Superheroes You Wouldn't Want To Meet In Real Life
If you're a fan of superheroes, you've definitely spent some time imagining what it would be like if you donned the cape and cowl of your favorite hero and wielded powers and abilities far beyond those of mere mortals. What you probably haven't spent that much time doing, on the other hand, is actually hanging out with them in real life. With the possible exception of Robin, whose entire deal is that he gets to hang out with another superhero, you'd want to be them way more than be around them.
Sure, Superman would help you change a tire and Batman might let you drive around in his rocket car — and if you found yourself in a dangerous situation, you'd be happy as a clam to see even Aquaman showing up to the rescue — but there are plenty of heroes in the world of comics that wouldn't be so great to see. Here are the superheroes that you wouldn't want to meet in real life.
Wolverine
The X-Men's adamantium-laced badass is one of the most popular comic book characters of the past 50 years, but Wolverine doesn't really seem like the kind of person you want to spend a whole lot of time around — and not just because his arch-enemies seem perfectly happy to kill everyone in ten-mile radius just to make him sad.
Even if you're just getting together for a quiet night of board games, chilling with Logan brings a pretty unique set of risks. That guy has, after all, been alive since the 1800s, and while his mutant healing factor has kept him safe from all the various diseases that one encounters over a century of stabbing people in the face with the knives that pop out of your hands, the same can't be said for the people around him. That dude is a five-foot walking petri dish, and if you spend more than ten minutes around him you are absolutely coming away with the Spanish Influenza or some other old-timey ailment that your great-grandma would've called "the Grippe."
To make matters worse, he's pretty commonly depicted using his claws to do the sort of thing that you'd usually do with a knife or a pair of scissors, like cutting meat into slices for a snack. You know what he's not commonly depicted doing? Washing his claws after eviscerating ninjas. He just sucks all that stuff right back into his forearms and then goes about preparing a charcuterie board, and that is gross as hell.
Deadpool
Deadpool is another hero that would make any sort of hangout pretty frustrating, but not for reasons that would be related to his healing factor. Instead, it has to do with exactly what makes him so appealing to us, the audience.
Imagine going out to dinner or a movie with a friend and trying to maintain a conversation while they continually interrupt you to turn to the side and make a fun pop culture reference to someone you can't see. Bare minimum, that's going to be a frustrating experience, and it's only going to get worse once you realize he's breaking the fourth wall, which means you've suddenly found yourself behind a literary concept that's meant to keep you separate from an audience, which in turn means that you're just a character in a story. And if Deadpool's there, here's some more bad news: you're not even the main character.
Assuming you get over the constant interruptions, having your very existence revealed to be a fiction is probably going to ruin your day, and possibly shatter your mind into an existential madness. Just not worth it, even if he's buying the chimichangas.
Spider-Man
Hanging out with Spider-Man would probably be pretty rad. If nothing else, seeing him in action would be pretty cool, and if you were lucky enough to catch him at lunchtime, you'd get to see that cool move where he pulls his mask up over his nose so he can eat churros or a hot dog or something, and that's always a treat. Hanging out with Peter Parker, on the other hand, would be the absolute worst.
For one thing, Pete's friends tend to be divided into two categories: supervillain and dead — with a third category if you want to count "dead supervillain" as its own thing. That might work out pretty well for you if you're the kind of person who wants to dress up as a Halloween monster and fly around on a rocket glider swearing revenge, but the rest of us have jobs we need to get to.
Even if you manage to survive and not swear to show them, show them all, Peter Parker's just not a great friend. He's flaky like a fresh-baked biscuit, bails on you whenever he bothers to show up, and always needs someone to spot him $20 because he's secretly spending all his money on web fluid and spandex. With great power comes great responsibility, but with great responsibility comes a bunch of really great excuses for ditching your friends in a bowling alley.
John Constantine
Being Spider-Man's friend might be difficult, but when it comes to putting your pals in danger, Peter Parker's got nothing on John Constantine. Over the course of his adventures in the pages of Hellblazer, he's seen virtually every single friend, lover, relative, drinking buddy, casual acquaintance, and potential father-in-law die as a direct result of their connection to him. If you accept that guy's Facebook friend request, you are taking your life into your own hands.
But unlike most heroes with a distressingly high mortality rate among their circle of friends, death is kind of the best-case scenario when you're dealing with Constantine. If you're lucky, you're going to be R-ing I.P. just for bumping into him on the street, but usually you wind up becoming a ghost who haunts the darkened streets of London, or having Satan personally drag you to Hell for an eternity of torture that's not even based on your own sins! He's just trying to make some scruffy dude in a trenchcoat mad enough to trade his soul for yours! A trip to the movies by yourself might be a little depressing, but there's a good chance that it can turn out fun, and if not, it only lasts two hours. That is significantly less than, you know, literal eternity being poked by demons in a lake of fire, so if your old pal John wants to catch up, maybe just decline the request, delete your account, and possibly change your name.
Green Lantern
Hal Jordan has saved the entire universe on numerous occasions as a member of the Green Lantern Corps, but he's also the most canonically dunked-on member of the Justice League. Even Superman has politely excused himself rather than hanging out with Hal Jordan outside of work, and he is literally the nicest person in the world.
There's a reason for that, though. Back when Hal was recruited, the only two requirements for membership in the Green Lantern Corps were that you were totally honest, and totally fearless. That's a great set of attributes for a superhero to have, but it's also how people who claim to "tell it like it is" and "say what we're all thinking" describe themselves in their Twitter profiles. After about the fifth time Hal told you that you sucked at something or that your shoes made you look fat, and then followed it up with a self-satisfied "hey, at least you know I never lie to you," you'd be more than willing to tell him where he can cram all the opinions that you didn't ask for. Unfortunately, you'd still be left with the fact that he's the one wearing a magic space ring that can drop a glowing green anvil on your head the second he thinks about it. Not exactly a great recipe for fun times.
