Marvel’s Luckiest Hero Has The Weirdest Weakness Ever

Marvel is famous for its hard-luck superheroes. But one mutant hero will always enjoy great odds – as long as he doesn’t act selfishly!

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Marvel Comics is famous for having scores of heroes with terrible luck. The Fantastic Four’s strongman The Thing is trapped in a hideous rock-like body. The X-Men are hated and feared wherever they go. And Spider-Man basically built his superhero career around his horrible “Parker Luck.”

So, it seems strange that, in the 1980s, writer Ann Nocenti decided to create a superhero with the power of uncanny good luck in Longshot, an alien hero from an alternate dimension. In typical Marvel fashion, however, Longshot has an Achilles heel – he can only stay lucky if his motives are pure.

Since most people can’t resist using such a power selfishly, this led to some interesting turns and reversals of fortune in Longshot’s career.

Who is Longshot?

Appearing first in his own six-issue miniseries Longshot, the four-fingered alien began as an enigma – even to himself. An amnesiac fugitive on the run, Longshot first sensed something different about him when every single shot aimed at him misses. Stumbling through a portal that transports him to Earth, Longshot finds himself on a busy city street and instinctively saves an old woman about to be hit by a truck. The truck ends up hitting a building where it knocks loose a gargoyle that just happens to be hiding several silver coins.

From this conspicuous debut, Longshot ends up wandering Earth, encountering militants, single mothers, and movie producers. Haunted by a past he can never quite remember, Longshot nevertheless displays a “happy-go-lucky” attitude, finding life a glorious adventure full of people he can help. His innocence made some people try to take advantage of him, but his uncanny good luck always lets him come out on top. Eventually, Longshot discovers he is an artificially-created humanoid born in the alternate dimension “Mojoworld.” Bred to be a slave for his world’s mad ruler Mojo, Longshot helps lead a slave rebellion and even participates in a ritual to give him perpetual good luck. However, his memory is wiped and he winds up on Earth with no idea of who or what he is.

How Do Longshot’s Powers Work?

As an artificially created life form, Longshot has many abilities that have nothing to do with his good luck powers. He has multiple hearts, three-fingered hands, leather-like skin, and hollow bones. These physical attributes allow him to engage in superhuman acrobatics and move with incredible speed. He also has the power of “psychometry” which allows him to read psychic imprints off of objects and track down the people who touched them. To top it off, if Longshot ever gets injured, he heals superhumanly fast.

With his powers of superhuman luck, however, Longshot can become truly unstoppable – most of the time. His powers enable him to “affect probability fields” and shift the odds in his favor. This causes incredibly improbable things to happen to him that benefit him. He discovers he is a natural stuntman and acrobat, able to fly better than anyone with a jetpack despite not being able to remember ever doing such a thing. Even when he engages in careless heroics (like when he decides to use a tightrope to save a baby but fails to tie the rope properly) something inevitably happens that lets him succeed (in the case above, a demon decides to secure the rope just as it was about to give).

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Aided by his good luck, Longshot regularly makes “impossible shots” that would make the Avengers’ Hawkeye or Bullseye blink. Using a set of miniature cleavers, Longshot has been able to outmaneuver and injure Proteus – a mutant who can warp reality. He was also able to randomly toss a knife and just happen to hit a demon’s weak spot and blow him up. Longshot’s luck changes, however, based on how nobly or selfishly he acts.

When he decides to save a woman’s baby from alien monsters, every move he makes seems to get him to his goal, no matter the odds. However, when he briefly abandons his quest to ask the monsters who he is – putting the baby’s life at risk – his luck momentarily abandons him and the monsters are able to beat him up. Likewise, when he suddenly realizes that using his powers to make money as a stuntman probably isn’t a noble motive, his expertise with his jetpack falters and he nearly kills himself. Some enemies have also claimed that Longshot’s luck powers literally make him steal other people’s luck – causing them to grow unlucky as he grows luckier. The truth of this varies depending on who’s writing his story, but it does show a dark side to his powers.

Longshot, The Perpetual Amnesiac

Interestingly, Longshot’s wide-eyed innocence is often the key to his pure-hearted motives – which may be one of the reasons he keeps getting amnesia. While he discovered his origins in his original miniseries, by his next appearance in Uncanny X-Men Annual #10, he had lost his memories again. Although he joined the X-Men and began building a new life for himself (primarily in his romantic relationship with Dazzler), by the time he joined the extra-dimensional traveling team the Exiles, he had gotten amnesia again. Of all the Marvel heroes – including Wolverine – Longshot seems to be one who begins almost all of his adventures as a “blank slate.”

While some might consider Longshot’s regular memory loss a symptom of “bad luck,” it also keeps him in a state of constant innocence – something he describes as “ultimate freedom” – which helps him not abuse his good luck powers. This odd perspective also makes Longshot a hopeful optimist most of the time, which also helps fuel his luck.

Longshot’s perpetual innocence also seems to make him a hit with the ladies, who all seem smitten with his good looks and regularly scrubbed mind. In his first meeting with the X-Men, every woman in the room, from Dazzler, to Rogue, to Psylocke, to fourteen-year-old Kitty Pryde, appeared instantly taken with Longshot. Dazzler and Longshot even developed a genuine relationship that resulted in Dazzler becoming pregnant with Longshot’s child. However, Longshot’s amnesiac tendencies made it hard for him to sustain this relationship, and they eventually drifted apart.

In a bizarre twist, Longshot eventually discovered that his child with Dazzler is the mutant hero Shatterstar. Raised in the future of Mojoworld, Shatterstar is eventually transported into Mojoworld’s past where his genetic material is used to create Longshot. This effectively makes Shatterstar both Longshot’s son and father. It’s a weird relationship – even by X-Men time traveling standards – but it also fits the probability-defying existence of Marvel’s luckiest hero.

Link Source : https://screenrant.com/marvel-luckiest-hero-longshot-power/