20 Most Important Superheroes With Disabilities (Ranked)

While disabilities may be looked at as a weakness, some people with disabilities turn out to be the most talented at their craft. For example, disabled superheroes don’t let their disabilities stop them from helping people. Some of their disabilities are even used to their advantage. Here are 20 heroes with disabilities who play huge roles in society.

20. Artie Maddicks (Marvel)

Well, he didn’t start out with a disability. His disability started when his mutation manifested. Artie is the son of scientist Dr. Carl Maddicks. The two of them had been living alone for several years. After Artie’s 11th birthday, Artie’s mutation began to arise, leaving him disfigured and mute. Wanting to cure his son, he tried to steal a cure from Beast but ultimately failed. He asked the X-Factor to take care of his son before he was gunned down.

Artie then began his training under the X-Factor. He has Visual Telepathy where he can project thoughts of himself or other people and on occasions with a scale of a city’s population. He can project holograms as a means to communicate due to his muteness. In addition, he has the ability to paralyze other people.

19. Kay Challis/Crazy Jane (DC)

Kay Challis has dissociative identity disorder, Crazy Jane or Jane Morries being the dominant one of all personalities. However, when she was exposed to Dominators’ gene bomb, all 64 of her personalities were granted a different superpower. Kay got the disorder due to years of abuse during her childhood.

During the incident that led to her gaining her superhuman abilities, Dr. Will Magnus asked the superhero, Cliff Steele, to look after Jane. This would eventually cause her to become a member of the Doom Patrol. Later, Jane faces her past and becomes at peace with her alters, allowing her to utilize all their abilities and for all of them to cooperate towards the same goals.

18. Cable (Marvel)

He doesn’t look like a guy who has a disability, but Cable had a lot of his body parts replaced with machines. Considering this big guy is from the future, it might be a common future thing. Unfortunately, he also developed a virus due to all his techno-organic body parts. The virus sabotages his own mutant abilities and control over his own body. Of course, this does not hinder him from protecting his friends in the past.

Despite knowing full well, he could die due to the virus if he overexerts his body, Cable still continued to fight for the X-Men. He eventually lost his battle to the virus due to overstraining himself to open a time portal. He gets replaced by a younger version of himself that got displaced in time. Apparently, this version of himself has decided that his future self wasn’t doing a good job and vowed to do an even better job.

17. Jericho (DC)

Jericho is a relatively unknown character in the DC universe. Some people first heard of him when they introduced the cast for DC’s Titans series. Jericho ended up becoming mute during an incident during his childhood. However, this didn’t stop Jericho from learning to communicate. He eventually learned sign language and discovered he had metahuman capabilities after some time.

Jericho would grow up helping his mother on a mission, even saving her a couple of times from assassins. He would later come in contact with the Teen Titans and become a member. For such an unknown member in the Titans, it’s important to note that Jericho was actually the first Titan to truly understand Raven.

16. Jubilee (Marvel) 

Jubilee gained popularity due to the 90s animated series of X-Men. While it doesn’t affect her work directly, Jubilee has Dyscalculia. It is only a mild disability when it comes to learning mathematics. She can at least do simple mathematics, but anything too complex is already beyond her. 

After her parents died, Jubilee started to do shows and gymnastics to be able to afford things. She ran into some female members of the X-Men and grew. When the X-Men left the vicinity through a teleport gateway, Jubilee followed them all the way to their base in outback Australia. Eventually, she joined these mutants and became a trusted member of the X-Men herself.

15. Captain Marvel Jr. (DC)

He is actually the disabled teen Freddy Freeman. Well, he wasn’t always disabled. Freedy was your ordinary teenager living in Fawcett City. After a baseball game, he and his grandfather Jacob went out to do some family fishing on their family-owned boat. While that was happening, Captain Marvel was fighting Captain Nazi and knocked him straight into the lake Freddy and his grandfather was fishing at. The pair try to save the villain but end up getting attacked by him.

The pair don’t end up lucky. Grandpa Jacob ends up slipping into a coma from the attack, and Freddy injured his spine and leg. These injuries will prevent him from walking ever again. Freddy is eventually taken to the Wizard Shazam, who grants him powers. When Freddie is Marvel Jr., Freddie can walk and function beyond an average capable human. However, this only happens when he is powered up. In his normal state, Freddie is unable to walk.

