Four years ago, while my brother was serving in Iraq, he and his fellow soldiers would come up with various inane topics of conversation to pass the time.  One of my favorite was the lame superheroes.  I enjoyed his list so much that I saved it for four years and really, its time to pass this on to the world.  Feel free to add your own.  This list was created without any knowledge (on his part) of the Legion of Substitute Heroes nor any similar concepts.

I have taken my 25 years of reading comics, plus my vast intellect, and deconstructed these powers.  I’m taking the idea down to the bare bones concept (which, as they are only concepts, didn’t take long) and re-imagined the ideas as a useful and interesting super hero.  Sort of like Grant Morrison, but without all the witch craft.

Click for more and read the top 4 ideas!

4.  The Man with the ability to lift 3,142 pounds… no more, no less.

As far as I can tell, this number has no meaning.  Its entirely possible that it was the weight of a jeep or some other vehicle they used day to day.  However, its far funnier for me to think that this number was pulled from the cloud and all in the room felt it was a perfectly good ridiculous number.  How useful could this power be?  He couldn’t be a hero on his own, but with a team it might be possible.  Maybe the combined weight of the team is 3,142 pounds.  He could lift them and maybe throw them into space or something.  See it says he can lift that weight, but no mention of how long or with how much force.  It just has to be that very specific weight.  I suppose he could have a weapon, like Mjolnir that weighed exactly that much.

3.  The Man with the ability to fly… but only straight down.

What is the difference between flying and falling?  The solution to this question will decide whether or not this super hero can succeed in any way.  Flying would be the ability to take off, land, and fly in various directions (with the possible ability to change directions mid flight as well).  Thus, for this power to work under my rudimentary definition of flying, he must have the ability to stop.  It is the ability to stop in mid air, or hover, that can make this a useful power.  He cant fly up, only down, so someone has to fly this hero up in a plane, push him out, and point him in the right direction.  With the power to hover, and the earth’s gravity (along with the side benefit of orbit) we have found a use for this power.  As a weapon of mass destruction.  Push him out of a plane while the plane is above our country, and have him hover.  The earth rotates, and the moon revolves around the earth.  But not at the same speed as the earth.  If it did, it would only be seen by one side of the globe.  However, we have the phases of the moon and everything else.  Point being, if Fly Straight Down man hovers high enough for long enough he will now be overhead of the villain.  Whether that be another country or Doctor Doom.  He now needs to only fly straight down and the speed he picks up will allow him to destroy the target like a bomb.  Taking super hero rules into play, as part of this power his body will naturally also have a way to protect himself from said power.  Cyclops cant burn himself with his optic blasts, for example.  Thus when all is left is a crater, Fly Down Man will be able to crawl out of it.

2.  The Man with the ability to make himself invisible… when no one is around.

The super hero version of if a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?  It may seem like a useless power.  One of the main reasons to be invisible is to spy on people, but the devil is in the details.  “No one is around”, not “no thing”.  This power of invisibility could still be used after hours.  Motion detectors and cameras may not notice and invisible man.  Thus thievery and bank heists could still be an option.  Oh wait, heroes.  Covert missions into shady corporations or super villains lairs could still be an option.  Plus there is the question on the range of this power.  “When no one is around”, but how far away would another human have to be in order to counteract the power?  Short of any sort of measurable distance the only other answer is within the line of sight.  If this is the case then the hero could go anywhere, as long as he uses his gift and covert military training to stay out of the eye line of any possible threat.

1.  The Man with the ability to hold his breath for hours at a time… but only on dry land.

This is the easiest of ideas.  I understand why my brother thought it was a foolish power.  Holding your breath under water or in space, that’s a power!  But on dry land, well who cares?  CDC would care.  There’s an entire continent of people who wear masks while riding public transportation, and that’s in our real world today.  The threat of airborne diseases and/or chemical warfare is real.  So real that a hero who could walk into an affected zone and not worry about any sort of breathing aparatus would be a benefit to all of humanity.  Whether the danger comes from anthrax, mustard gas, smallpox or any of the (way too) many other options would not matter.  What would matter in such a situation is to get to the source of the outbreak as quickly as possible and put an end to it.  This “useless” super hero could be the savior of all humanity.