David Christopher Bell
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Having superpowers is like flying first class: It comes with a lot of unlisted complimentary items and no one will complain if you wear a cape. On paper, Captain America's secret sauce granted him the superhuman strength to throw his shield -- and yet he also possesses the knowledge of a geometry professor, because he is able to use that shield to make impossible trick shots. Spider-Man has the characteristics and power of a spider and is also immediately cured of his terrible vision for no discernible reason.
But while most of these side-effect abilities are a garnish, some characters have unmentioned secondary skills that are so incredible that their primary superpower eats a pale shit in comparison. For instance, no one ever mentions the fact that ...
20th Century Fox
Storm is a goddamned elemental deity. She can control weather so precisely that she's able to rain down lightning at the leisure of her own baffling catchphrases. She can summon the tornadoes, tsunamis, and hurricanes needed to solve droughts; create renewable wind energy; or demolish a small country of her choosing. But, most importantly, she can produce electricity from her own body, like a sexy Tesla Coil.
20th Century Fox
20th Century Fox
She's basically hot Raiden.
To put that into perspective: A single bolt of lightning is about 5 billion joules, which translates to 1.2 million calories worth of food someone would have to scarf for their body to generate that much energy. Storm would have to be downing 2,131 Big Macs per thunderous kill shot -- which means her particular mutation must allow her body to instantaneously materialize power from either the electromagnetic energy around her or fucking nowhere ... and either option would be a world-changing miracle.
20th Century Fox
"You ... didn't ... supersize me, motherfucker!"
The wattage in a single bolt of lightning could power a home for a month -- meaning that with the right conductor and tapering, she could be spending her mutant off-days occasionally taking the time to run entire cities. Her body can produce endless amounts of sustainable juice on such a large scale that she could piledrive the energy crisis like a robotic Al Gore, but instead she wastes all her time teaching children and saving civilians like a selfish asshole.
Columbia Pictures
In the first of several Spider-Man franchise killers, Sandman tumbled into the unguarded testing abyss of a confounding particle physics lab and gained the ability to turn his body into sand. He then used his awesome powers of sand transformation to rob banks while perpetually looking like a roided-up Steve from Blue's Clues.
Columbia Pictures
I just killed an old man
I just killed an old man
I just killed an old man
Wonder who it was?
According to the rag-tag idiot scientists conducting their wacky late-night sand experiment, the process vaguely involved the demolecularization of a silicone mass, which caused the hulking frown dispenser Flint Marko to be infused with the sandy substance and become Sandman. It makes as much sense as anything in Spider-Man 3 -- except for the part that magically grants Sandman the power of flight:
Columbia Pictures
Fly away, fish poop. Be free!
Look at that: He's not riding the wind; he's controlling his direction like fucking Imhotep. In a film series featuring a man who casually invents sentient robot claws and a meteorite housing a glob of outer-space Gwar jizz, this is by far the most far-fetched nonsense portrayed on-screen. And yet, no one seems concerned about the sand-character that's managed to propel each grain of his disembodied particle cloud with no apparent propellant. That's seriously magic, right? Can we all agree that's magic?
How long is Sandman able to maintain his sorcerous cloud form? Can he go to space, like Superman? Build a Martian sandcastle like Doctor Manhattan? He has two out of four Last Airbender powers -- it's a wonder the world didn't just stop and give him all the cartoonish money bags he needed to cure his daughter's mystery ailment. For all we know, he's as immortal as the hovering Earth particles flooding his DNA like dusty vampire blood.
Columbia Pictures
"Sorry I can't stay and chat; got a double shift at Never-Never Land.
20th Century Fox
If you have ever fired a gun, you have no doubt experienced the boner-inflating opposing force created by launching a bullet, perhaps into a cantaloupe with the words "MY INSECURITIES" scrawled on it in Sharpie. That's called recoil. And, according to Newton's Law, without resistance and mass, that feeling would mirror the amount of force created by the bullet's impact. That is, if you had a gun strong enough to blow through a steel door, the recoil would be equal to that force, if not greater. With me so far? Now, let's imagine that your projectile didn't have any resistance or mass, like a laser. Like the kind of laser Cyclops uses to blast through steel doors.
20th Century Fox
"Here's Scotty!"
Cyclops' laser eyes are so powerful that they can blow the roofs off train stations and eject ThunderCats straight out of national monuments. That means his true superpower is the tremendous ability to absorb batshit amounts of recoil that would come from firing such a devastating face-blaster.
That's right, kids: If you took a regular human and mounted a laser to their head, that person's head would explode right off their body the first time they used it to blow a hole through a tank. And yes, before you ask, laser guns would theoretically have a recoil -- which we're guessing would be tenfold considering the completely unbroken stream of energy connecting his skull to whatever fool enemy stepped in front of him.
20th Century Fox
Visitors to Xavier's school parallel park at their own risk.
If William Stryker ever got the opportunity to cut this fellow open, Cyclops' neck and spine would look like a piece of rebar covered in vulcanized rubber. Or maybe he just absorbs the force and recycles it, like Kevin Bacon's character in X-Men: First Class. That would certainly explain where the energy for laser-beam eyes comes from ... because, like for Storm, we never get a sense of where Cyclops' endless power originates, despite the fact that you could stick his head in a rain barrel and create a nuclear reactor.
Twentieth Century Fox
Depending on which ridiculous version of the Fantastic Four you've decided to follow -- the group's "unstable molecule" suits were created by Mister Fantastic himself in the comics, the cosmic radiation on board their ship in the 2005 film, or whatever "grounded" pseudo-science the new movie chooses to piss out.
Twentieth Century Fox
"I molded it out of my own angsty tears."
Whatever their origin, the Fantastic Four's suits have the power to adapt to any environmen
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