Some superpowers are really just... dangerously suicidal - Power Pack 37

[icon_uk]

Back in 1988, Marvel ran a competition to create a new mutant character, with the prize being that they would feature in a Marvel comic... sort of like a low rent version of the 1980's "Dial H for Hero" (Which I must make a post on soon). There were Junior and a Senior sections.

The Senior winner was Tom "Alchmey" Jones, who showed up in an X-Factor story (with art by Art Adams, and about gold-greedy trolls trying to use his transmutation powers for their own ends) and the Junior winner (in a story with art by Sal Velluto) is this character....



The debut of... Lighttrakker! Seriously, that's the name she considers using in one of her two subsequent appearances. Not sure that basing your codename off a track lighting is really the way to go, but maybe she can get sponsorship from IKEA.,,,

Now as you might have noticed over the years, I like the lower-key powered (or unpowered) characters. I can appreciate the appeal of the Superman's and the Phoenix's and I have enjoyed many of their adventures, but I always have a soft spot for the character whose powers are just... a little off beat, a little weird, for whom the solution to their latest confrontation with evil isn't as obvious as "Punch them until they fall down", and boy-howdy, does this character qualify....

Oh, and this story also contains mutant bashing, and some horribly exploitative media figures... business as usual in that regard then..

This story also happens in the middle of the first "Mutant Registration Act" storyline running through msot of the MU books.

We open in New York,,, in a playground




Hope you're proud of yourself there bully-boy, though anyone dumb enough to think "Look, they wear glasses so they must have possibly dangerous powers in their eyes, hey let's take the glasses off" deserves to try that same trick with Scott Summers sometime...

I pains me to omit the next several pages which is the Power kids discussing media coverage of the Mutant Registration Act and the possible impact on themselves (They're not mutants, but when wearing their Power Pack costumes, they do register as such for plot reasons) and also the impact of revealing their powers to their parents... all whilst using their powers to do theirs chores like Alex disintegrating the trash, and Julie using her shrinking pwoer to get the last socks out of the dryer. It's a very cool scene, but it's Rebecca's story we're looking at here...




You might have spotted the key to her powers by this point, she uncontrollably teleports to wherever the brightest thing she can see is, regardless of what, or where, it is. (I can't remember why the top of the Empire State Building is now gleaming... it might have been transmuted into gold or something... or it might be some sort of energy thingie... it was the late 1980's, there were a lot of things going on...)

The risks in this are pretty self-evident.... Looking up at the sun would be an instant death sentence! Evolution really not coming into play on this one, even by X-Men standards..

Later that night, the Pack decides to have a meeting on their building's roof to discuss some threatening phone calls they've received along the lines of "I know your secret, I know what you can do".... and Jack uses a torch so they can see where they're going, but when he shines it out the window so they can see their way to the roof....




That's the sort of thing I think you're going to need to work on Rebecca... I can think of few mutants for whom "looking at things" is a chronic danger to themselves (other people, yes, anyone with eye blasts can tell you about that, but to yourself?)

So what might be brightly lit late at night in New York? Well, a whole lot of things, but in this case it's a TV studio with a big picture window out over the city, where a late night chat show is going out live.



Yeah this guy is instantly added to my list of "People I wouldn't piss on, even if they were on fire" That's a kid you ass.

So we cut back to the studio after the adverts as Rebecca is talked into telling her story about teleporting all over the city.



Well, at least ONE member of the crew has a conscience... He's not even phoning the polive, he's getting the home number of the address that Rebecca gave.

The Pack, since they're not watching TV decide that they need to find Rebecca, and come up with the idea of having Alex release a power ball into the sky, and at night, that's pretty much guaranteed to be the brightest thing in the sky, so if Rebecca see's that, she'll teleport up to it, and they can use Katie's flight speed to catch her before she falls too far.



As someone once said, "There's a face you'd never tire of punching"


Love the sensible-but-kid level chit chat

Power Pack drop her off, using Julies cloud form as cover...



Rebecca would go on to make one more appearance in Power Pack, when she's targetted by the Power Pack's old foe, the kid-and-mutant-hating villain known as the Boogeyman, and I think a cameo in the Inferno crossover.

Comicvine mentions that her status since M-Day is unknown, but without wishing to sound cynical, I'd be very impressed (and relieved) if this young lady (who never went anywhere to receive training in controlling her power) managed to make it past her next birthday... since a sunny day would be a suicide run for her.
 
