The 10 Lamest Super Hero Origins

The Incredible Hulk #181 November 1974

First his name was Logan and he was a Canadian government agent with retractable claws attached to his gloves. Then the claws were really his and attached to his adamantium skeleton. Then his father was Sabertooth, and they’d both been alive for 80+ years. Then Sabertooth wasn’t his father anymore. Then his real name was James Howlett and his claws were originally bone. Most recently, he is no longer a mutant at all, but really an actual super evolved wolverine. There’s only one thing worse than having one lame origin story, and that’s having too damned many.

All Star Comics #8 December 1941

The lame thing about Wonder Woman is actually not how Princess Diana became Wonder Woman, but why the character was created in the first place. She was invented by psychologist William Moulton Morrison, who also invented the polygraph test, because there were no positive female role models in comics at the time. Specifically, he wanted a character who would teach girls “how to have adventures while still being tender, submissive, and peace-loving”. This comes across quite clearly in the sexist comments peppered throughout the early issues.

Thor #337 November 1983

The writers of Thor got bored one day and decided they wanted to go in a very weird direction. Thor gets in a fight with an alien colony refugee ship and does battle with one of their dead horse faced warriors. Thor get knocked out, the alien grabs his hammer, and gains his powers. Odin makes them fight over ownership, but in the end it's a draw and a "new" hero is born. Come on guys, you couldn’t even come up with some original powers for a new character?

Detective Comics #27 May 1939

Before all the cool ninja training and Frank Miller’s badass recreation, Batman was kind of a p***y. Literally the only reason he dressed up as a bat was because one flew into his window as he was thinking, so he could have just as easily ended up dressing like a moth or Jehovah’s Witness. The new versions of his back story do a very good job with motivation, but his original story was pretty much, “Well, my parents are dead, maybe I’ll just dress in a costume and see how it goes. Oh, and I’ll need a young boy who will follow me around and won’t complain about being put in dangerous situations.” Apparently Child Services was too busy taking bribes to notice.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles #1 May 1984

Probably one of the weirdest what-the-f**k origins ever in comic history is that of the Ninja Turtles. It goes something along the lines of a disgraced samurai going to live in the sewers, befriending some rats and tiny turtles, getting doused in green radioactive slime, and both the turtles and the samurai become anthropomorphic martial artists. All that can be said is that the creators were smoking some very good s**t.