skateboard. Usually, Robbie could control the skateboard with his mind, but sometimes it had a mind of its own, including one memorable occasion where it beat him up for cheating on his girlfriend. Being beaten up by your own skateboard is pretty embarrassing. Robbie's health would also deteriorate when he was away from his board, which seems less than useful.
5 Teleporting People Into The Next Room
There are quite a lot of heroes who can teleport themselves or other people to just about any place you can think of. Doorman, who joined the Great Lakes Avengers, had a slightly more limited range for teleporting people. He could only teleport you into the next room.
While this power might be useful if you were locked out, it isn't very useful to getting access to places, as Doorman needed to be very close to his destination for his powers to work. Perhaps just lockpicking abilities would have been alright.
4 Being Blue
John Zander, or as he is better known, Jazz, is a pretty unfortunate mutant. He dreamed of being a rapper, but unfortunately, wasn't all that good at it. Instead, he became a drug runner, selling Toad Juice, a drug made from the Toad Boy's secretions. He was one of the few mutants to retain his mutant abilities after M-Day and was forcibly taken to a mutant camp. This seems particularly unfair, as his only mutant ability is being blue. That's it. Poor Jazz has no real powers. He's just blue.
3 Being Extremely Infectious
Some odd heroes have tried and failed to join the Legion of Super-Heroes, including Infectious Lass. As her name might suggest, her power was to infect people with various diseases. Infectious Lass is a carrier for thousands of different diseases. She is immune to them all, which is useful for her, but unfortunately, she couldn't always control who she infected, or what she infected them with. If she had more control, this could be an interesting power, but who wants a teammate who might accidentally give you a deadly disease?
2 Blasting Your Own Teammates. Or Yourself
Poor Friendly Fire's powers should have been useful, but he didn't seem to have much control over them. Friendly Fire could shoot powerful concussive beams from his fists. This could be amazing in a fight, but for some reason, as his name suggests, he seemed pretty bad at hitting the bad boys, and instead mostly hit his own teammates by mistake.
In fact, he never managed to hit an enemy. His short-lived hero career came to an abrupt end when he somehow managed to laser-punch himself, and blew his own head off. Oops.
1 Always Being Forgotten
Forget-Me-Not is quite the literally named hero. His power meant that anyone who saw him immediately forgot that he existed as soon as they weren't looking at him. His power was pretty useful for gaining access to places but was less useful for being a member of the X-Men. It's quite difficult to be a member of a hero team who immediately you're on the team whenever you're not there. Charles Xavier had to leave himself notes to remind him of Forget-Me-Not's existence. When the poor guy died, he was, of course, completely forgotten. A sad end for a hero with a challenging power.