| “ | Who's stronger...? The question those like us are always asked. Who's stronger? Can I arm-wrestle The Hulk? Run a race with Quicksilver? Challenge Willie Lumpkin in a contest of wriggling ears? Quickly measure the results! Write them down, to see who is worthy! But strength is relative to the need for it. If I have to... I can stand on Jupiter. I can stand on anything if the need is great and the cause is just -- as can you. As can we all. We are not measured by strength, nor by raw power. The measure of us is what we do... when the need for action lies with us... and the hammer is in our hand. | „ |
| ~ Thor Odinson |
Introduction
There are several massive problems with using power-scaling for these two prominent franchises that have shared hundreds of different authors over several decades.
Said writers naturally tend to have highly differing opinions and interpretations, which is reflected in their stories. Quite often, internal story logic regarding relative power levels is ignored, and personal favouritism (along with plot convenience) decides the outcome of confrontations. While this is done to avoid making outcomes too predictable, the results are completely inconsistent, and most importantly, the enormous contradictions in continuities, power levels, and comparative hierarchies between the many different writers and editors over the decades results in massive amounts of confusion.
A few examples include that the Hulk has been beaten by Captain America, or an ordinary snake, and been severely injured by regular gorillas, or an everyday stop sign, despite that he caused an earthquake across an infinite number of planets, or had his power measured as infinite by the Beyonder, in other stories; Thor being rendered unconscious by an ordinary handgun, but also preventing the destruction of 1/5th of the universe; Black Bolt killing Celestials; Gambit defeating Gladiator; Black Panther placing the Silver Surfer in an inescapable grip; Dormammu beating the Multiversal incarnation of Eternity in one story, only to be manhandled by Cyclops or Frankenstein's Monster in other stories; or the Beyonders killing the Living Tribunal and numerous abstract entities, only to be killed in turn by Doctor Doom.
However, this is not the only type of inconsistency. The fundamental natures, sizes, structures, continuities, etc. of many different concepts and objects also tend to vary greatly from story to story. A concept, object, or character can be dramatically stronger in a story, and dramatically weaker in other stories.
Just because a certain character displays a certain extreme degree of power in one instance doesn't imply that they will remotely possess the same scale of power in another, and that we can automatically scale another character from the higher end feat. Also, we cannot use the relative power levels for one author in the 1960s and apply it to another present day author, or vice versa. Again, one writer's canonicity cannot automatically be used to power-scale another's. To illustrate:
- Dan Jurgens, a former writer of Thor for Marvel Comics, stated in a 2004 interview that he wrote Odin's power as limited to planetary in scale despite Odin otherwise consistently having many galactic and higher feats.
| “ |
RC: So you did not write Odin as a character capable of, say, killing galaxies? DAN JURGENS: Odin? No. RC: Then what were the limits of his power . . . planetary-level? DAN JURGENS: They had to be . . . and I will say that consistently because we have seen Odin defeated so many times. The idea we were trying to get across is that the Odin-power made him among the most powerful of gods-certainly the most powerful Asgardian. But if we look at either Odin or Zeus, we see fallibility and we see a limit. |
„ |
| ~ An interview with Dan Jurgens |
- Stan Lee, Marvel Comics' late primary creative leader, repeatedly stated that in any story, whoever wins in a fight simply depends on whoever the current writer likes best or wants to win.[1][2]
- Tom Brevoort, Marvel Comics' executive editor, who manages the franchise's official handbooks and is likely the highest current authority regarding its continuity and power levels, rejected the idea that power levels were as simple as statistics and stated that one character defeating another doesn't automatically mean anything regarding their relative power levels.
| “ |
If you throw kryptonite at Superman, he’s going to double over and collapse. If you throw kryptonite at Batman, he’s going to laugh at you and then beat the hell out of you. Does this mean that Batman is more powerful than Superman? We need to stop thinking of these power relationships in such simple linear and black and white terms. if real life worked like that, there’d be no need for sporting events of any kind–you could tell which person or team was going to win without a game, from just looking at the stats.'' |
„ |
| ~ Tom Brevoort |
| “ | I get the sense that, somewhere, there’s a mighty battle boards-style discussion going on about the Sentry. And I try to stay out of those. But I will say that the transitive property has never applied to super heroes. After all, the Fantastic Four and Iron Man and even the Man-Thing have defeated the Molecule Man in the past, and doing so didn’t make them anything more than themselves. | „ |
| ~ Tom Brevoort |
Hence, Marvel and DC (the latter company functions similarly, and generally has the same writers at different points in their careers) are primarily interested in entertaining the readers via storytelling, not in accurate power-scaling, which is perfectly fine and acceptable. However, said ideology runs contrary to this site's purpose of accurately indexing the statistics of characters. We cannot continue to systematically gloss over this fact, as it creates extremely unreliable and misleading ratings.
For example, if we use cumulative power-scaling for Marvel characters, in terms of that one character defeated or stood up to an objectively far more powerful character, who did the same to an objectively far more powerful character, who did the same to an objectively far more powerful character applied to all of Marvel's history, we would literally end up with Captain America (or even Spider-Man's elderly aunt May) and other characters of the same level power-scaled to the Living Tribunal.
