The 5 Most Absurd Superhero Names of All Time

5 The Gay Ghost (DC Comics, 1942)

The Gay Ghost is a ghost who fights crime and evidently is super happy about it. He appeared in the same comic as Wonder Woman and had a lot in common with her, if you know what I mean (I mean they both occasionally turn invisible). He's still the most fabulously dressed character in the whole series, though. Right from the first page, the introductory text warns us that the adventure we're about to read is "one of the queerest in all history":

But what is it that makes the Gay Ghost so queer, exactly? Well, for starters, his superpower is being able to possess the body of "dissolute young American" and renowned pencil mustache enthusiast Charles Collins -- or, as the crime-fighting spirit himself cheerfully puts it, "I can enter your body!"

In fact, the Gay Ghost can force himself into just about anyone as long as they have "a little good in them." Curiously, all the people he chooses to "enter" happen to be males; sometimes he spends whole issues just going in and out of different men, tirelessly penetrating the flesh of any guy who crosses his path as part of his quest against crime. His burning passion for justice was born one day in 1700 when, as Irish nobleman Keith Everet, he was ambushed and killed by a gang of thieves who wanted to steal his favorite purse.

After that, Keith's ghost was granted powers by his ancestors in the afterlife and spent the next two centuries resting inside a painting of himself (perhaps waiting for a time when society was more accepting of Gay Ghosts), before coming out and helping defeat the Nazis. Although he still makes cameo appearances from time to time, for some reason DC Comics started pretending his name was the Grim Ghost, which is only half as catchy and none as accurate.

4 The Whizzer (Marvel Comics, 1941)

One of the most important rules of comic book writing, indeed storytelling in general, is that if you're gonna create a superhero whose name evokes the image of a stream of piss, never dress him in a yellow costume and give him speed powers that will make it look like he's attacking his enemies by peeing super hard on them. Unfortunately, Marvel Comics' the Whizzer was created before this rule came into effect.

You know when you go for a quick leak and your Guybrush Threepwood decides to start shooting its watery salvo in any direction and you end up leaving a mess? Well, that happens to the Whizzer sometimes, too:

The Whizzer was a regular man named Robert Frank until he got bitten by a cobra, presumably in the dick. With his judgment seriously clouded by grief and desperation, Robert's dad could think of no better solution to save his son's life than to inject him with some mongoose blood (again, presumably in the dick). Robert is restored to life and gains the speed of a mongoose, while his dad immediately suffers a heart attack and dies, probably just from the utter shock that his infuriatingly moronic plan worked.

I feel like there's a dick joke to be made about the fact that the Whizzer gets his powers from injecting mongoose blood (something about how "mongoose" sounds like "man juice," perhaps?), but I'll leave that for more talented Internet writers to make. The important thing is, that's how Robert became the Whizzer, King of Speed. Hope you brought a sufficiently large tarp to this motel room, crime, because you're about to get golden showered. Or worse:

Surely you get the general idea by now. However, it saddens me to admit that, despite everything I've shown you so far, the Whizzer still wasn't the most offensive character in his own comic -- meet his dim-witted sidekick, Slow Motion:

3 Lady Fairplay (Progressive Publishers, 1941)

Lady Fairplay is one of the earliest female superheroes ever created, an important and historic milestone for the comic book medium ... and her name sounds like "foreplay." I mean, yeah, it could have been worse (she could have been "Lady Fairskin"), but what makes her name so unfortunate is that there's definitely a kinky S&M vibe going on in her adventures that makes it seem like fighting crime is, in fact, just like foreplay to her.

The narration even calls her the "Goddess of Chastisement," which sounds like something Gomez Addams would call Morticia during the height of nipple-clamp-induced orgasm (those two were freaks). The same text also seems to imply that Lady Foreplay only fights crime because otherwise she'd be using all that extra energy to bone anyone or anything that crosses her path.

