Super powers (or mutant powers) are generally portrayed as a binary situation – either you are at the extremity of your powers, like Superman or The Flash or Magneto, wildly powerful in what you do, or you are just the cattle that need rescuing occasionally. Watching X-Men II when it came out set me to wondering about this – there’s a kid at Xavier’s school that only displays two abilities – he doesn’t sleep, and he can change the TV channel by blinking. Sure, you could gain a certain competitive advantage at school and in business if you didn’t sleep, and the TV is a neat party trick, but he’s not exactly Wolverine is he? It reminded me of the Sandman, who used to do a little spoken clip each day on Triple J – Sandy’s dad had the amazing ability to know exactly how strong someone liked their cordial.

The movie Sky High explores this a bit – there is a hero stream in the school, and those with lesser powers are shunted into the sidekick stream, or ‘hero support’ – these are people who’s powers are things like shapeshifting into a guinea pig, melting, or a kid who glows – “Well, it’s easier to see in a dark room, maybe we could turn off these lights, you could cup your hands around your eyes and look real close…”….Sidekick!!! Sky High is a good laugh too, worth watching. On Spicks and Specks earlier this year, David O’Doherty sang a song about Very Mild Superpowers – youtube clip.

So what if the mutant gene, or gamma rays, or toxic waste or whatever the source of your powers is, what if it only affected you in small and relatively useless ways?

My first thought was a kid who could change the channel by blinking, but he could only change it to Channel 31. Other useless mutant powers are things like always knowing exactly where David Hasselhoff is, or the ability to raise your body temperature half a degree just by thinking about it.

Maybe there are people just walking around with unnoticed, very mild superpowers. Could be that people whose hair always seems to stay in place are unknowingly protecting it with a very small and fairly telekinetic field. Perhaps Trudi that I went to school with wasn’t just mindbendingly ditsy, but actually had some kind of supernatural ability to just slightly confuse the people around her.

Mild superpowers could also explain Steve Vai.

Andrea (my sister in law) works at a cathouse cattery noted that she comes home covered in great swathes of cat hair. Perhaps, if she’s lucky, a sick cat will vomit on her, and the mess will include a hairball which is suffused with cat medicine and milk which have reacted to form a toxic mutagen. Cleaning up the mess, she thinks nothing of the cat vomit on her skin, but in the morning wakes up endowed with the uncanny ability to repel loose cat hair, and from that day forth will come home with clothes untarnished by tabby, persian or russian blue.

Of course, the universe being what it is, she’ll probably have the accident but wake up in the morning with the ability to sour milk.

So, audience participation time if you please : what would your very mild superpower be?

Read more about superpowers in a later post