Just some of many examples:
- Aunt May is not significantly weaker than J. Jonah Jameson, who has punched an unmasked Spider-Man bloody on his own, who beat Firelord unconscious, who has harmed and held his own against the Silver Surfer, who managed to fight the Griever at the End of All Things for several minutes, who almost killed the Molecule Man. (1-A aunt May)
- Thor has been knocked out from a shot by a regular rifle but also harmed the Chaos King (1-A rifle).
- Daredevil once kicked D'Spayre to the ground, after the latter had stolen the powers of Nightmare and The Dweller in Darkness and defeated them both, and Nightmare once defeated The Living Tribunal, Eternity, and Death at the same time. (1-A Daredevil)
- Gambit once defeated Gladiator, and Gladiator significantly harmed Galactus after the latter had just consumed Dormammu and Satannish, and right before he collapsed the entire Universe-616 reality. (1-A Gambit)
- Hyperion withstood a point blank incursion event caused by The Beyonders. (1-A Hyperion)
- The Hulk was choked unconscious by an ordinary python, and the "Devil Hulk" was regularly severely damaged by conventional weaponry, but a likely weaker incarnation of the Hulk almost matched Odinforce Thor (1-A regular snake and conventional weaponry).
- Wonder Woman has been significantly damaged by regular bullets, and is more powerful than Wonder Girl (Cassandra Sandsmark), who drew blood from Superboy-Prime with a kick, who overpowered The Darkest Knight, who killed Perpetua, one of The Hands of Creation (High 1-A regular bullets).
That said, we can obviously continue to use power scaling for more internally consistent franchises headed by a single or unified creative voice. The problematic key issue is the staggering amount of different writers and contradictory stories for Marvel and DC characters over their several decades of existence.
Also, to clarify, we deliberately made the above scaling as ridiculously exaggerated as possible, to illustrate that we should not blindly use all powerscaling at face value without consistency and further context, since many people regularly use illogical outliers and extreme writer biases to get whatever statistics that they want, and this is exactly the kind of issue that we should attempt to avoid during our work, in order to gradually improve on the reliability of our profile pages.
Immortal Thor Volume 1, Issue 4, November 2023
The Rules
Given the long history of Marvel and DC, we are still able to get fairly reliable statistics for quite a lot of characters even without power-scaling between different writers:
- Feats: The most basic and reliable method for power-scaling would be direct feats. However, the feats should preferably be somewhat consistent, and elseworld and alternative continuity feats are not acceptable for power-scaling.
- Case-by-case basis: We can still use power-scaling for Marvel and DC, if a certain character is explicitly shown at a certain degree of power within a story, and another character legitimately matches that power. If a certain author portrays a character at a certain degree of power within a near time period, and has another character match it, power-scaling can also work, but even here it is important to use common sense regarding inconsistencies for story purposes.
- Official comparisons: If the handbooks officially list certain characters as equal, this can be used as a gauge in more logical instances.
- Consistency: If one character has been depicted to be superior or equal to another consistently, then logically speaking, the stronger or equivalent character can be power-scaled from the weaker or comparable one, if the weaker character has displayed greater practical feats in stories written by the relevant authors in question. For example, Kryptonians should logically be of similar levels of power to each other.
- Common sense: Common sense will also be necessary to distinguish between outliers and proper feats. As such, certain power-scaling will be accepted only with community consensus.
- Single statistics power-scaling: A more general inherent misunderstanding of power-scaling is the use of superiority of one statistic to power-scale all other statistics. This is highly inaccurate, and leads to flawed statistics listings. As such, power-scaling will only be done in a ”stat-by-stat” approach. Take note that this rule adheres to power-scaling in general, and is not limited to Marvel and DC only.
- Properly presenting the full contexts for scans of feats: When attempting to get profile page changes accepted in content revisions threads, always add full issue number references for the stories in which the feats depicted in images occur, so the members evaluating them can more easily verify the authenticity and canonical reliability of what is truly going on. It is also preferable if you honestly try to explain what is happening in the stories, as it is quite common for people to represent illegitimate feats out of context, including well-intended victims of misinformation (via respect threads or otherwise). Staff members are allowed to lock Marvel and DC Comics threads that do not list any sources for their images, but can be asked via their message walls to unlock them after this problem has been corrected.
Additional Rules
- For the Prime Marvel Universe, please refrain from making profiles for characters with less than 20 appearances across comic books (approximately 2 years' worth of appearances). For DC Comics, refrain from making profiles for Golden Age characters with less than 5 appearances, Pre-Crisis characters with less than 15 appearances and Post-Crisis or Post-Flashpoint characters with less than 10 appearances, unless they play an extremely important part in the scaling of other characters, as the constantly changing nature of their statistics make it hard for us to keep files updated as is.
- For keys in existing profiles, and equipment files, one only requires at least 15 appearances across comic books, as opposed to 20.
- Alternative canon/non-canonical character profile pages for Marvel and DC Comics can only be created if the version in question was prominently featured in their own runs, and scale to their own feats instead of being presumed to scale to their main canon counterparts.
Notes
Strictly adhere to these rules, as ignoring them purposefully will result in a ban.
Additionally, help in finding errors to be corrected within our Marvel and DC character profiles is greatly appreciated:
See also
References
Discussions
| Discussion threads involving Power-scaling Rules for Marvel and DC Comics |