There are several other clues in the comic that she's not in the superhero business to save lives, but simply for the excitement -- the sexual excitement, that is (just making sure you got it, if it wasn't clear). Also, look at the word "fairplay" in the first panel below and tell me it doesn't look like it originally said something else and they had to change it: Maybe her original name really was Lady Foreplay, or maybe it was something even worse.

Granted, the name may not be the biggest problem this comic has.

At the end of her first adventure, the Goddess of Chastisement returns to her classroom before the school principal can find out she was gone -- yes, the whole time she was getting her rocks off by punching criminals, she was also neglecting the innocent little angels entrusted to her care. We're very disappointed in you, Lady Foreplay.

2 Super Slave (Marvel Comics, 1941)

OK, seriously, what the hell is wrong with you, Marvel? And don't give me that "It was a different company in the '40s" crap -- if it's got Stan Lee and Captain America in it, it's Marvel. I don't care if they were called Timely Comics, Atlas Comics, or Horribly Insensitive Racial References Comics back then. Still Marvel.

Anyway, the hero of this story is a thousand-year-old muscular dude trapped inside an ancient artifact who must do the bidding of any person who releases him. So in other words, he's a ... Super Slave, yes. That's exactly what a wish-granting magical being is called. A Super Slave.

Super Slave's mystical artifact is found by an old dude and his daughter after their ship crashes on a beach (it's not mentioned what the ship contained, but I'm guessing Russian brides). From then on, Super Slave must use his seemingly limitless slave powers to do anything the old dude tells him to do, no matter how wild or impossible the wish may be. But mainly, he just punches other dudes for him.

The most creative use of Super Slave's magic powers in the entire issue is the time when he turns super tiny, steals the bullets from inside some thugs' guns, and then punches them. By the way, the artifact that our sweater-wearing Aladdin uses to control his personal hit man is a bracelet, in keeping with the whole forced servitude motif, and Super Slave even calls him "my master." It's like the geniuses at Marvel were hired by some 18th century Confederate colonel to give slavery a much-needed fun reboot. They even came up with a catchy slogan for it!

That next issue, by the way? It doesn't exist. Despite the fact that Marvel hyped the character with some ads and such, Super Slave had one adventure and never appeared again. Or hasn't yet, anyway.

1 "Fuck" Falcon (Fox Publications, 1939)

Flick Falcon is an action scientist who travels to Mars to have adventures filled with sexy women, horny giants, and drug-slipping, girlfriend-snatching dwarfs. It all sounds perfectly innocent until you see how Flick's name looked in the comic:

Yep, it turns out that when you combine the word "FLICK" in caps with shitty printing, the result is a nice big "FUCK." Suddenly this goes from a simple War of the Worlds ripoff comic to the R-rated story of a man's quest to fornicate with every falcon that ever existed. It's never explained in the comic why Flick suddenly decided to jump into a portal to Mars one day, but this solves that mystery -- he was looking for further falcons to fuck, having already seduced all of the ones on Earth.

The other main character in this comic is Flick's remarkably open-minded girlfriend, Adele, who gets recruited by the shifty dwarf people of Mars to help seduce the giants that rule the planet. She doesn't seem so thrilled about it, though:

Despite dressing like an accountant, Flick was as much of a badass as his accidental name implies. One time, he gets separated from Adele (possibly in order to locate some falcons to fuck) when he comes across some sort of large hairy ball in his way. His natural reaction is to just kick the shit out of the ball until it splits open -- I'll remind you now that the ruling class of this planet is a race of merciless giants who are probably not accustomed to getting any opposition when they shove their naked privates against forest-dwelling strangers.

Sadly, with the fourth issue Flick's name was suddenly changed to "Flip Falcon" with no explanation, which makes him sound like someone who makes obscene gestures at falcons rather than someone who genuinely loves those majestic creatures and simply wants to share a moment of mutual passion with them. But we know the truth, Flick. We know.

When he isn't making fun of comics characters with stupid names, Maxwell Yezpitelok writes his own comic called ACK. You may point out the contradiction (and read it for FREE) here.