Blessed with Suck/Comic Books: Difference between revisions

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*** Isn't that more [[Cursed with Awesome]]? You get to go to a different place in space AND get back home in a blink! Imagine how useful that is...
** During ''New X-Men'', Grant Morrison introduced a number of new mutants whose primary power was to look weird. Beak typifies the whole lot of them: he's a mutant who looks sort of like a humanoid chicken and has no other powers than looking like a chicken.
** Jean Grey used to have great difficulty controlling her powers. Her telekinesis wasn't so bad, but her telepathy was a huge hassle because she couldn't shut it off. [[It Got Worse]] when she became the host of the Phoenix -- even more power, and even less control since the Phoenix isn't always content to stay in the passenger's seat.
* The specials in ''[[Rising Stars]]'' all get treated pretty badly over the course of the series due to [[Beware the Superman|the public's fear of them]], but a few of them have especially sucky powers.
** Peter Dawson is almost completely invulnerable due to an invisible shield that lines his skin and the inside of his lungs and stomach. The shield let things like oxygen through, but kept out anything toxic. However, because nothing can actually touch his skin, he's completely numb. He can, however, taste things, so he eats a lot and becomes very obese. This disqualifies him from any law enforcement job where his power might be useful, and he ends up working a minimum wage job at a service station. {{spoiler|He's killed by having a plastic bag duct-taped over his head while he's asleep. The killer knew he'd never feel it, and he quietly suffocated.}}
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* The Boulder, who made one appearance in ''[[The Avengers (Comic Book)|Avengers]]: The Initiative'' (which, again, is a Marvel Comic, demonstrating just how much they are in love with this trope), has the superpower of total [[Nigh Invulnerable|Invulnerability]]. He's impervious to harm, can't be worn out, and is otherwise invincible. Sounds great, until you realize he's forever stuck in the body of a slow, weak, overweight teen who's incapable of losing weight or getting any stronger, making him pretty much worthless as a superhero.
** Oh, it gets worse. When one of his teammates offers to have sex with him, he tells her that there's no point - his invulnerability not only prevents him from feeling pain, but from feeling pleasure, too. Pretty damn rough when you consider that he's going to remain a teenager ''forever''... To be fair, he's since landed a job with the Shadow Initiative and has a bright future ahead of him in search and rescue. And, come on. This is the guy who broke the Taskmaster.
*** An extra down side is that while pretty much nothing can hurt him, he's still vulnerable to all forms of telepathy, including mind control. But an extra bright side to him, when in fights, he's pretty much the perfect shield for his teammates.
** Another character in ''Avengers: The Initiative'' who fits this trope is Trauma, who possesses both [[Telepathy|telepathic]] and [[Voluntary Shapeshifting|metamorphic]] powers, and can therefore transform into whatever a person is most afraid of. Often, he will give this attack a nightmarish twist; if you're afraid of death, he'll morph into a mutilated corpse, if you're afraid of spiders, he'll turn into a spider about the size of a ''T. rex'', and so forth. He started off with a horrible case of [[Power Incontinence]], as his powers are triggered by strong emotion. If someone near him was upset or scared, he would spontaneously transform into something horrible. Unlike most people on this list, Trauma ''did'' eventually learn to control his powers -- but the damage, sadly, had been done. A recent issue of ''Avengers: The Initiative'' revealed that his family does not want anything to do with him. Even worse, in the very first issue, we're told that his mother is in a mental institution...
*** During ''[[Secret Invasion]]'', the guys with which he was fighting Skrulls with were so afraid that one of them could be Skrull, that their fear made him change into one. While his buddies beat on him, ''real'' Skrulls caught them. He's no teamplayer at all.
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* Another DC example, though not canon, was [[Larry Niven]]'s essay, [http://www.rawbw.com/~svw/superman.html "Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex"], in which he makes a convincing argument that pre-crisis [[Superman]] can never make love to Lois Lane (or any human, for that matter.)
** Thankfully, there's the equally convincing counterargument that Kryptonian involuntary movements aren't proportionately powerful, as Superman's blinks, heartbeats and peristalsis don't cause shockwaves in the air.
* And these DCU Examples have nothing on the [[Doom Patrol]], a team that is ''based'' on [[Blessed with Suck]].
** [[Magnificent Bastard]] super-genius Niles "The Chief" Caulder assembles the team and acts as [[Mission Control]] because he's in a wheelchair. The story he gave was that his brilliance attracted the attention of an [[Evil Mastermind]] who manipulated him into horrible actions. [[Grant Morrison]] pulled a [[Retcon]] that made Niles a ''real'' [[Magnificent Bastard]] and granted him immortality... meaning he can't die, even as a [[Brain In a Jar]]!
** Rita "Elasti-girl" Farr can grow or shrink to any size, and even grow her limbs to be different sizes... but had zero control over it, wrecking her movie career.
** Hotshot test-pilot Larry Trainor gets exposed to cosmic radiation, and has a cool double (the Negative Spirit) that can teleport out of his body and phase through anything but lead... but if it's out of his body for longer than 60 seconds, it'll kill him, and he has to have every centimeter of flesh wrapped in specially-treated bandages to keep himself from dosing others with fatal levels of radiation.
