Showdown! Justice League of America vs. the X-Men

Cafe Society
261

“Rabid fanboy” is an insult? Have I missed a decade or something?

Alright, next lineup (circa mid 80s to early 90s):
Maxwell Lord and L-Ron vs. Professor X
Green Lantern (G’Nort) vs. Jubilee
Blue Beetle vs. Nightcrawler
Booster Gold vs. Dazzler
Captain Atom vs. Havok
Ice vs. Iceman
Fire vs. Sunfire
Captain Marvel vs. Rogue

Fight!
Maxwell Lord leads off trying to negotiate a truce between the two teams, to which Professor X readily agrees. Like that is going to last…

Booster Gold make a crude pass at Dazzler, including an inappropriate placement of hands. Dazzler cuts loose on the hapless Booster, sending him through 3 walls. So much for the truce.

G’Norts ring protects him from everything Jubilee throws at him, but he is too mesmerized by the colors to actually mount an offense. Stalemate.

Nightcrawler has a definite advantage over Blue Beetle, until Blue Beetle starts with the one-liners. Nightcrawler laughs uncontrollably as Blue Beetle rags on Booster Gold about his latest mishap with women. Blue Beetle, playing to the crowd, keeps cracking the jokes. Stalemate.

Iceman is much more charming than Booster, and Ice is much more receptive to his advances, having recently broken up with the missing Guy Gardner. The warmest chilly reception in the history of superhero teamups. Stalemate.

Fire and Sunfire go after each other tooth and nail. No one can understand a word, as each taunt the other in their native languages. Neither is effective against the other, however, and all they do is keep Ice and Iceman busy regulating the temperature. Stalemate.

Captain Marvel is far too much of a gentleman to fight back against Rogue, who pounds him relentlessly, yet ineffectively. Rogue busts her hands against the Big Red Cheese, and can’t take her gloves off to touch him. She goes to kiss him, but Billy Batson freaks and gets away, instead offering to share some milk and Oreos and getting to know the southern belle a little better first. Stalemate.

Havok and Captain Atom go at it, in an enclosed space. Not good for anyone involved. End result: everyone except Captain Marvel, Captain Atom (now suitless), G’Nort, L-Ron and Rogue (now on her secondary mutation) dead from extreme radiation poisoning.

Rogue, now combining all the powers she’s ever absorbed, including Captain America, Hulk, Juggernaut and so on, is now more than a match for the remaining JLers. Captain Marvel falls first, without ever raising a hand. G’Nort is ineffective at using his power ring to slow Rogue, who literally shoves his head up his butt. Even the enigmatic L-Ron is turned into an iPod mini. Unfortunately for her, GL Guy Gardner, who had been stalking Ice, arrives - and he’s more than a little pissed at the fact that Ice has been melted. Unlike G’Nort, he knows how to use his ring and isn’t afraid to do so. Even Rogue can’t withstand the most powerful weapon in the universe when wielded by a homicidal sociopath.

Winner, and last person standing: Guy Gardner.

Follow-up: Forget Hal Jordan. This time, Parallax is Guy Gardner. Goodbye Universe.

262

“Rabid” certainly is.

263

If Jean is out, so are Superman and Martian Manhunter, who you keep saying could take her out. That cuts both ways.

If it is, I flamed myself two or three times in this thread without realizing it.

264

Not at all. The only way to fairly remove Ion is to exclude members of both teams in atypical states. Superman with the extra solar charge he used against Imperiex. Kyle as Ion. Jean with the Phoenix. Xavier as Onslaught. Wonder Woman as the Goddess of Truth. Firestorm and Red Tornado as Elementals. Thunder-punch He-Man.

If you just start plucking people out of one side because “They’re too powerful” then you’re no longer asking “Who’d Win?”, you’re asking “Who do we have to remove from the JLA to let the X-Men win?” - entirely different. Kyle was a member of the JLA as Ion. There’s no reason to exclude him without excluding Jean as the Phoenix except bias.

265

Notice I’m not advocating anyone’s removal, only noting that if Phoenix is taken out due to her power levels, that the DC equivalents would have to be removed as well.

