Marvel Comics General

Pretty much this.

Guy should be going up against high tier threats.

Explaining it was the mistake.

It's already a known comic law of physics that the person who wins a fight is who the writer needs to win the fight.

This as well.

It's simply up to the writer to determine why in a plausible manner.

Of course, that gets harder when you have different writers with different ideas of how strong someone should be.

The answer to that is to hit writers with a foam bat until they behave.

I'm more talking about how they could write ways to allow Juggernaut to kick ass against threats the heroes need him to take out instead of nerfing him.

Like, sometimes seeing two villains duke it out is awesome.

There is a solution to different writers with different ideas of how smart, wonderful, petty every character should be. An official Marvel Universe handbook, which you then hand out to every editor. Or rather that SHOULD have been the solution. There's always going to be hiccups, like when Silver Surfer suddenly gains the Carnage symbiote and no longer is in the same state the handbook has him in, but you have crap like Spider-Man throwing a semi truck with tractor trailer at The Hulk, when it handbook clearly says "can lift ten tons. Under extreme circumstances he can potentially lift 30 tons". The editor should stop the artist, "Nope, this is too heavy for Spider-Man." Furthermore this vehicle and trailer flying through the air knocks Hulk out cold. The same handbook should be telling them that even at his most calm all this truck with trailer that Spider-Man shouldn't be able to lift, let alone throw, should only be knocking Hulk off balance if he didn't see it coming.

Then the handbook is just wrong sometimes besides. Like the very update for Arana, which states "class five strength" and "can't stick to walls" comes out the very same day as Arana's own comic showing her climbing straight up a wall, sticking to a wall with her hands and kicking up with her sneakers!

It's like DC reveals they actually have a map for their little multiverse and then puts out a bunch of comics that all violate said map in different ways. Is the speed force "above" or "below" the god sphere? Both and neither! Is the bleed the highest form of existence before the over void? Well why is Brainiac freely manipulating it? If Superman can fight this Brainiac then why is Brother Eye a problem? Oh look, Midnighter just survived a spill into the bleed! Clearly this is less deadly than a regular vacuum! Stormwatch now look like idiots for being impressed by Brainiac's bleed tricks! No wait, it is the monitor sphere right before the overvoid, except that we then established the god sphere above the monitor sphere because somebody is still upset about Antimonitor coming along and displacing Darkseid! The only difference being Marvel has a few decades on DC in the meaningless Universe Bible business, and doesn't have nearly as many inmates Running the Asylum to excuse it.

Edited by IndirectActiveTransport on May 11th 2024 at 9:22:25 AM

I like the character development Marko has gotten showing he's not really a bad guy.

His redemptive moments and character development are like the sole good parts of Asuten's infamous X-Men run.

Yeah, it's so weird. Like, so much of Austean's run is just... laughably terrible in every conceivable way possible. And then you get to the scenes with Juggernaut and suddenly it turns into this beautiful, moving story of redemption and two brothers reconciling after their fathers' abuse tore them apart. And then the scene is over and it's right back to stupid bullshit like airborne sex or redneck blood feuds or Nightcrawler becoming the Pope.

Uh Austen was never a great comic writer. But man is a killer executive producer. Steven universe, Penn Zero, She ra and kipo. It's wild how someone can make some of the worst comics made in the new era and make some of the modern eras best shows.

I'm sorry, Austean produced all of those?????

Yes. Weirdly enough for one of the worst comic writers of all time. Hes even the director of season 1 of steven universe.

That is insane. I never knew that.

In She Ra's case it helps that the actual writer is ND Stevenson who's excellent at writing LGBT content. Guess Chuck Austen's real talent isn't as a writer but as a producer.

And retcon or not, it makes sense that a god of destruction wouldn't be happy with an avatar that isn't causing destruction.

I feel that Hulk, Doomsday and Juggernaut suffer from the problem of writers not understanding that being physically strong can only get you so far. For Juggernaut to be seen as invincible, characters with much more versatile abilities need to forget how to use them or be weakened by the writers themselves.

Granted, Juggernaut and Doomsday both have power that goes beyond just being strong.