14. Misty Knight (Marvel)

Misty was a dedicated member of the NYPD before becoming part of a superhero team. She was so devoted that she risked her life trying to get rid of a bomb during her duty. While she did ultimately survive the explosion, Misty lost her right arm. But due to her heroism, Tony Stark fashioned her a bionic arm, and not just any arm; her bionic arm turned out to really pack a punch. Her right arm can crush anything, and she can now punch with great force, but only on her right arm. This is only the first version of her arm. In later years she had it upgraded and allowed her to add more abilities to the side that she lost.

13. Echo/Ronin (Marvel)

Those who got to see her in the Hawkeye series may have noticed she was deaf. But don’t let her villain background fool you. She becomes one of the good guys. Echo’s real name is Maya Lopez, and she is the adoptive daughter of Kingpin. After becoming one of the good guys, Maya joins the New Avengers as Ronin, where Daredevil recommends that she join Captain America to aid the Avengers. Maya eventually gives up the name Ronin to Clint Barton.

Despite being Deaf, Maya is able to understand sign language and lip movement. She can even read lips from a long distance and can even read it to an extent even if the person talking has a thin cloth mask.

12. Puck (Marvel)

He wasn’t originally a dwarf. When his origin story got retconned as him being an average human, but due to mystical means, he ended up as the size, he is now. So, they changed his origin story, but his old story had Puck referencing he was in constant pain, something caused due to his condition, which is achondroplasty caused by his dwarfism.

Apparently, the First Puck was designed loosely after a friend of John Byrne, the creator of Puck. According to John, his friend was short but not as short as Puck and was occasionally bald. His friend, however, was never possessed by demons, unlike Puck.

11. Komodo (Marvel)

Melati Kusuma was a car accident victim, which caused her to lose both legs. She also caused the car accident as she was recklessly driving the streets just a few weeks after receiving her license. She got tired of people feeling sorry for her and put all of her efforts into her academics. She earned herself a full scholarship to the Empire State University.

She grew interested in Doc. Conner’s Formula to restore her legs, so she secured an internship under him on the day she applied. Doc Conner knew about this and agreed to help her as long as she promised not to do anything reckless. But at the end of the day, Melati stole the Formula and modified it so it would work on her and grant her regenerative properties.

Taking the Formula, she gained the ability to transform into a creature that can walk and regrow its lost body parts. Eventually, she joined superhero teams and was even supported by Doc. Conner. She even chose her codename: Komodo, for her new superhero identity.

10. Cyclops (Marvel)

He isn’t entirely blind, but his vision isn’t exactly the best out of the X-Men due to his power. Being one of the first few characters created for the X-Men comic, his story has been revisited and reconned several times throughout the series. However, there are fixed elements from his backstory. While he was young, Scott Summers was orphaned due to his parents dying in a plane crash.

Both Scott and his brother Alex were present but had managed to survive the incident. However, the two brothers were eventually separated. When his mutant powers manifested, it destroyed his area due to his inability to control it. He was then found by Charles Xavier, who trained him to become a member of the X-Men. Since joining Professor X, Scott has become a leading figure among the X-Men.

9. The Chief/Dr. Niles Caulder (DC)

The leader of the Doom Patrol happens to be a paraplegic, but he is a sort of genius. Using his intellect, he has created several inventions and innovations that led him to wealth. He eventually created the Doom Patrol, a group of superhumans whose goal is to protect the innocent and fight crime. The Doom Patrol also tries to teach humanity to accept people with superhuman abilities. 

While gathering the members, Clauder helped most of them find a way to survive and give them purpose in life. Similar to a lot of our heroes, Clauder wasn’t born with a disability. However, his employer planted explosives on his upper torso when Clauder refused to give him a serum that would prolong his life. Clauder managed to devise a plan to get rid of the bomb, but it cost him his ability to walk.

8. Doctor Mid-Nite (DC)

Doctor Mid-Nite or Doctor Midnight is a name that belonged to three different people who take upon the title due to having similar abilities. Unfortunately, all three of them had to give up their sight in place of getting abilities. The three individuals who took the name of Doctor Mid-Nite are Charles McNider, Beth Chapel, and Pieter Anton Cross.

