Ex-linebacker Phil Graysfield runs around fighting football-related crimes wearing the NFL corporate logo on his ridiculous but colourful costume. His suit would actually make an awesome football or BB uniform, but this comic, which ran for twelve issues plus a Superbowl special, has to be the lamest thing I ever heard of. Note that the first issue boasts a special appearance by Spider Man, which pretty much screams "we have no confidence in this concept." What I really don't get is that he's an EX-footballer, which naturally has me thinking that every linebacker out there is in better shape than he is. So what sort of superhero is he? A lame one.

I gotta tell you, I really like Captain Marvel Junior. A lot more than his namesake, and a damn sight more than that Mary Marvel. And he's culturally important in that Elvis Presley copied his haircut (no joke), and later in his career actually wore capes onstage in the same style. Circular reference fans will enjoy the fact that writers of CMJ stories fashioned him into an Elvis fan. Anyway, he's on the team because his alter ego, Freddy Freeman, was crippled by Captain Nazi. So literally, Freddy Freeman is lame. Not CMJ, though. He rocks.

Like Superpro, Dazzler is the mediocre product of a corporate think-tank. Casablanca Records and Marvel comics teamed up with a nonsense concept: a superhero comic engineered to tie in with the emergence of a new real world pop sensation, with a film to follow. This disco-age superheroine didn't appear in time however to cash in on the crossovers, since disco's popularity faded between concept in the mid-70s to product in the early 80s. By the time her magazine hit the stands, they'd been burning Village People records in Cincinnatti for months. The comic didn't do so well either. "Real life" storylines about the struggles of a small-time musician and part-time model underwhelmed audiences, and Dazzler pretty much disappeared until a recent retcon as a punk rocker, then later, as a trance/techno performer. Her power, by the way? She can turn sound into light, making her basically a living disco ball. With cleavage.

Billy Moon, former soldier and Roller Derby skater fights crime with a utility belt and roller skates. His sidekick, a street kid named Paco, rides a motorized skateboard. Skateman likes to kick his opponents in the face while wearing roller skates, which I guess is kinda badass, but he's a normal human with no superpowers and he wears roller skates! He's a martial artist and former soldier, yet he decides to base his superhero identity on his old roller skating job? Did I mention he's unemployed? This guy is a loser.

Black Lightning is embarrassing. Not that his powers suck: he can generate, project, and absorb electricity. So that's pretty cool. It's not that his first series only ran 12 issues, and that his career played out in other characters' titles. No, it's that he actually wore an afro wig as part of his costume, so that he could appear more "urban" than the olympic athlete that he was. Having already made the Panther-esque hero Luke Cage for Marvel comics, Tony Isabella went one step further for DC's "coloured" content, creating a black man who goes out of his way to talk jive. Throw in a goofy wig and a superhero name that actually references his race and you shouldn't wonder why white people are afraid to sing along to rap music.

Burdened with such genius and talent that he had accomplished all of his goals early in life, this hero considers suicide before accidentally realizing that he could use his amazing strength, speed, intelligence, business acumen, etc to help people less fortunate than he is. What a star, Richard Cory turned crimefighter. Later in life he passes on the mantle to a successor, an equally-talented guy with similar suicidal tendencies. Yup, this concept was so strong we now have two suicidal rich guys named Mr Terrific. If the basic idea wasn't lame enough, his superhero handle is like some sarcastic nickname your wife throws at you when she's pissed off.

Wonderman goes down in history as the first case of copyright infringement in the comic book industry. Charged by a former DC accountant to create a Superman-like character, Wil Eisner produced Wonderman, who could fly, stop bullets with his chest, see great distances, you get the idea. He wasn't from another planet though; he got his powers from a Tibetan monk. This wasn't considered different enough: the lawsuit succeeded, and Wonderman ended after exactly one issue.

Ok, I admit I liked this show when I was in high school. That done, it was a pretty weak concept. Apart from giving us that #1 pop hit (and years later George Costanza's awesome answering machine message!), there was little reward to the idea of a high school teacher with an alien supersuit who lost the instruction book that showed him how it worked. That was the one gag the show had, so we had to deal week after week with the embarrassment of watching him fly into walls and cover his face when shot at because he wasn't sure if the suit protected the parts of his body it didn't actually cover. He just looked like a dork, and the haircut didn't help. Season Two had the aliens return with a new instruction book, but he lost it again when he shrunk himself down to microscopic size and then dropped it before returning to normal. Believe it or not!

Mister Miracle's amazing ability is that he can escape from any trap. That's it, so when the supervillain captures him and sets up an elaborate death, such as tying him to a rocket and firing him off to the sun (which they do in his debut issue), he'll be able to get away. I admit, that's pretty neat, but seriously, this guy's powers only kick in when he fails to do his job right in the first place. If he was halfway decent at fighting bad guys they wouldn't ever get to know he even had any powers. And as a sidenote, can we think of ANY superhero who wasn't able to get out of the supervillain's traps? As "powers" go, escaping from traps was as common as enhanced strength. But don't let me sell him short: he's not just good at escaping; in fact he is the GOD of escaping in the quasi-Norse "New Gods" mythology of Jack Kirby. And yeah, his real name is Scott Free. That I could not make up.

OK, a lot of people pick on Matter Eater Lad for having a useless power: he could eat anything. In the real world, he'd be really handy at cleaning up pollution, but yawn, as a superhero you'd have to come up with a pretty crazy scenario to make him valuable at all. Which is what the Legion of Superheroes did: faced with the terrible might of the Miracle Machine, which could make thoughts into reality, and which was likely to be used to destroy the entire universe (gulp!), they asked Matter Eater Lad if he would be a dear and just eat the darn thing. Which he did, with a side of fries and a coke. Hooray! He retired after that and went into politics on his home planet of Bismoll (seriously). Anyway, what I think is lamest about this guy is his name. "The Devourer" or "All-Consumer" would have been ok, or at least been more palatable than this one. I figure no superhero should come up with a name that criminals can't say when they're drunk. And come on: "Lad" is pretty hard to swallow. What was wrong with "Boy?" Or better yet, "Man?" We're not kids forever, you idiot.

It's hard to be sure who stole from whom, but Marvel's Man-Thing came out the same year as his DC rival, Swamp Thing. Both were born from some industrial accident involving death and being regenerated by swamp organisms fed by experimental chemicals. Both dealt with the understandable difficulties of interacting with ordinary humans. Basically, apart from being more interesting to draw, these guys were not far removed from The Thing or The Hulk. So maybe I gotta weigh in on Marvel's side here, though in the long run Swamp Thing turned out to be way more interesting. Man-Thing's unique abilities included oozing, secreting, and creating a corrosive excretion whenever he sensed fear in humans. I'm sorry, the corrosive stuff is so-so, albeit with the drawback that he can't do it at will, but all the other stuff is not cool. Oozing and secreting are not super powers!