Doomsday's got an extremely deadly combo of Resurrective Immortality and Adaptive Ability. Every time something does manage to kill him, he revives with an immunity to whatever killed him. He's so powerful because he's been through this vicious cycle for a very long time. It's also why he's an Omnicidal Maniac — he's so traumatized by this that he thinks everything in creation is a threat.

Juggernaut meanwhile isn't just strong either. He is the avatar of Unstoppable Force. He's not truly unstoppable since he is just a Human Juggernaut, but he's as close to unstoppable as Cyttorak could make a mortal.

Hulk otoh is "just" really strong. Except his strength has no actual limit — the angrier he gets, the stronger he gets. Immortal Hulk showed just how bad this could get when the Hulk body was possessed by the angriest thing in existence, The One Below All.

Edited by M84 on May 12th 2024 at 6:33:32 PM

Of course Immortal Hulk and I think the latest run also showed that Hulk is an aspect of TOAA/TOBA, of which means he can tap into mysticism to let him punch on a spiritual level.

A lot of fancy words, but it basically means that some Hulk alters are also magic.

And in Hulk's current run he's been figuratively dunked on by both Thanos and Mistress Death, and while Death caught him by surprise, Hulk pulled up on Thanos and got put on his butt.

Now I'm not suggesting that you need to bring in a top tier threat like that every time an X-Men team with Juggernaut on it rolls out. Think about it, Optimus Prime, Grimlock, Fortress Maximus, Rhinox, whoever the big transformer is, often suffers setbacks without personally taking any damage whatsoever simply because they can't fly, can't move fast in water, can't be in enough places at once or don't have enough information.

Let's say immortal Hulk could just trounce Thanos regardless of whatever purple puss is using this season. Let's just say Immortal Hulk said "dumb magician, I'm busy with a fake One Above All! I don't have time for nasty chin right now. Try telling him Deadpool his making moves on Death far away from California! Bye!" There, that's why Thanos stomps on the the broken bodies of the Illuminati! Maybe you can then build up to a Hulk fight later, even, but in the same way Juggernaut being on the team doesn't automatically means Juggernaut solves all problems.

I'm not really sure what your trying to get at. Powers are relative and power levels change depending on the book and story they are being written in.

Eh, it's all just whoever the writers want to win. I recall the scene in Avengers: No Surrender where Hulk (recently Immortal) returns and just actively beats up on a bunch of Avengers including more than one whose powers should logically beat him no matter how strong he is but you know, magic. Very few writers actually seem to care about consistency that much.

Juggernaut solves the problems that can be solved by a really strong guy walking up and punching someone (or breaking something).

I'm pretty sure most of the X-Men's problems aren't that simple. And without nerfing him or downplaying his powers, half the fun of having him on the team again should be seeing Cain find ways to deal with stuff he can't simply beat by brute strength. Especially as he's not a super-genius who can just cook up a gadget or reprogram the villain's doomsday device.

I think Wonder Man, Jane Thor, and Hercules was the only characters who could actually fight him equal grounds in that issue. Of course Jane and Hercules could barely hold him down.

In that issue he encounters Enigma's pod suit whose density only makes her as hard as diamond so he easily tears off the suit, slaps away Cannonball, absorbs Maverick's Red Hulk gamma radiation leaving him powerless, and no sell's Lightning's full blast attack.

The only other character who gave him struggle was Vision using his density shifting and was defeated cause he didn't realize Devil Hulk was intelligent and tore off his head at the right time he would become solid.

My point is that if you just want a strong character to get beat it can be done without retconning his entire situation and permanently altering his relationships, as was done with Juggernaut and Cyttorak. Not only did Immortal Hulk lose two fights, but I gave an alternate scenario where he simply doesn't help the rest of his team right away because Hulk was legitimately doing his own thing in his own book that could legitimately push Thanos and California back on his "to do" list.

Which might retroactively explain how Professor Hulk was able to punch Mephisto in back during Rick Jones wedding.

You are mistaken, Thanos has not showed up in Phillip Kennedy Johnson's Incredible Hulk. The book has focused on Hulk fighting the mother of monsters and other supernatural creatures.

At least reference something that has actually happened in this run.

Edited by Cortez on May 12th 2024 at 2:30:33 AM

Yeah the Thanos fight was in the recent Thanos mini by Christopher Cantwell where the Illuminati sick Hulk on Thanos to stop him.