My go-to in any discussion of awful superhero characters had always been
Cocaine, a DC character who hails from Colombia and whose powers all stem from cocaine and whose name seems pretty obvious now that you know his backstory. And I stand by his suckiness, but I think we’ve got a solid Plan B: the Marvel character
Leather Boy.
Leather Boy (real name, tragically: Gene Lorrene) applies for membership to the
Great Lakes Avengers — a Milwaukee-based spin-off to the Avengers, which itself kind of sounds like a joke. He’s rejected, however, because he lacks any superpowers. You see, he’s not Leather Boy so much as a leather boy, ball gag and all, and he only applies because he mistakes the Great Lakes Avengers for an S&M fetish group. (An easy mistake to make, given the language that would go into such a classified ad, no?)
Leather Boy comes back years later, however, still smarting over the fact that he wasn’t allowed into the group in spite of everything I just relayed to you in the previous paragraph. Now wearing a leather fetish version of Doctor Doom’s costume, Leather Boy unleashes his rage on
Monkey Joe — who, weirdly, is not a monkey but a squirrel who happens to be the sidekick of
Squirrel Girl, whom Leather Boy felt didn’t deserve membership for reasons that should be fairly obvious. He kills Monkey Joe.
In the end, he is apprehended by
Big Bertha, who sits on him. Bertha, by the way, has the superpower to increase her weight dramatically, though she can only return to her regular size by making herself throw up.
“In spite of all this, I still love comic books.” — me, reminding myself.
Superheroes, previously:
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