Green Arrow
In theory, Green Arrow sounds like the friend to have if you're going to pal around with anyone from the Justice League. He's rich enough to have all the stuff that Batman has — including an "Arrow Cave" — but without the relentless dedication to crimefighting that would keep him from letting you borrow the Arrow-Car to grab a few pizzas. He's even canonically got a killer chili recipe that everyone in the JLA seems to like having around at parties.
Unfortunately, any relationship with Ollie Queen is going to be fraught with potential day-ruining minefields. That ride in the Arrow Car is 100% going to include a faux-casual "you know, Batman didn't invent the idea of fighting crime in a custom car that you keep in a cave," and there is a 0% chance that no matter how good that chili is, it's going to come with an entire speech about how adding a Carolina Reaper increases the heat by over 10,000 Scoville units — or as he definitely calls them, "Scovies."
To make matters even worse, his history as the member of the Justice League who's most concerned with social issues, while by no means a bad thing in and of itself, has always been presented with all the subtlety that you'd expect from superhero comics. On the page, that translates to him constantly having to remind people like Hal Jordan that racism exists, but in real life, that definitely makes him the kind of person who would spend an entire conversation ignoring you while he took screenshots of randos on Twitter with four followers so that he could dunk on them on the official @JusticeLeagueOfAmerica twitter account.
The Phantom Stranger
The Phantom Stranger is the guy that nobody remembers was technically an actual member of the Justice League, which has less to do with our memories and more to do with the fact that he only shows up every couple of years to remind you that he's been there since 1972. And also that despite being on the team, he must forever remain... a stranger.
Which is exactly the problem. Much like the friend you have who always turns the conversation back to their recent trip to Greece or leads off every single anecdote with "back when I was working on Dog With a Blog...," the Phantom Stranger has exactly one thing to talk about, and he's going to drag every single conversation back to it, come Hell or high water. Sadly, that thing is finding ways to work the word "stranger" into everything he says, which isn't even as interesting as working on Dog With a Blog.
What really makes it worse is that "Stranger" is literally part of his name. It would be like having a friend named Brad who kept saying things like "I guess I've just got a... Brad attitude." You would quit your job and move to a new town to get away from that guy, and Brad probably doesn't even have the power to dramatically step out of shadows when prompted.
Swamp Thing
The shambling mound of vegetable matter formerly known as Alec Holland has always been written with a really halting speech pattern and an understandable concern for the environment. In context, this makes sense, as his body is made of plants that are just simulating human biology by forcing air through branches and reeds in order to mimic the sound of his voice, and a creature who's at least 80% tree is going to have some opinions on climate change and widespread deforestation. Put those things together, though, and you're meeting up for coffee with a walking ficus who starts in on "plastic... straws... are bad for... the environment" and doesn't actually finish until you're already done with your iced mocha. A slow talker isn't the worst thing in the world by a long shot, but it can get a little grating when the payoff is about the perils of industrial agriculture.
Beyond that, though, there are a few pretty obvious reasons that it would stink being besties with a creature canonically made of mud and trees assembled into a vaguely human shape. If you invite him over for board games and you've got carpet, you're just straight up never getting that security deposit back, and if you head over to his place, well, your copy of Settlers of Catan is absolutely going to be ruined by swamp water and possibly eaten by an alligator.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
There are very few drawbacks to being friends with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, as taken individually, teenagers, mutants, ninjas, and turtles are all exceptionally rad things to be — assuming that you're of the appropriate age to hang out with a quartet of teens (and possibly their sentient rat dad) without making it weird. Even their tendency to go buck wild with the pizza toppings isn't really that bad. Sure, pepperoni and marshmallow don't sound like flavors that would go well together, but unless you've tried them, you don't really know they'd be bad. Maybe that mix of textures would open up a whole new palate and give you a new favorite.
Then again, there aren't enough scented candles in the world to mask the smell of four sweaty amphibians who literally live in a sewer engaging in constant combat training and building zeppelins out of garbage. Even if you can convince them to take a handful of 90-minute showers before heading over, you're still left with a pretty big breach of etiquette. Unless you're having a very specific kind of gathering, showing up to a party wearing domino masks, a belt, kneepads, and nothing else is usually frowned upon.
Donna Troy
In continuity, the DC Comics character variously known as Wonder Girl, Troia, and occasionally Darkstar is among the most beloved people in the entire universe. She's Wonder Woman's surrogate sister and was a cornerstone of the New Teen Titans during the height of that team's popularity in the '80s. Actually meeting her, however, could lead to one of the biggest headaches it's possible to have while getting to know someone, all because of one of the most basic things you can say to a new friend. "So... tell me about yourself!"
See, the problem here is that Donna Troy is one of the few comic book characters who was actually created by mistake. The original Teen Titans lineup included the sidekicks of DC's major heroes, like Robin, Kid Flash, Speedy, and Wonder Girl. Unfortunately, Wonder Girl wasn't a sidekick — that was the name given to Wonder Woman in flashback stories that took place when she was younger. As a result, a separate "Wonder Girl" did not actually exist.
That might seem like an easy mistake to fix just by inventing a new character, but over the next 50 years, Donna would wind up starring in multiple stories with names like "Who Is Donna Troy?" and "Who Is Wonder Girl?" that only made things way more complicated. By the time you finally got an answer to the question of "where'd you grow up," it'd be four hours later and you wouldn't really have an answer. Besides, as great as Donna might be on her own, there's a chance she'd bring her husband Terry Long along with her for a hangout sesh, and that guy is the absolute dirt worst.