Old And Terrible Comics Characters DC Won't Reboot

Even the most useless comic characters can be resurrected at any time. Remember, DC Comics once took the long-forgotten goof Calendar Man—whose superpower was literally just "could read a calendar"—and rebooted him into a dark and twisted horror show figure. But there are some shameful chapters from DC's past that we're betting the company will never dredge up. Don't expect any of the following to make it into a movie or major comic reboot anytime soon.

In 1988, DC introduced Extraño, probably the first openly gay superhero in comics history. It was a major step in the right direction—except the way the character was portrayed was so offensive and ignorant, they would've done better to not use him at all.

Extraño's stated power was magic: levitating, making objects disappear and reappear, parlor tricks, and the like. He never pulled a giant, man-eating rabbit out of his hat, though, which probably would've helped his team's cause. Instead, he focused mainly on his real power: being as flamboyantly, stereotypically gay as humanly possible. While he never explicitly came out, it was pretty obvious what the creative team was up to. Swishy, girly, loud, obnoxious, overly happy, and with a knack for calling himself "Auntie," Extraño advanced the homosexual cause precisely none. How DC wrote him off didn't help either: he was attacked by the supervillain "Hemo-Goblin" and contracted AIDS. While his long-presumed death was later called into question, DC probably won't let him be fabulous again any time soon.

While "Danny the Street" sounds like a jive-talking, streetwise hero, the truth is far lamer. Danny the Street was...a street. The name was literal! Yes, in 1990, DC gave us a sentient, living chunk of road as our newest superhero, presumably because somebody put something in the water that day. Danny didn't walk or anything, which might've made him an effective crimefighter (Doomsday versus a thousand tons of concrete), but he could teleport, randomly absorbing himself into whatever city he liked, without anybody noticing the brand-new road that wasn't there last night. (He's also been, at various points, Danny the World, Danny the Brick, and...oh, never mind.)

Oh, we keep calling Danny a "he," rather than "it," because he was very much a male. But an organic, teleporting, gendered street wasn't "huh?" enough, so DC made him a cross-dresser. He'd sport "manly" buildings, like gun stores, and decorate them with just the prettiest, girliest, floweriest curtains and doilies you ever did see. This was based on a real-life cross-dresser named Danny La Rue ("la rue" meaning "the street in French), meaning DC went to truly ridiculous lengths just to parody a guy maybe two of their fans had ever heard of. Superhero movies showcase plenty of streets—just don't expect any to be named "Danny."

Here's another literal failed-hero: Debuting in 1974, Infectious Lass had the power to, well, infect you. Hailing from the planet Somahtur, her race was covered in microbes that could spread to anybody else through simple contact. In other words, all Lass had to do was touch you, and you were immediately bowled over with vomit-inducing sickness. Take everything you love about the X-Men's Rogue, make her incredibly disgusting, and you've got Infectious Lass.

If that's not bad enough, she has little to no control of this power. When trying out for the Legion of Superheroes, the character Star Boy volunteered to be infected, so Lass could show off for the judges. But she accidentally made him too sick, thus failing her audition. Even when recruited into the Legion of Substitute Heroes (the DC equivalent of your kid brother forming his own clubhouse after you wouldn't let him into yours), she continued to fail at even the most basic power-having. One time, she touched a teammate named Color Kid and made him so sick he...became a woman. We don't remember hearing about "Granderian Gender-Reversal Germs" in health class, but OK.

Codpiece, a bad guy introduced in 1993, was angry at people making fun of him all the time, so he became a gun-toting madman. So far, so good. Except Codpiece took it in a decidedly more immature direction: people were making fun of, well, what he had down there, so he fixed a gun to, well, down there, and started blasting people with it to feel manlier. Also, he robbed a lot of banks using his codpiece gun, because what's manlier than money?

Exceptionally few comic characters are truly one-and-done, since there's always some writer out there willing to give this or that failure another go and see if their vision is the one that takes. Not Codpiece. The poor guy made one appearance in DC's Doom Patrol, was bested by a woman wearing a frog mask, and nobody's wasted even a drop of ink on him since. Maybe if DC ever wants to do their own Deadpool-style flick, he could be the butt-of-jokes bad guy. But they're pretty busy with all things Justice League, so don't bet on it.

A character like Tyroc, who debuted in 1976 when DC had virtually no black superheroes, should have been groundbreaking. Instead, he was just plain embarrassing. It wasn't just because of his Z-grade superpower, which was literally just him somehow hurting people by screaming really loud. No, it was more that in the hands of decidedly white writers, one of the first black superheroes ever hated white people. He refused to work with any of them, including Superboy, simply because of their skin color. So he fought evil on his own, you ask? Nope, not really—he mostly tended to his home, an island called Marzal that usually existed in another dimension (when it wasn't floating off the coast of Africa) and was full of other black people who hated white people.

You read that right. The first black DC superhero was created almost solely as a convenient excuse for why there were no black heroes. See, they had all segregated themselves, and didn't want to work with white heroes. Naturally. We're sure that's also why we're all but guaranteed to never see Tyroc in the DCEU, ever. Because he doesn't want to be there.

Wonder Woman will fight many a villain as part of the DCEU Justice League, but Egg-Fu will almost certainly not be one of them, and you only need to look at this picture to understand why. Hatched in 1965, Egg-Fu wasn't just a giant anthropomorphic egg, which would have been silly enough on its own—he was a racist Chinese stereotype, right down to squinty eyes, evil twirly mustache, and bad Engrish dialogue. (Considering he was an egg-spert spy for the Communists, there's no way he shouldn't have trained himself to to speak without an accent, right?)

Egg-Fu has since received several makeovers in the comics, with all the blatant anti-China stuff wiped away. His face is normal, his speech is normal, and he goes by a new, less-insulting name—Chang Tzu—while dismissing his old moniker as an "unmentionable name." It's a start, but don't expect him to make the movies or suddenly receive Lex Luthor-like exposure in the comics. Too many bad memories.