As you said, to do otherwise would be biased.

266

I never said to take her out due to her power levels.

267

No, but it was strongly implied by If Ion’s out, you pretty much have to remove Jean while in possession of the Phoenix Force. If not due to her power levels, what? That it was only temporary and was twenty years ago?

Due to her recent history, it seems the Phoenix transformation wasn’t a one time deal and is a part of her. It’s even her current incarnation, ignoring her death.

268

Based on the fact that the Phoenix Force is an independent entity that happened to use Jean as a host for a portion of her life. It is atypical. Just because they’re revisiting it doesn’t mean that Jean and the Phoenix are one. Kyle’s situation as Ion is almost exactly analogous. (possibly exactly, if the Oan energy is revealed to have a sentience in it, as I suspect it may soon be) - even if he got the power back again, it wouldn’t be his ‘typical’ configuration.

So you can allow both, in the spirit of the original “any team member, any time” edict, or you can disallow both and a few others by limiting it to “typical” versions of the characters.

269

The reason that I think Ion should be excluded is that, from what I’ve read in this thread and on the DC website, Ion could take out the whole of the universe by himself if he had to. Same sort of a thing with Spectre.

The character and power levels of Phoenix are fudgeable enough to make her beatable, and even at her most powerful, she isn’t a wave of the hand poof goes the enemy powerhouse like Ion and Spectre seem to be.

Also, Ion seemed to be a short term story arc, like the quantum control Moonstar I listed earlier.
This really wasn’t a problem for anyone in the first five pages of this thread. Why is it such a big honkin deal now?

270

So… “The X-Men can’t win with him around, so instead of answering the question in the OP with ‘JLA’, we’ll take him out to arbitrarily re-weight things more favorably to the X-Men.” Yeah, that’s pretty much what I object to.

And that’s kinda the reason why I suggest the JLA will win. The members tend to be more powerful.

Kyle possessed the power for a relatively short time - but the story arc itself’s probably… what, a decade? old now. It began with Hal Jordan absorbing the Oan battery.

Because up till now, no one suggested excluding someone who is a legitimate member of one of the teams on the basis of ‘He’s too powerful.’

271

As huge a fan of the Legion as I am, I’m not so sure of this. I know that Val is the top of the martial artist spectrum in DC and probably Marvel, and that he regularly beats up Daxamites (or rather, a specific Daxamite), but I think Wolverine would give him more of a problem.

M’Onel, or whatever he’ll be called in the near future, has minimal fighting skill. (Source: Very old Who’s Who in the DC Universe). He didn’t need to be proficient in hand-to-hand, and never really tried.

On the other hand, I’m going on the assumption that Wolverine is at near-Bat level proficiency. He’d know that Val is a much better fighter and would fight defensively, drawing the fight out quite a bit.

Val, on the other hand, wouldn’t be able to put any serious harm on Logan. On the assumption that adamantium can’t be broken even by Val’s ability to spot weaknesses (no weakness), depending on how fast Logan’s healing is working (i.e. whatever speed best serves the story), this might be a stalemate. Logan, on his best day, couldn’t beat Val, but Val couldn’t hurt Logan fast enough to finish him off.

[I’m basing a lot of this off of an old Timber Wolf spotlight issue that all but stated that T-Wolf was good sparing friends with Val as he was the second most proficient hand-to-hand fighter in the Legion, plus had superspeed and strength to compensate for the difference]

272

Karate Kid once put pre-crisis Superboy in a lock he couldn’t break out of. He puts a hurting on Daxamites. He’d find some way to knock wolverine out.

I’m actually a bit distressed at how godlike Wolverine’s healing factor seems to now be considered. I’ve always considered him the Batman of the X-Men, in that his powers aren’t very flashy compared to everyone else, and he’s very easily underestimated. Where his powers end, however, his skill and attitude take over. I like heroes like that (see also Captain America), and I think it takes something away from the character if he can’t be killed by anything no matter what.

