This is an I-Heart podcast.

Guaranteed Human.

Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of IHeart Radio.

Hi, my name is Robert Lamb, and this is The Monster Fact, a short form series from Stuff to Blow Your Mind focusing on mythical creatures, ideas,

and monsters in time.

In considering super-powered comic book characters, we all love to wonder what it might be like

to fly through the air, to shoot laser beams from our eyeballs, or turn invisible.

Which superpower would we prefer? What does our choice say about us as people? How might we

change our own lives, if not the world, if we had these powers? We also love to ponder the

curse slash blessing dynamics of certain superhero

abilities, such as the power-draining touch of X-Men's rogue, in many other examples, where great

power is achieved, but something else is lost. However, we also can help but ponder some of the more useless-seeming superpowers out there,

and two of the best examples from Marvel comics concern the power of ice cream.

First, there is ice cream.

That's spelled like E-Y-E-E-Scream.

This character was created by Alan Cooperberg in 1983 as a mutant antagonist of the X-Men. His superpower?

The ability to transform his body himself into any flavor of ice cream.

He's a clear-cut comedic villain, to be sure, as his signature power

does him little to no good in his vendetta against the X-Men. And then there's soft-serve,

created by Bob Quinn in 2021. She's a mutant citizen of the island of Krakowa with the power

to poop or otherwise excrete any flavor of

ice cream. She's essentially a background character with obvious comedic intent, reminding us that

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