** Cliff "Robotman" Steele was an extreme sports athlete, adventurer, and race car driver who got himself into a fatal car accident. His brain was put in a robot body which is stronger, faster, and tougher than any human one... but it locked him out of doing the things he loved because his new body disqualifies him from competition. Worse, he outlives all of his teammates several times over... the poor bastard frequently wonders if it would have been more merciful for him to die in the wreck.
*** It gets worse in the current continuity. {{spoiler|Why is he a robot? A group of scientists (including Caulder) gave him an injection of nanites to protect his life, when they hired him to drive for them. When the superbike he was testing went out of control, the only thing they could think of to do to save him was to consume his still completely concious body, and convert it into an indestructible robot.}}
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* Gwen Raiden (see ''[[Angel]]'' below) gets a mega-massive dose of this in ''Angel: After the Fall'' when {{spoiler|having found a cure for her electrical...ness, she uses the opportunity to get close to another person for the first time. Then everything goes to Hell and the electrical doohickey keeping her powers suppressed breaks... and she [[Squick|deep-fries her new friend]].}}
* Rick Sheridan, from the 1990s [[Marvel Comics]] series ''Sleepwalker'' ends up having to share his head with the titular alien hero, who can only come out when Rick sleeps. Sleepy's presence causes no end of trouble for Rick in his social life, up to and including putting Rick in a coma when Sleepwalker tries to force his way out while Rick is still awake. At least Peter Parker got some cool powers to balance things out...
* One of the few examples of this trope who is also a [[Badass Normal]] comes from [[Marvel Comics]] in the form of [[Steven Ulysses Perhero|Michael Van Patrick, aka MVP]]. Long story short, he went through a diet and exercise regimen (starting from ''infancy'' it seems) devised by his grandfather who had worked on the [[Super Soldier]] program that created [[Captain America (comics)]]. On the plus side, it made MVP a human being whose physical abilities were on par with [[Captain America (comics)]] himself, ''without'' [[Super Serum]]. The downside? Hoo boy. When it was discovered that his grandfather worked on the project, school officials suspected that MVP's abilities weren't natural, so he got booted off his high school sports team. Then he got drafted by the Initiative because they also believed he had [[Super Serum]] in his veins. While he adjusted well enough, he and his fellow recruits took part in an ill-advised live fire exercise on ''their first day''. End result? {{spoiler|To quote the Sniper from ''[[Team Fortress 2]]'', "[[Boom! Headshot!|Boom. Headshot]]."}} [[It Got Worse|It]] [[Cloning Blues|didn't]] [[With Great Power Comes Great Insanity|end]] [[Ax Crazy|there]].
* Jhiaxus in IDW's ''[[Transformers]]'' comics {{spoiler|gains immortality as a result of being on the border between two universes, and so cannot die. This would be fine if it weren't for the hyperviolent Arcee using this to take her revenge against him. So she kills him again, and again, and again, and again...}}
** However, this is karma paying him back tenfold. Arcee wasn't hyperviolent until Jhiaxus turned her into a her. Until he experimented on Arcee, she ''had'' no gender, just like the rest of the Transformers. He did it just to see what would happen, just because he could. So this is a bit less this, more him getting his just desserts.
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* Jessica Drew AKA [[Spider Woman]] was one to get over this problem but initially, her powers caused accelerated aging, unwanted attraction due to pheromones and unjustified hatred because of those same pheromones.
* Further Marvel examples: for a time, Rhino's suit was grafted to his skin. While this provided the permanent secondary powers for him to break through walls without pain, he had a lack of feeling and required a special flap for natural functions. Also, a side story mini-series from the perspective of Kitty Pryde as a new X-Man revolved around Wolverine running off with her in the middle of the night and telling her about some bank robbers he had fought while in Canada that wore adamantium suits. Unfortunately, the suits could not be removed; and one of them ended up with some disease. The man was left on life support for decades because the doctors weren't able to give him the single injection he needed, and the suit was of similar strength to Wolverine's claws. Wolverine took Kitty because he suddenly realized her powers would allow them to phase the needle past the suit, but he had died shortly before they arrived.
* The [[Avengers Academy]] seems to be ''built'' on this. We have Veil who can turn into mist...yet her power is slowly killing her. Then we have Hazmat whose body produces deadly radiation, and has to be confined to a suit to protect others. Then there's Finesse, who is a super fighter but her brain can't handle all the information and in the future...its revealed she's {{spoiler|continually forgetting her daughter's name.}} Then there's Mettle, who was a champion surfer before his powers awakened granting him [[Super Strength]] and [[Nigh Invulnerability]]...but making him look like a metal version of [[Red Skull]] (he even yells once 'I'm not related to Red skull, I'm Jewish'), and then there's Reptil who could only transform his body parts into dinosaurs before getting a future power up.
* The newish Mutants from the marvel universe, Generation Hope, all have powers like this, or at least linked to this. You have Velocidad, who's a superspeedster who ages up with each use of his power as it just makes time move slower/faster/whichever would be relevant for him, Sadie (can't remeber hero-name) who's trapped forever in some blue alien looking body, some guy who got super-animal strength and senses... and the mind to go with them. Another one of them's walking [[Body Horror]]. Being one of the new generation of mutants sucks.
** Idie is the one exception. Too bad her upbringing convinced her that just being a mutant was bad enough.