273

I must cite What If? for this point - but it was put forth that Wolverine’s Adamantium skeleton, while nice, has to… y’know, bend in places… so he can move? And that in one particular issue, the Wolverine V. Hulk battled played out with the Hulk hitting Wolverine at the right angle to sever Wolverine’s spinal cord between two adamant-laced vertebrae. So, at the cartilage points, there are exploitable vulnerabilities.

Has Val ever damaged Inertron, by the by?

274

Menocchio, I was taking Val’s ability to take on unskilled Kryptonians and Daxamites into account. Wolverine, however, has evolved greatly from his early incarnations. Now, he has several hundred years of combat experience, is a highly skilled martial artist (versus the competent brawler he originally was), and regenerates quite quickly. He regularly takes lethal damage and keeps on going.

Another thing to take into account in most of my posts is that I’m trying to figure out a way for a comic to display a fight that highlights both skills. Marvel fans (or rabid Marvel fanboys) will always envision a Wolverine win, while DC fans (or rabid DC fanboys, like me) will always envision a Karate Kid win. Despite my being a rabid Legion fan, no writer would be allowed to put down Wolverine that easily, so you have to make a plausible reason why it would be a good fight, within the character concepts.

275

For edification purposes only, would deranged or demented be any better?

276

I think so, but I’m not the best person to talk comic or even Legion minutae. cmkeller could probably answer definitively.

"What If"s count as “Elseworlds”, therefore, they don’t count. :wink: I’m working hard to make fair fights enjoyable to both camps.

277

In regards to Ion or the Spectre, from what I understand, you could put either one of them on one side of a fight, and all the rest of the JLA and X-Men together on the other, and Ion and/or Spectre would still win. Which makes discussion of any fight involving them rather boring. And since the purpose here is to have fun, not to be bored, we should exclude them. Phoenix, by contrast, is beatable, even if atypical, so the same case cannot be made for her.

On the Wolverine vs. Karate Kid question, I suspect that Karate Kid would have an edge, but not be able to finish it. Assuming, that is, that KK stays in the fight long enough to assess Wolverine’s abilities, which I presume that he can. Certainly, he could gouge out Wolverine’s eyes… How long would it take for Wolvie to heal from that? Fighting blinded would be a serious (but not critical) handicap. The next step would be for KK to put a choke-hold on Wolverine (blocking the blood supply to the brain). The adamantium skeleton wouldn’t stop that, but the problem is that even versus a normal human, that takes a few seconds, and it would probably be longer for Wolverine. In the meantime, they’re grappling, and you don’t want to grapple with someone with six knives in his hands. The only way I can see it happening is if KK somehow manages to wrap his legs around W, pinning his arms to his body (and for fairness, the woman with the camcorder now wins one). While I figure W’s probably stronger than KK, KK’s legs are probably stronger than W’s arms. This might buy enough time for the chokehold to work. But now comes the stalemate: KK can keep the chokehold on indefinitely, but as soon as he lets go, W is going to wake up. And assuming he’s restricted to bare hands, there’s nothing KK can do to injure W faster than he can regenerate. I guess you’d call this one a win for Karate Kid, but by decision.

278

Someone finally agrees with me. Thanks, Chronos

279

I don’t think that particular point is strictly What If?. I’m going to vague-out here for a second, but I remember an issue of X-Men (from '97? '98?) where some female assassin-type was planning to take out the X-Men and seemed to think that she could chop off Wolverine’s head by sliding her sword in-between his vertabrae. Of course, I’m pretty sure she didn’t do that, and “how the hell does she know that would work?” is a perfectly valid response, but the idea has been brought up in actual continuity before.

280

Of course, flexibility isn’t an issue in the Marvel universe, slap “organic” in front of it and you could cover Plastic Man in adamantium and he’d be fine :stuck_out_tongue:

The other thing is that the one doing the back breaking here is the Hulk. I’m not sure what KK’s powers are, but I doubt Hulk level strength is one of them. In terms of fighting blind, Wolvys senses would be able to compensate. He’s done it before.

I’d have to call it a draw, only due to a complete lack of knowledge of the Karate Kids abilities.