DC Exploration: Generic Man

 

Generic Man is a character that has only appeared in a single issue of a relatively obscure Hero appearing in the Heckler #2 in 1992, putting him in the tier of the most obscure dc characters there are. However his concept and power are bizarre, out there, and make him extremely hard to explain, making him the perfect character for one of these blogs.

Who is he?

John Doe was a completely normal man. And he stayed that way. If anything he only got more normal over time. This progressed until he became so aggressively average and normal that he became literally the embodiment of genericness. Viewing distinctness and individuality as the source of conflict he began to spread his genericness until stopped by that bastion of wild distinctness and individuality, the Heckler.

How strong is He?

Overall, not very. He was killed by a stray shot from a completely normal human with a gun and fled from a potential conflict with the Heckler who himself would probably only be Low Vigilante Tier. While his powers hypothetically make him a danger to regular people, I think it's fair to say he's only Low Vigilante Tier.

What are His Powers?

This is the hard part to explain. Generic Man's power is the power to "Genericate" things by touching them, replacing them with a blank silhouette version of them with a word labeling them. Things are deprived of their individuality and uniqueness, reduced to their essence. This works on the metafictional level with the cover title and blurb being genericate-d by Generic Man and the second page and third page being turned into... well this. He does this passively to anything he touches up to at least a building scope. He explicitly couldn't do this to a city at once, but could infect a water supply to infect the entire city. His canvas of paints were reduced to just words of the colors, a newspaper was turned into a white page just saying "headline", and just running away from the Heckler he turned the comic background more generic,  as well as turning grass into a green patch with the word "grass" written on it. The things he makes Generic seem to have the power to turn things generic as shown with the water infection plan, and he can control people made Generic. 

Also while this isn't combat-applicable, when he died he immediately reincarnated into a baby who made the attending doctor start turning generic. You can't kill generic-ness. 

What are his weaknesses?

So Generic Man's biggest weakness is just his sheer average-ness statwise. He is a completely normal human physically and in terms of mental capabilities. He died to a normal bullet and has no real feats of physical capability. His best mental feat was contaminating the city's water with generic-ness which is fairly average in terms of mental capabilities. 

Generic Man's powers are also touch-based meaning while he presents a hypothetical danger to most people, anyone with a weapon longer than the human arm can fairly safely kill him out of his reach. He also has his emotions literally written on his face and instead of speaking normally speaks in special font direct expository dialogue meaning there's no way for him to deceive most enemies. 

So overall, I feel pretty confident calling Generic Man a Low Vigilante Tier character. He has powers that would be dangerous to normal civilians but normal criminals with guns would be a high risk to him, and most vigilantes would be able to handle him fairly handedly except for ones who fight primarily hand-to-hand such as Wildcat, Rorschach, and Al Pratt (The original Atom.)