It does make you wonder how many other mutants we never hear about because their powers are just so self destructive, like someone who produces acidic saliva, but doesn't have any immunity to it. Or teleporters who end up embessed in rocks, or speedsters who age to death in hours, or discover their turning distance is a lot further than they thought as they head towards that brick wall.

On a UK gameshow a few years back the teams were challenged to come up with the most useless superpower of all time. My favourite was "The ability to fly... but you'd never know for how long your power would last before giving out". God, how frustrating would THAT be...

 

Comments

[md84]

'It does make you wonder how many other mutants we never hear about because their powers are just so self destructive, like someone who produces acidic saliva, but doesn't have any immunity to it. Or teleporters who end up embessed in rocks, or speedsters who age to death in hours, or discover their turning distance is a lot further than they thought as they head towards that brick wall.'

If you want a list, take a look at TV Tropes' "Blessed With Suck" and "Required Secondary Powers" pages. There are more than a few mutants whose mutations are harmful to themselves. The worst was probably Sally Floyd's daughter, who manifested the power to reverse her aging...when she was two.

The whole Russian Roulette aspect of mutant powers (and yes, there's a page called Superpower Russian Roulette on TV tropes too) can be justified since mutant powers have never had any connection to actual evolution. They're just the by-product of Celestial experiments. It makes even more sense if you take the "Galacta: Daughter of Galactus"'s take on mutant powers to be canon: that all mutants are actually reality warpers who have no control over their power.

[donnblake]

Though for what it's worth, the theory of evolution doesn't say that all mutations will be helpful. It says that those that better enable the subject to survive and successfully reproduce are more likely to be passed on.

[md84]

Some mutants are unlucky in this regard too, since their mutations render reproduction impossible. Barring the liberal application of power-inhibitors, it seems unlikely that mutants like Rockslide (a guy who's basically a spirit that can create a body from minerals) and Mercury (former cheerleader turned T-1000) will ever be able to have children that are their genetic offspring. And those are just the more extreme examples. Chances are your dating life isn't going to be very good if you happen to be a mutant whose sole power is to look weird. Unless you can meet people who are into that.

[donnblake]

Right. And the theory of natural selection (as I should more correctly have said, evolution being an observed phenomenon, and the Theory of Natural Selection being an attempt to explain the mechanism) would suggest that those mutations are unlikely to be passed on.

[icon_uk]

Santo/Rockslide is now an independent psychic entity (one which just happens to manipulate a puppet made out of rock because of lingering belief that he has need of a body), so he's most likely not subject to aging the way an organic life form would be, so the requirement of passing it on may be moot since he'll ALWAYS be here.

[md84]

That reminds me of Kars from Jojo's Bizarre Adventure Part II Battle Tendency. Once he obtained complete immortality, he lost all need for reproductive capability (the narration box reads "SEX: USELESS") since he no longer needed to pass on his genes.

[icon_uk]

Or maybe they just meant he was really, really bad in bed?

[donnblake]

Well, if he's an independent psychic entity he presumably doesn't have genes, but the point stands that he's unlikely to be the progenitor of a new species.

[halloweenjack]

The Wild Cards SF anthology series has this as one of the central tenets of the unitary origin for superhumans: about 90% of the people who express the active form of the xenovirus die from side effects of their mutation, 9% get a disfiguring and/or useless mutation, and the remaining 1% get superpowers, although many of them get a power that's trivial in effect or level.

[icon_uk]

Ooh, forgot about Wild Cards, with their Black Queens, Jokers, Deuces and Aces. Good comparison!

[skemono]

There was a mutant in PAD's Madrox mini with the ability to catch fire, like the Human Torch, but without the accompanying immunity to being on fire.

[md84]

Reminds me of the Human Torch spoof from The Venture Brothers.

[halloweenjack]

That was also used as a throwaway joke in Marshal Law some time ago.

[md84]

One of the more sadistic bits about M-day was that in some cases it didn't completely depower a mutant. Just the part of their power that kept it from being self-destructive. One unlucky dragon-like mutant still looked like a dragon but crash-landed and died because the part of its power that let it defy the laws of physics and allowed it to fly stopped working.

[q99]

Yea, the physical aspects often stuck around. One aquatic mutant drowned as their gills stopped worked...

[qalchemist]

And the Blob. Oh, the poor Blob..

...and that girl that controlled bugs...

[md84]

Things worked out pretty well for Blob in the long run. He had the extra skin removed via surgery and became a health guru.

