From the longbox: Star Brand

The best comic book characters - the ones carrying with them classic Greek tragedy levels of suffering - don't want to be comic book characters. Batman would have been much happier and more content if his parents had lived. The Hulk and the Thing don't want to be superstrong-yet-misshapen freaks. Spiderman's great power comes with great responsibility that's always messing up his life. Being a superhero in the real world would probably suck.
Which brings us to the tragedy that is Star Brand. The 19-issue series, which ran from 1986-1989 in Marvel Comics' New Universe imprint, was created by writer Jim Shooter and artist John Romita Jr. It told the story of Ken Connell, a Pittsburgh-area guy in his 20s who works for an auto detail shop, rides his dirtbike on weekends, and one day was handed the Star Brand - essentially this unlimited power to do anything - fly, invulnerability, strength, bring back the dead, etc. etc.
Star Brand started with an interesting concept as it blended some real world situations (people like the Libyan government start trying to track down Connell to use his power) with a weird mystery (who was the old guy who just handed this d-bag unlimited power and then tried to get it back?) with always-strong Romita Jr. art. Add to that the fact that Connell turned out to be not all that noble a guy, as he screwed around on his girlfriend and turned out to be sort of a self-pitying loser.
Unfortunately, the wheels came off the cart pretty quickly on this one as a succession of writers caused and artists vast unevenness.
And even when Star Brand went for broke, with Connell accidentally destroying the city of Pittsburgh and killing a million or so people, it made the mistake of going overboard and too far into the comic book world (with mutated creatures coming out of the pit that was Pitt) instead of maybe evaluating more what would the world be like with a true Superman. Writer/artist John Byrne came aboard for the last third of the series and was given the unenviable task of trying to wrap it all up. And issue 19 in fact did tie everything together and semi-solve all the questions, but in a rushed way.
Interesting side note: in the Legends miniseries for DC that Byrne did around the same time, Byrne had a Star Brand-like character caught by Green Lantern who accidentally zapped his own foot off, probably a thinly veiled jab at Shooter, who was well known in the comics world for being the tight manager Marvel needed at the time (getting books out on time, bringing in people like Frank Miller) who also happened to have no people skills and alienated vast numbers of writers and artists.