The hero is a member of DC’s Justice Society of America and has aided other heroes throughout all of their runs. All three who took up the name Mid-Nite showed similar features and traits. Namely, those traits are: having a cowled costume that features a crescent moon symbol, the ability to see in the dark that was traded for their ability to see in sunlight, visors, and smoke bombs that they use to get the upper hand in battle and a high degree of knowledge when it comes to combat.

Doctor Mid-Nite was one of the first few characters in the DC universe to show a disability, even predating Marvel’s Daredevil by twenty years.

7. Hawkeye (Marvel)

If you’ve watched Hawkeye the series, then you would have noticed that Clint has already started losing his earrings. The series explains that being a human member of the Avengers, constantly being in close range of loud explosives, and sustaining damage from several fights with aliens would have caused some damage to his hearing. In addition to MCU’s Clint losing his hearing, his comic counterparts have also lost their hearing entirely or to a certain extent.

There was a point where Clint bit down on a sonic arrow which successfully stopped a rough fight, he was in the middle of. Unfortunately, enough, this permanently damaged his hearing. By the fight’s aftermath, he was said to be at least 80% deaf.

The story was retconned, but Clint was made to supper partial hearing loss due to past abuses from his father before the events of the story. Then, he eventually goes fully deaf in a fight against The Clown. The villain stuff an arrow into Clint’s ears that fully damages his ability to hear.

6. Cyborg (DC)

Cyborg is a popular member of the Teen Titans. Before he became Cyborg, he was a teen named Victor Stone. He had a pair of scientist parents who tried to experiment with him several times. Some of the experiments caused him to enhance his IQ. Unfortunately, when the lab got destroyed due to an experiment, his mother died, and Victor was also in the brick of death.

His father took this opportunity to install advanced prosthetic artificial limbs on his son. Victor wasn’t too happy with the change, as this caused his peers and his girlfriend to look at him like he was a freak. He eventually found a home with the Teen Titans and even became an idol to those with artificial limbs since he’s been using them to fight crime under the Teen Titans.

5. Bucky Barness/ The Winter Soldier (Marvel)

Bucky lost his arm back in 1945 during a mission. So, he had a new arm implanted. His first arm was a titanium arm that Hydra gave, but that arm was destroyed by Iron Man in 2016. But, as a way to aid the battle during the Infinity War, he was given a vibranium arm by T-Challa.

4. Moon Knight (Marvel)

Moon Knight wouldn’t have been successful as he is. In fact, a lot of his solo career’s success might have been thanks to how he efficiently uses his Dissociative Disorder to do his job as the fist of Khonshu.

After gaining his powers from the moon god Khonshu, he dedicates himself entirely to his new role. He even created his alias and a superhero costume to go with it. He moves to the United States and uses his three other identities to gain information about villains. Steven Grant is his billionaire persona who handles his finances. Meanwhile, Jake Lockey and Mr. Knight as used to gather information on the street. 2 of his personas manifested from his childhood. Meanwhile, the other personas manifest at some point in his adulthood.

3. Batgirl/Oracle (DC)

Unable to fight didn’t leave Batgirl lost at what to do. She still took an active role with crime-fighting, even confined in a wheelchair. Batgirl, after Killing Joke, takes on a new name, Oracle. As Oracle, she becomes the eyes of almost every DC hero and becomes an important informant for the heroes.

2. Daredevil (Marvel)

Talk about bad luck. All Matt Murdock wanted to do was to save a blind man from getting hit by a truck. He didn’t count for himself to get blinded in the process. The radiation that hit him at least heightened his other senses and made him pretty good in combat. Later in life, Matt decided to try out living a life-fighting crime as Daredevil.

1. Professor X/ Charles Francis Xavier (Marvel)

All of us must be aware that Professor’s X wheelchair is more than just a prop. For most of his life, he’s been paraplegic. But, he is brilliant in what he does and is considered one of the strongest mutant telepaths. Professor X is the reason why mutants now have a place they can call home where they are accepted. He is the founder of Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters, which created the X-Men. His goal is to make a world where mutants and humans can coexist without conflict.