...Then he used MGH to become Blob again because, comics.

[lbd_nytetrayn]

MGH?

[icon_uk]

Mutant Growth Hormone an extract from mutants which can grant non-mutants mutant abilities for a short period of time.

[md84]

Warning: Results may vary. Powers granted may or may not resemble that of the donor. Side effects include addiction and increased aggression. Seriously, don't try it.

[q99]

Blob I know, but what happened with the bug girl?

[beyondthefringe]

I always loved Power Pack back in the day. It got pretty bad near the end, but I love how they've managed to hang on throughout the years in one fashion or another. I think it would make an awesome animated series...

And I remember Rebecca Littlehale. Cool character, horrible power, and I'm glad she hasn't come to a bad end so far. You'd think that Xavier would have come to find a way to help her... even if it was just a more effective set of glasses or something.

How to make her power more useful? Good question. Maybe arm her with polarizing glasses and some sort of wrist-mounted flare gun, so she could teleport via line-of-sight? But if she actually had the power to teleport to the sun (and why not? Lila Cheney can teleport across vast interstellar distances, what's an AU or two between friends?) then I suspect she did a lot of avoiding daytime.

I could see her growing up to be a nocturnal person, or a recluse...and being relieved when M-Day stole her power.

[md84]

Unless she was one of the mutants who kept her powers when M-day happened. M-day really was awful in that regard. Some mutants who loved their powers or really needed them to survive (at the moment) lost theirs, and others who hated being mutants and wanted nothing more than to be baseline humans kept theirs. The panel of Mercury crying in front of a mirror wondering why she wasn't one of the ones depowered sticks out in the mind. As does the page with Wither showing his crush that he had been "cured" of his power (which was to dissolve organic matter with a touch) by grabbing her hand...

[jkcarrier]

"'The ability to fly... but you'd never know for how long your power would last before giving out'. God, how frustrating would THAT be..."

There was a period in the '70s when Supergirl's powers were cutting in and out at random. But after a couple of issues, she (and the editors) remembered that she owned a Legion Flight Ring, so that took a bit of the edge off.

[icon_uk]

Losing flight and invulnerability at the same time would be the risky combo for her I suspect

Though, it being the 70's, if she kept her super-speed she could probably spin fast enough to create an updraft to lower her more gently to the ground... albeit being as dizzy as hell and throwing up from motion sickness... if she hadn't already when spinning around... which would certainly be a new peril to living in Midvale!

[skjam]

There's at least one Superman story where he's losing his powers one by one, so has to get more and more creative so solve crises.

[icon_uk]

Hence the fun inherent in Ultra Boy, with his "One at a time" super-powers... though the flight ring allows him to cheat a little.

[skjam]

For one crossover fanfic I decided Jo Nah also had rapid healing--which he never used in combat because not invulnerable while using. Thus his healing up so fast after fights where he gets tagged while non-invulnerable.

[lbd_nytetrayn]

Waiting for "Kids with magic powers? Don't be ridiculous!" to happen in the next panel.

[silverhammerman]

There actually was a Marvel speedster, Thunderbolt, who rapidly aged to death in his second(?) or so appearance as a superhero. From the looks of it he'd been introduced as a regular speedster, but after flopping he got repurposed for a Heroes for Hire story that saw him die after defeating his brother's killer.

I'll admit to having a certain fondness for the character, based on the follow through that the concept received.

[md84]

The "Speedster aging to death by overusing their power" has shown up a few times. One episode of Darkwing Duck had Darkwing gaining superspeed that would cause rapid aging. He hilariously (and awesomely) solved the problem by taking advantage of his new ability to think at superspeed to get a degree and develop an antidote in a matter of minutes. Transformers Animated also had a speedster thief called Nanosec who had a suit that granted him superspeed. Again, the side-effect was rapid aging. Fortunately for him, he later partnered up with a villain who had time-related powers who was able to reverse his aging and prevent the suit from prematurely aging him.

[halloweenjack]

Gruenwald's Squadron Supreme had an interesting twist on that: the Whizzer (no relation to Robert Frank, who was thought for a while to be Wanda and Pietro's father) had to basically put himself into suspended animation for a while after using his superspeed, although I don't think that premature aging was specifically mentioned as a side-effect.

[espanolbot]

Man, why do I get the impresson the "mutants are evil" kid would have had the same reaction if the girl was wearing the glasses because she was partially sighted or something.