Lord Frieza wrote:Polyphase Avatron wrote:snip
I'll agree with you there, Darkseid and also Doomsday are two Superman foes who often get badly down played. In is original incarnastion Darkseid is nigh unstoppable and should beat Superman with little effert. But how he should be written and how DC comic's chooses to use him are to different things. Avarage Darkseid while powerful is still only about even with Superman or a bit strongre in most comics. Again I agree its a real shame because Darkseid is without a dought one of the single greatest villains ever created yet very few have the tallent and insight to really do him justice. Darkseid makes characters like Luthor and the Joker look like paper cut outs.
While not as great a character in terms of personality and newance, Doomsday likewise gets badly down played a lot although in his case he was made to powerful then used to much when really he, like Darkseid, should not be pulled out of the toy box now and again.
I will stand by my statement about Zeno-Oh as he can destroy his entire mutliverse if he wanted to by just lifting his hand. He's not a threat to the Multiverse, that dose not due him justice, he is god above all who can destroy it all in a whim if he chose to. Thats a lot more powerful then even a full power Darkseid.
I also stand by my Tori-Bot statment as he the avatar of Akira Toriyama. You cannot get a more powerful being in fiction.
Eh, Kirby's original conception of the New Gods was very neat, I agree, but as for characters like Lex and the Joker, they've been around longer and had so many different writers that you can't even really judge them as a whole. The interpretations of the characters by some authors are downright brilliant, and others are downright awful. The same is true for a lot of comic book characters that have been around for such a long time. Like if someone were to say that they like Batman as a character, that doesn't actually say much - do they mean the gritty, Golden Age Batman who was more than willing to use guns and kill? The campy, goofy Silver Age Batman? The even goofier Adam West Batman? The darker and edgier 80s/Dark Knight Returns Batman? The serious yet amusing animated Batman? The gruff, super-serious Christian Bale Batman? Any one of the more modern comic interpretations? They're all so different.
Honestly I find Doomsday to be one of those characters who is neat in the first story he appears in, but when they keep reusing him his impact and effectiveness as a villain is diminished. I mean he's basically just a brute who mindlessly beats people up - unlike, say, the Hulk, there's no alternate personality or struggle with self-identity to keep the reader interested. They added the adaptation power which was something, but that's been done before and better. The time they tried to make him intelligent just failed... the intelligent JLU incarnation was kind of neat though I'll admit. Basically in terms of character depth and story role, Doomsday is Broly. In his first appearance - a great, if shallow, villain. After that? Overstays his welcome.
Going back to the power assessments, a lot of my statements are mostly based on the fact that the DC multiverse is just so much bigger. Destroying 12 universes at once is neat, but how does that compare to someone who can destroy infinite universes at once? And yet even those characters are nothing compared to the higher ones on the food chain. I suppose you could make the argument that Zeno is capable of destroy an arbitrary amount of universes simultaneously (although I doubt it based on the scene where he wiped out the future multiverse and Zamasu - he used both hands and took over a minute to do it, compared to when they wiped out universes 9 and 10 both easily with a simple one-handed gesture... to me that says he had to put quite a bit more effort into destroying all 12 at once). But either way, Darkseid at the level he is typically portrayed at is not as powerful as Zeno.
As for author avatars and fourth wall stuff, that's a pretty sticky situation to get into when arguing power levels. Personally I tend to not take such things all that seriously (unless the work clearly wants you to take it seriously - for example Grant Morrison's Animal Man, which was brilliant, but bizarre). In terms of gags and comedy you have authors and even publishing companies inserting themselves into their works all the time, but how they're actually portrayed is often not in a serious manner. In some stories you even have incidents where the characters escape from their (meta)fictional world and kill their own authors (like in Stephen King's Dark Tower series... he wrote himself in as an author who can change reality by writing it, yet every author including himself is apparently just a tool for the higher gods of the setting who are manipulating them. It's weird).