Really? :eek: Examples? (Oh, and I would go for Nabu or the Wizard Shazam (not the weakling in Day of Vengence, or whatever it was called). I don’t normally see Dr. Strange as that strong, then again, I haven’t read him in a long, long time. I thought Strange would be as strong as Orion, sorcerror of Atlantis.)
Hmm…I didn’t even know Marvel had a death. Is he/she as cool as Death from Vertigo?
I would pick Batman over Dr. Manhattan, because like Ozymandias, Batman would be able to devise some ridiculous machinations to maneuver (pull on John’s puppet strings) to do what he wanted. Remember, it was Laurie’s (Silk Specter) random chance of existing (or was it being on the moon?) that caused John to change his mind and actually act out his will. Batman would have covered that little contingency.
I think we should have weight classes. One for cosmic entities like Death, another for planet smashers like Superman, then one for “mostly human” characters like Batman, Spider-Man and Wolverine.
You’ve got location to figure in too, perhaps; it was implied that within the Dreaming he’s pretty much unbeatable. He made a half dozen or so gods nearly crap their pants.
And who would win in a fight between the android (in the current JLU)? They seem to be the “serious”/“cartoony” incarnations of the same concept, IMHO.
Are we convinced that they’re separate entities? Something as fundamental as Death would, I think, span even across the Marvel and DC metaverses.
And the problem with weight classes is you need some unambiguous way to separate them. Otherwise, it’s a question of whether so-and-so is the most powerful of the humanoids, or least powerful of the planet-smashers. You might also have a few isolated cases where a specific hero from a lesser class could defeat a specific one from a greater class, but perhaps not most other lesser heroes.
Timing is everything. If Rock, Paper, and Scissors get in a fight, the winner is going to be whichever one fought last.
I started a thread on this once and while I don’t think it got very far because, as I remember it, some just refused to put the characters in any kind of hierarchy, you might find the discussion helpful.
Judge Death is one of those non-corporeal types, can be captured but his essence isn’t actually destructable. If his body is destroyed, he can simply have another prepared for him to enter, the living are his puppets. The worst that has happened is that his essence is cast into the afterlife where he must wait until an opportunity arises to come back.
I’d class a fight with him as a long drawn out stalemate at best
Most of them have not actually destroyed a planet but I see your point. On most battle boards the Surfer usually wins with ease. He’s a lot faster than pretty much anyone, he’s immune to mental attacks, can transmute people into anything he wants and can take massive damage. For example, when he fought Gladiator (a Superman clone with maybe more power) he figured out his weakness to a certain radiation and just created said radiation ending the fight in a panel or so.
In a recent fight with Cable, Cable destroyed the entire 6th US naval fleet. The Surfer put it all back together all while fighting Cable.
