What do you think?  Is it hard to challenge a character that can teleport?

It’s ridiculously hard to come up with unique superpowers, but let’s try this.  The ability to inflict blindness.  I suspect it would work pretty well in novels and comic books.

If you’re writing a superhero story, don’t let your superpowers fall into these traps.

1. The hero’s powers can’t be used creatively. Readers really want to be surprised, so it’s very important that the powers be versatile. If your character is only superstrong, you can only surprise them by using different things as weapons.  That gets tedious fast. (Watch a Superman or Dragon Ball Z fight scene). Test your superhero against some of these situations. Can he get through them in an unexpected way?

• Distracting a guard.  (Cliche:  mental control, illusions and possibly telekinesis).
• Nonviolently subduing a guard or cop (cliche:  mental control and/or hypnosis).
• Preventing a building from falling (cliche:  superstrength, telekinesis).
• Getting past a locked door (cliche:  teleportation, phasing, lockpicks, blowing open the wall).
• Finding a password (cliche: anything electronic or electrical, beating it out of a bad guy).

2. The character’s limits are hard to grasp. In Heroes, a head wound will permanently kill the regenerating heroes, but a nuclear explosion won’t.  Huh?

3. The character’s strength fluctuates arbitrarily. Most Superman cartoons feature two battles. Superman will lose the first bout (to raise the stakes) but he’ll win the second.  He hasn’t gotten any stronger, so why does he wins the second time? That usually feels unsatisfying.

4. The superpowers are hard to understand. Ideally, you can explain each hero’s powers in a brief sentence.  “He has spider-powers, like slinging webs and climbing and sensing danger” is OK.  “She can control the weather” is even better.  Please stay away from heroes that have many unrelated superpowers.  What’s the connection between eye-beams, cold breath, flight, superstrength and x-ray vision?  It sort of works for Superman because readers are exposed to him, but it is likely to ruin a superhero story that is completely new to its readers.

5. He’s overpowered. Superman is the best example of this. He can only have interesting fights with supervillains. (Theoretically, he could fight thugs armed with kryptonite, but Superman limping around isn’t much of a fight). If your character is completely immune to bullets and other common weapons, it will be hard for you to challenge him.  Also, humans are vulnerable and we relate more to (somewhat) vulnerable heroes.

6. The hero’s superpowers ruin the drama. In particular, time travel, reading minds, erasing memories, and resurrection are particularly bad here.

• Time travel:  if your hero can undo anything bad that happens, nothing will ever be dramatic.  “Why doesn’t he just go back in time?”
• Reading minds: surprise, suspicion and uncertainty are all dramatic.  A story about a psychic is all-but-unable to use any of them.  (To some extent, lie-detection suffers from a similar problem).
• Erasing memories:  this is probably the lamest way to protect a secret identity.  It will also confuse readers because we can’t keep track of who actually remembers what.
• Resurrection:  if someone can bring people back from the dead, death will become banal and the action will suffer.  “He died, big deal.  Why don’t they just bring him back?”  This is almost as serious as time-travel.

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Beat’em-up superheroes like the Hulk and Superman often suffer from these six problems.

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Writing a novel or comic book/graphic novel about a psychic character? Here are some recurring challenges.

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Generic Physical Superpowers

1. Superstrength
2. Speed
3. Durability
4. Agility/reflexes
5. Healing/regeneration
6. Supersenses
   1. Sight/hearing/smell/taste/touch
   2. Sensing danger (spider-sense)
   3. Sensing other types of events (dishonesty, murder, etc.)
7. The ability to remove senses (like inflicting blindness, etc.)
8. Longevity/immortality

Forms of Transportation

1. Climbing/wall-crawling
2. Swimming/water-breathing
3. Flight
4. Teleportation
5. Exceptional leaping (e.g. the Hulk)
6. Phasing/intangibility

Time-Based Abilities

1. Temporal manipulation (like The Matrix)
2. Time travel
3. Prophecy

Elemental Control/Manipulation

1. Basic elements (fire, water and/or ice, earth, wind)
2. Electricity
3. Light
4. Darkness and/or shadows
5. Gravity
6. Magnetic forces
7. Radiation
8. Energy
9. Sound
10. Nature

Generic Mental Abilities

1. Skills and/or knowledge
   1. Popular categories: science, mechanical, computer/electronics, weapons-handling/military, driving, occult/magical.
2. Super-intelligence
3. Resourcefulness (“I’m never more than a carton of baking soda away from a doomsday device”)

Psychic Superpowers

1. Telekinesis (moving objects mentally). Can be restricted to a particular type of material (e.g. metal for Magneto, paper in Read or Die, deadlines for B. Mac, sand, etc).
2. Telepathy (reading minds)
3. Mind-to-mind communication
4. Mind-control
5. Possession (total mental control)
6. Memory manipulation (may include creation/alteration/deletion)
7. Mentally generated weaponry/objects
8. Mindblast
9. Ability to locate someone mentally
10. Forcefields
11. “Psychometry”–the ability to learn things about the past or future of an object by touching it

Biological Control

1. Acid/poison
2. Controlling plants and/or animals
3. Shapeshifting (animals).
4. Shapeshifting (people)–mainly useful for disguises/stealth. In some executions (e.g. Clayface), the user’s body can create weapons or otherwise modify itself for combat.
   

Miscellaneous Talents

1. Elasticity
2. Self-destruction
3. Self-liquification
4. Gaseous form
5. Growth/shrinking
6. Self-duplication
7. Invisibility
8. Absorbing someone else’s powers
9. Negating someone else’s powers
10. Luck manipulation (good luck for hero and/or bad luck for enemies)
11. Illusions
12. Pocket space–the ability to hold and remove objects so that only the user can retrieve them. It could be used for carrying really heavy equipment, hiding valuable and/or stolen and/or highly explosive goods, concealing weapons, smuggling candy into movie theaters, removing a hostile explosive, etc.
13. Ability to control density

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