Surely you've heard of Galactus. He's the arch-enemy of the Fantastic Four, and he happens to be a floating giant with a permanent deadpan grimace and an enormous appetite. How enormous? He eats planets. Despite several attempts, he's never managed to eat Earth, so we're not really sure how he goes about it. Does he wander the planet eating each individual thing one at a time? Does he have some kind of contraption that harnesses the Power Cosmic to simplify this gargantuan task? Maybe a big ol' barbecue?
However he does it, the idea of a villain who could devour us all simply because he's hungry is pretty impressive. Not all food-related superheroes and supervillains are as impressive, though. In fact, most of them are pretty stupid. Here are the five worst.
1. The Blob Frederick Dukes, like many early Marvel villains, is an ex-carny, having enjoyed life as a sideshow freak for quite some time before heading down the path of evil. His superpower is that he's just massively, massively fat. Unreasonably huge. The Blob is so fat, he has his own gravitational field, which makes it impossible to move him against his will. It's food-related because he remains one of only a few supervillains whose power exists thanks to the fact that he eats his feelings.
Every time he goes up against the X-Men, he'll heave himself up into the air and come down on Wolverine or Colossus or some other nigh-indestructible X-Man, and keep them incapacitated for most of the battle. Sounds like a pretty good strategy, so why is he so lame? Well, for one thing, he never lands on anyone he could destroy permanently. His power is being a crushingly enormous tub of shit, and he wastes it sitting on unkillable heroes until someone remembers that his head is normal-sized and punches him in the face. Would it be all that difficult for The Blob to come down on, say, a Dazzler or a Cypher or a Gambit or some other non-invulnerable hero whom he would instantly convert into a costumed puddle of gumbo? Apparently so. As far as we know, the Blob has only directly killed one hero, the Wasp. And he did so by exercising the one ability that absolutely everyone else has: he ate her. Stupid.
2. Matter Eater Lad Matter Eater Lad popped up in DC's Legion of Super-Heroes, perhaps history's greatest depository of worthless superheroes. Although among the ranks of such hard-hitters as Triplicate Girl, Bouncing Boy, and Shrinking Violet, Matter Eater Lad managed to stand out as the dumbest. His story: He's an alien from the planet Bismoll (seriously), who, like most alien superheroes designed in 1963, looks like Clark Gable. Bismoll, it seems, became victim to microbes which rendered all of its food inedible, so what did the Bismollians do? "Evolve a natural immunity to the microbes," you said? No no no, that's far too sane. What they evolved was the ability to eat absolutely anything. Yup, Matter Eater Lad is the first superhero we know of to land on Earth bringing with him all the powers of the common billy goat.
Matter Eater Lad also has a ridiculously high metabolism, so he can eat an incredible amount of anything; once, he escaped from a grain silo by eating every last grain in it. You'd think once he'd eaten the grain level down to around his knees, he could have just waded out, but no, turns out Matter Eater Lad is also a bit of a showoff. Imagine how much it would suck to share a headquarters with Matter Eater Lad. Not only does he clean out the fridge, he eats the damn fridge. You'd have to keep a huge stockpile of sticks and rocks on hand or else he'd start eating the house. "I'm sorry! I need it to live!" he would whine, and every day Superboy would get just a little closer to putting a sonic fist straight through the Lad's bottomless gut.
3. Jell-O™ Man Imperviousness is a hallmark of the superhero. Superman's kryptonian skin cannot be pierced by anything save a kryptonite bullet; Collossus turns into organic steel; and even heroes like Spider Man and Captain America who aren't invincible are still significantly tougher than any regular human. What, then, is the single worst material you can think of to make a superhero out of? Jell-O™ gelatin dessert has to be pretty close to the top of that list, next to water or feathers.
Jell-O™ Man and his dog / sidekick, Wobbly, were the result of a lab experiment to create a 3-D holographic logo on a box of Jell-O™. Naturally, a nearby robotic lab assistant, jealous that he couldn't eat Jell-O™, sabotaged the experiment and escaped from the lab, determined to steal all of the Jell-O™ in the world so that no one else could have any, either. "You'll settle for off-brand gelatin and like it, assholes!" Luckily, that very same act of sabotage resulted in the holographic box label coming to life in the form of letters made out of Jell-O™. Really. Wobbly the dog is the J, and Jell-O™ Man is the E, L, L, and O. He tracks down the evil robot, detaches his own head (the "O"), and hurls it at his metallic foe. Now, we're aware that a certain level of suspension of disbelief is called for before even picking up a comic called Jell-O™ Man and Wobbly, but come on. By all rights, Jell-O™ Man's head should splatter ineffectually against the robot's hardened metal exterior and bring to a close the most hilariously brief superhero career in history, but no. Crazily, Jell-O™ Man's head destroys the robot, a sentient being capable of feeling. Wow. So not only is Jell-O™ Man a horrendous advertisement for Jell-O™ - demonstrating that the traditionally soft dessert can in fact shatter metal (and presumably teeth) with its might - he ends his origin story by killing his arch-enemy in cold blood.
What do Superman, Batman, Spider Man, Daredevil, and Charles Xavier have in common? They're all heroes with strict "we never kill" policies, but apparently Jell-O™ Man straight doesn't give a fuck. Oh, he also buries another one of his enemies in a pile of disembodied, chattering heads. Damn. You know, if we could have sold the character's movie rights to Ralph Bakshi, we could have had a drugged-out, balls-crazy masterpiece.
