5

Bloodshot

Valiant Comics

You may not be familiar with Valiant's Bloodshot, but you should check him out. His new series, Bloodshot Reborn, just started, and it's phenomenally written by Jeff Lemire. And he's going to be getting a movie in the not-too-distant future, so you may as well brush up.

As far as a crash course in the character goes, Bloodshot was created to be a kind of super soldier, and that involved injecting him with millions of little silicon-based nanocomputers that make him nearly immortal. You shoot the dude through the head, the little nanites will rebuild him, brain and all. The downside is he has no memory of who he really is and the people who made him are kind of nefarious, but such is the life of a superhero.

Valiant Comics
"I can't even tell if I'm actually Catholic or just heal that way."

4

Carl Grimes

Image Comics

You have to bear with me on this one. For those who don't already know: The Walking Dead TV series is based on the Image comic of the same name, which you totally should read because it's superb. But even if you've only seen the show, that'll mostly do for now. The show kind of screws up the point I'm trying to make, but whatever. Just imagine Carl. Poor, little Carl with his hat and his gun in the goddamn zombie apocalypse. The world is over. It's not going to come back. There's not going to be a cure or a reset or anything. The best thing Carl can hope for in life is that he and the few people who have survived the apocalypse so far don't get eaten. Try to put yourself in that headspace, where your chief daily concern is being eaten by someone.

So in the comics -- and maybe don't read this if you don't like mild, probably-not-related-to-the-show spoilers -- Carl and crew find a place to stay and years literally pass. Carl is in his teens, and as any teenager is wont to do, he goes hunting for some tang. Well, maybe not that aggressively, but he does have an interest in girls and he even starts a relationship with a character named Lydia. Sounds great, right? Except no. Gross.

Image Comics
Gross.

3

Man-Thing

Marvel Comics

Man-Thing has a lot of things stacked against him in life, not the least of which is that he's a walking heap of swamp trash. But even that isn't insurmountable when you consider Swamp Thing once got to have sex with Heather Locklear.

The difference between Swamp Thing and Man-Thing is more than just a hyphen, insofar as Man-Thing is more thing than man. He doesn't have all the brain power he used to when he was a scientist, and he's also stuck with the pain-in-the-ass power of corrosively reacting to negative emotion. So even if he did have all his faculties about him, which has happened once or twice in the comics, he'd still be screwed trying to get screwed, since he'll just burn anyone who's afraid of him, a reaction you sort of can't help but have when confronted by walking gator turds mixed with lily pads and twigs.

Marvel Comics
"And those that don't burn at my touch, will at my chlamydia."

2

Skin

Marvel Comics

Back in the 1990s, the X-Men were Marvel's unstoppable juggernaut, even more so than the Marvel character the Juggernaut. X was king, unlike now in the post-Avengers world where Marvel seems to want to disavow all knowledge of the book, at least from a marketing standpoint. The X-Men were so popular that, at one point, Marvel was publishing The X-Men, The Uncanny X-Men, Excalibur, X-Force, X-Factor, and Generation X every single month. And it's that last one where shit really got weird.

Generation X was meant to be the hip, cool new X-team for those Gen-Xers, hence the clever name. How cool was Generation X? Oh man, watch this. It's an hour and a half long, but every minute is more precious than the one before it:

So maybe hip, cool X-Men can't exist on a $30 budget, but the idea was there. Among the mutants for this new team was Angelo Espinosa, aka Skin, a mutant who just has a lot of extra skin. Like six feet of extra skin that he could manipulate octopus-style to grab things or wrap things up.

1

Rogue

In recent years, the X-Man Rogue managed to get some control over her mutant power, but for a long time she was basically relegated to leper status among the world of superheroes, because touching her meant losing your powers, your memory, and possibly your life. It was a mixed bag of shitty surprises if Rogue high-fived you.

Being a female character, Rogue's sexuality was of course covered at some point in comics, because no one gives a damn if anyone wants to hump Beast, but they do care if the girl in the skin-tight yellow and green catsuit gets busy. For many years, her relationship with Channing Gambit was a bit of a sticky wicket, since they could maybe bump a single ugly before they'd have to go their separate ways and take a nap.

Marvel Comics
"Merde, she didn't even LeBeau my Remy."

While Rogue's power causes obvious issues, and even in the first X-Men movie we get a scene of her kissing a boy and giving him varicose veins to prove just what a shitty date she is, not a lot of the downsides are ever explored. Sure, she'd feel bad for almost killing a dude, but consider that she also basically becomes, mentally, the person she touches, even if only for a short time. She doesn't just get into their head, their head becomes her head -- not just mutant powers but their very psyche and personality. So anyone she wants to sex ends up, psychologically, boning themselves. Who the hell wants that? Her only successful sexual encounters would be with narcissists.

Rogue also gains the memories of the people she touches, so while you're probably OK with everything you've done in your life at this point, it all becomes the movie she just watched before the two of you take your pants off together, so everyone you ever had sex with and any time you cheated on your taxes or maybe pooped in the laundry sink is all front-and-center for her right at your most intimate moment together. If that's not a mood killer, then nothing is. The very idea that Rogue could ever have sex with anyone without cutting her powers off completely is one of the most far-fetched aspects of the entire X universe.

For more from Felix, check out 4 Reasons Your Employer Doesn't Care If You're Happy Or Not and 4 Badass Works Of Art That Shouldn't Exist.

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