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During the 1970’s Marvel and DC comics struggled to find their place in the new world of social relevance. The civil rights movement was barely in the rear view mirror, and both companies decided to create a wealth of black superheroes. Unfortunately, most were created by goofy white guys whose only exposure to blacks (we didn’t know what an African American was in those days) was through the schlock-filled blaxploitation movies like TNT Jackson, Black Belt Jones, and Super Fly.

When you use those kind of movies as a template to build a black superhero comic book character, you get lame characters. The lamest of the lame was Tyroc of the Legion of Superheroes.

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Tyroc is just a stupid name. As my girlfriend points out, it seems to be a bastardization of the name Tyrone. I mean seriously--why Tyroc? One wonders if the character had been a robot would they have named him Leroid. If it wasn’t so ridiculous it would be insulting. On second thought, it IS insulting.

As if that’s not lame enough, author Cary Bates took it a step further by trying to explain away why up until that point we had never seen a black person in almost 20 years of Legion continuity. He explains that all the black people left and went to live on an island off the coast of Africa to get away from whitey. Sounds like a futuristic utopia as imagined by David Duke. Even sillier is the name of this secret Island of Black People: Marzell. Marzell? Isn’t that the name of the guy trying to kill Bruce Willis in Pulp Fiction?

Tyroc’s power was pretty lame as well. He could yell magic words that would allow him to perform great feats. Teleporting, exploding things, and materializing chains and restraints out of thin air are only a few of the things we see Tyroc doing with his strange power.

This Tyroc Trivia quiz has a list of the magic yells

Tyroc was indeed pretty lame. It is hard to stand out as the lamest of all on a superhero squad that boasts Matter-Eater Lad as a member, but in my opinion Tyroc wins hands down.