The villainous heroes vs the villains farmed out as heroes.
Who would Win?
Nitpick: There was no crime-fighting group called The Watchmen. Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way:
I dunno. Is it time Dr. Manhattan had some time alone? If it isn’t, it starts with an earthquake and it ends there, too, because none of the Suicide Squad can hope to take down God Himself, He Is What Am.
If it’s set after the events of the Watchmen graphic novel, OTOH, Blake and Rorschach are dead and Dr. Manhattan’s off creating Earth-616 or something, so we’re down to the Dreiberg Nite Owl, the Juspeczyk Silk Spectre, and Veidt, none of whom are useless in a fight but neither of whom are metahuman resources the way the members of Task Force X are, so the battle is over once they’re located and killed, probably from a great distance by Deadshot.
If you leave Dr. Manhattan out, but include Rorschach and the Comedian, and Veidt is a team player, and you have Archie in the mix, the Watchmen fellers are in with a good chance. Having a hovertank on your side tilts the odds a long way.
And Veidt is not above using a sniper rifle against Deadshot…or, being rich as Crassus, hiring it done by a professional assassin. Is it violating the rules of the hypothetical for Veidt to bring a small army of mercenaries?
After Dr. M, Veidt is the key player. Does he know Task Force X are after him? If not, I’m sure he has excellent security, but Walker’s got plenty of experts to get around that. Really, it comes down to an espionage game between Veidt and Waller. I’m sure they both have plants and bugs in the other’s organization. Adrian is smarter, though, so I’d give him the edge. In a lot of ways he’s a Batman expy, and I think it’s well established that Waller’s team couldn’t take down Bruce. Even if Waller pooled all her resources and government connections, I don’t think she could do it.
Without Dr. M or Ozymandias? The Minutemen don’t stand a chance.
ETA: Good topic, btw. I don’t usually like superhero matchup threads, but I wouldn’t have thought of putting these groups against one another and it has a nice symmetry you pointed out in the OP.
Advantage: Deity.
The rest of the Watchmen don’t even need to show up.
To answer meaningfully, I’d have to know the lineup and incarnation of both team. Suicide Squad has had an incredibly diverse roster, even if you were so uncouth to exclude the overtly superpowered members.
Likewise, the Watchmen/Crime Busters teams may, depending on where you pick them or in what medium, include demi-super “peak” humans, aging and semi-retired heroes, unusually tough semi-retired heroes, or virtual Deities.
Each team might easily slaughter the other one, depending entirely on when you picked them.
Well, yeah. Like, if Veidt learns the Squad is in NYC in early November of '85…
Watchmen box office was $185.3 million on a $120 million budget.
Suicide Squad box office was $745.6 million on a $175 million budget.
I’m afraid it’s Suicide Squad all the way (to the bank).
Rorschach, returned from the dead at a whim of the author, secretly kills all the Squaddies before anything else can happen. But he’s still miserable.
“Villainous heroes”?
If Dr. Manhattan can be arsed to join then Watchmen would win in a Cakewalk. If he goes to Mars to brood, then it is a much closer fight.
I think it has to be taken as a given for this question that Manhattan is sitting this one out, because with him, there’s no question.
Look, it’s all fun and games so long as Laurie Juspeczyk is breaking someone else’s legs. But does Doc stay on the sidelines if someone breaks Laurie’s legs?
The only meta-human I think might be able to go toe-to-toe with Doctor Manhattan is the original Phoenix. Both of them have such all-encompassing power that they can simply will that you never existed. That’s not to be fucked with.
I’m not sure. I mean, the Watchmen-verse being what it is, we get to see a whole bunch of Doc’s physical feats – but we never get to see the guy get targeted by a super with crazy mind-control power: there’s no Charles Xavier dramatically placing fingers to the side of his head, there’s no Zatanna Zatara gniklat sdrawkcab to wipe memories and do personality rewrites; there’s no Max Lord, no Emma Frost; there’s just a succession of people who fail with purely physical attacks.
Doc versus a sharpshooter, a chick with a baseball bat, a dude who climbs really well? Yeah, that’s obvious. Doc versus Mesmero? Who knows?
Manhattan beats about anyone except people who can teleport him to other dimensions I suppose. And even then…
I guess you could seperate his spirit from his body. That might work. Though that could probably be circumvented by some nonsense about “I am my body right down to the last quark. You can no more sepreate me from my body than you can catch the same part of a stream twice in your hand.”
Seems to me that Molecule Man (at his best) is basically Manhattan. Others like Galactus would probably opine being able to contain him for a while but no more.
Mesmero?? I’m fairly sure Doc has senses well beyond illusion casters.
basically what I’m saying is: When you do these imaginary face-offs…whoever sounds the least cheesiest when you explain ones dominance over the other wins.
Doc Strange casts him into another dimension…Manhattan returns withing 30 seconds saying his quantum signature is exactly identical to the universe he was born in. It stood out like a lighthouse.
ALL Alan Moore creations sound less cheesy in general since they can fall back on higher sounding gobbledygook.
Sorry for the run on repsonses…isn’t Rorshach basically a dumber, less skilled Daredevil?
Rorschach is a Batman without the intelligence, wealth, idealism, or charm, but a surplus of determination and willingness to hurt and kill people.
It’s misleading to say that Veidt is Batman in the Watchmen universe, because Moore didn’t write simple one-to-one analogies like that. He split up character traits to bring out the most exaggerated form of each kind of flaw he saw in superheroes of his time: Veidt got Batman’s wealth, intelligence, and massive long-term vision, and the concomitant alienation from humanity. He’s even more alienated than Dr. Manhattan, at the end, because he’s willing to nuke-in-all-but-name a major world city to bring his plan to fruition. Rorschach, on the other hand, is alienated from humanity because he doesn’t have normal human emotions and he’s unwilling to compromise. Everything is black and white, like his mask, never mixing, never contaminating itself, unlike the constantly, irredeemably impure real world, full of pedophiles and drug-dealers and people who embrace in doorways.
Dr. Manhattan is Superman, I suppose, and is probably the only one-to-one comparison you can make, because all superhuman capes are Superman to some extent.
Dreiberg and Juspeczyk are the legacy heroes, one a fanboy who took it all the way, the other a sad-sack who was stage-mommed into it. Blake is a reaction to the Dark Age antiheroes, written before those characters even existed, and inspiring their creation to some extent. He was the worst of all of them, at a basic day-to-day assholery level, but he was the only one who truly wept over Veidt’s plan, and was the first who had to be killed to preserve it. Rorschach hated the plan because it wasn’t right in his rigid rule-bound sense, but Blake understood it was wrong, morally, even though he had the worst conventional morality of all of them.
(At a very simplistic level, none of the characters can be Batman because they’re based on old Harvey properties, not DC. Rorschach is The Question, for example.)
Corrections:
Charlton, not Harvey. Although I’d love to see a Moore-penned Richie Rich/Casper the Friendly Ghost.
Second, Rorschach is closer in spirit to Ditko’s other big creation Mr. A, for A=A, for Absolute Batshit Objectivism with a side of Moral Absolutism.
Now, can I get a No-Prize?