5 Amazing Comic Book Superheroes Too Damn Awesome to Appear On Screen

Avengers End Game drops today. After a decade of super-fights, super-budgets and super-box-office-takings, End Game promises to be the last film in an epic saga that started a really, really long time ago with the first post-credits glimpses of Thanos. The folks who make the MCU have said that after this film everything will have changed and nothing will remain the same.

So what will change?

Most likely the current line up of million-dollar faces will get retired and new recruits will get to step in. End Game will be Robert Downey Jr’s tenth movie in the franchise after all, and I’m not sure if the Iron Man suit even has nose holes for snorting cocaine.

With the changing of the guard, new and different superheroes will get a chance to save the world. Here are our pick for 5 superheroes that hand-on-heart appear in the comics, but we doubt we will ever see on the silver screen.

#5 Hellcow

Did you think this article was going to be about the worst superheroes? Wrong, this article is about the best superheroes. The ones who are just to damn awesome for the big screen.

Meet Bessie, aka Hellcow. She was your ordinary everyday kind of bovine, until one day Dracula needed dairy and this ordinary cow became a different kind of steak from the ones normally featured in vampire stories.

Hellcow’s most famous outing involves a team-up with the always lovable Deadpool as part of his team of odd-ball recruits in Deadpool Inc.

Hellcow can fly (when wearing a cape), suck blood and generally do vampire stuff while having the stealth and aerodynamics of your standard issue cow.

#4 Maggott

The X-Men series has probably the most creative freedom of any superhero series. Want a guy who shoots lasers from his eyes? Mutant. Want a girl who can walk through walls? Mutant. Want some bloke who’s internal organs have been replaced with two cybernetic maggots that can come and go as they please, can be controlled telepathically and can see the history of anything by consuming part of it? yep, mutant – by name of Maggott.

This unfortunately named superhero was a member of the X-Men on several occasions and generally an all round good guy. The fact that his insides are now his outsides and they crawl around doing their own thing made him a bit hard to love, and it seems like some of the writers felt the same way, with heroic moments that weren’t all that heroic at the best of times, and an origin story that is more gross than defining.

Maggott’s maggots were not exactly a match-winning power either, as while they were autonomous and Maggott could see through their eyes, this was a totally underwhelming feature-set, considering telekinesis and omniscience are found in any of the numerous psychics that populate the series.

But Maggott sure was gross, especially as some artists would draw him with grey-green skin. He is supposed to be a 6’8″ black man by the way.

#3 Pink Pearl

Comics have always been pretty equal opportunity. The super-men are all super-muscly and the women tend to be buxom, brave and beautiful. Even leather-clad villainesses like Catwoman and Mystique get regular stints on team good-guy just for long enough to show some redeeming qualities, and while being sexy, smart and salacious enough to dominate the darker parts of the internet.

And then, you get Pink Pearl. Her whole thing is that she is a fat fatty fat fat with super-fat strength and super-fat agility for some reason.

And sure, out of context this does look like a still shot from Here Comes Honey Boo Boo, but some comic-book artist spent longer drawing folds of fat in this picture then they took to make Beast actually look like a recognizable character. They really wanted you to know she was fat.

Pink Pearl made her original appearance in 1985 where her motivations for being a super-villain were – because she was fat…. and also, Canadian?

Before taking on the moniker of Pink Pearl she was known as Pearl Gross, a name which must have at least had something to do with her maniacal motivations.

In one story line she get’s stabbed in the heart with a dagger however “due to her fat, she was able to survive the encounter”.

Pink Pearl was also part of a team of female supervillians called the Femizons, which must have been a a direct, rather critical response to a certain pro-women movement that would have been making waves in 1985 America.

Oh, and apparently her size didn’t change or anything like that in the story, but panel-to-panel the artist would sometimes get a little carried away…

Pink Pearl did try and go legit, at one point even opening a male strip club called “Cloisters.” This venture was ruined when superheroes Aurora, Guardian, and Diamond Lil patronized the venue… and started a super-brawl. 

#2 Brown Bomber

Let us introduce to you Brown Bomber, DC’s first ever attempt at a black super hero. Did you read the speech bubbles in the image above? What do you mean “I only have my powers when I turn black”?

This is one panel earlier:

Yup. Brown Bomber’s super power was doing the reverse-Michael-Jackson and turning from some fat white dude into a super-powered black man. All he had to do was yell “Black Power!” and he would suddenly gain a very decent tan, a full ‘fro, and a superhero name that sounds like a hate crime.

This was 1977 and much like today, DC was just trying to do something marvel was already doing much better (with Black Panther and Luke Cage).

It is unknown if the Brown Bomber had to yell “White Power!” to change back again.

#1 Arm-Fall-Off-Boy

I’m not sure what the vetting process involves for superhero creation. I mean it is pretty easy to come up with an idea for a superhero, look around the room, pick a random object or appliance and bang, you’ve got a b-grade hero in no time. I’ll prove it:

• Let’s see, on my desk I have a pot plant, so everyone meet “The Bush-Whacker”, a super hero who’s arms turn into tree branches and… he wacks you?
• I’ve got an empty coffee cup so that can give us a super-villain called “The Caf-fiend”, (get it?) who I guess can move really fast but needs to pee all the time.
• There is a vacuum cleaner in the corner of the room, so let’s introduce “Boy-Vacuum” who’s super-power is… sucking so much that he ends up in this article.

All three of those ideas were stupid.

And in fairness, people have stupid ideas all of the time, especially when they have run out of fucks to give, which is what must have happened at DC in 1989, because nothing else can account for inexplicableness of Arm-Fall-Off-Boy.

Arm-Fall-Off-Boy made his first appearance in Secret Origins Vol. 2 #46, with the unenviable power to make his arms fall off and then try and bludgeon people with them.

Not only is this a terrible fighting technique but I’m sure the characters whole existence is actually a mocking jab at someone who caught an STD from an unsavory source.

For some reason, Arm-Fall-Off-Boy’s ejectable extremities have the appearance and texture of a rotting banana with a bad case of genital warts thrown in. His arms just have a habit of falling off (he has multiple story lines about getting denied to join the legion of superheros because he will literally fall apart under pressure), and you tell me if the stump hole that is left behind doesn’t look like something you shouldn’t put your dick in:

End Game is here. We are so very excited.

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Laurence London

Laurence is an engineer by trade, a huge comic book nerd and is also probably the missing Kardashian sister.

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