Some people are fucking lucky. They get to be born on Krypton or have the X-Gene or whatever. They pop out of momma’s baby pouch ready to slap on some tight-fitting spandex pants and beat the shit out of bank robbers and super-villains. But what about the rest of us? We don’t have piles of cash like Bruce Wayne or Tony Stark, so what can we do to ditch the normalcy and become badass crime fighters? Don’t fret, hu-man! I’ve done the research and unearthed several tried and true methods to turn you from unimpressive to unfuckwithable in one easy step!

(1) Throw yourself in harm’s way- on purpose! First step to being a hero is having an awesome heroic origin (it’s got “hero” in it, duh). Matt Murdock shoved a blind man out of a truck’s path and got hit in the face with ooze. Bruce Banner shoved a kid out of the blast radius of a gamma bomb. Ronnie Raymond shoved his face into the fist of an angry guy trying to blow up a nuclear reactor. Did they die? No way! They got powers! They became Daredevil, the Hulk, and Firestorm! Next time you see an opportunity, go ahead and shove something out of or into the way of something else and accept your newfound abilities!

(2) Find yourself a powerful ancient artifact! If the shoving doesn’t work out, you just need a doohickey. Think about it.  The Helmet of Fate, the Blue Beetle Scarab, the Tantu totem, the Trident of Lucifer, Mjolnir, the Cloak of Levitation, the list goes on and on. Chances are pretty fucking good that if you grabbed a shovel out of your garage and started digging right now, you’d have some sort of ancient power bestowed upon you by dinner time. Or you’d hit a gas main. Whoops.

(3) Douse yourself with radioactive chemicals! Or inject them, eat them, get bitten by a spider carrying them, whatever. Before he stood in front of a bookshelf full of random electrified chemicals, the Flash was just Barry Allen. Where would Ant-Man be if he didn’t go crazy with the Pym particles? And if there were no X-Kryptonite, there wouldn’t even be a Streaky! Can you imagine a world without a Streaky? No way. I don’t even want to try.

(4) Strike a deal with the devil! I know it seems pretty risky. We all saw that holophonor episode of Futurama. But look what a deal like that did for the Silver Surfer! Spawn! Ghost Rider! Robert Johnson! Come on, you and I both know that you’re not even using your soul. It’s just dead weight. Trade it to Nekron / Mephisto / Malebolgia / Satan and reap the rewards!  The only real risk is that you might accidentally become the world’s best blues singer instead of a meta-human.

If you try all of these and all you end up as a crippled, soulless cancer patient with a fossil collection, don’t despair! There are always aliens ready to empower you for no real reason. ALWAYS.