[williamssl]

[glow=red,2,300]THIS POLL IS NOT YET OPEN - IT WILL OPEN THE EVENING OF SUN, DEC 17. USE THIS THREAD NOW TO CONVINCE YOUR FELLOW PUNSTERS WHO THEY SHOULD VOTE FOR[/glow]

Our ourth batch of 3 vs. 6 matchups has Marvel's #3, Venom vs. DC's #6, Darkseid

Their wiki's:

Venom

Darkseid


A few things:

• You're voting for who you think is the greatest supervillain, or the greater of the two. It's not about who could beat the other up.
  
• You can only vote once.
  
• The poll will open Sunday evening, December 17 and close at 10 pm Eastern on Thu, Dec 21, so have your vote in by then for it to count.
  

[salmonjunkie]

Wouldn't the DC/Marvel flip of this be Bane/Thanos?

[Deleted]

OK, sal. I bite. That comment went COMPLETELY over my head. 'Splain, please!

[salmonjunkie]

I've always seen Thanos as Marvel's Darksied, and Bane to be Batman's Venom.

[Deleted]

Ah, gotcha. I honestly don't know enough about Bane to put him as the villainous counterpart to Venom.

[williamssl]

Voting is open!

[The Canadian Content]

Does anyone have an argument for Darkseid here? I'm not overly familiar with him, but he looks pretty goofy and his head's shaped like a bucket. I leaning heavily toward Venom, and I'm ignoring recent Venom in the process.

[OpTard]

come on!!! it's fucking darkseid!!! lord of apokolips!!! psychofish, you should love him, he kicks superman's ass all the time!

here's some darkseid clips from the superman and justice league cartoons on youtube. watch them and enjoy.

youtube.com/results?search_query=darkseid&search=Search

[Deleted]

The guy's clearly illiterate, though. Doesn't even know how to spell his OWN NAME!

Capitalized for emphasis.

[Lucky]

I'm a total swing vote. I was leaning towards Venom until I learned he's apparently Scorpion. Now I'm in the air.

Wait, Scorpion-Venom was part of the Sinister TWELVE? Now I have to read some Spidey too? I FINALLY caught up on Infinite Crisis and most of One Year Later. I was hoping to gloss over everything before Civil War, damnit.

[The Canadian Content]

gatorbait said:

The guy's clearly illiterate, though. Doesn't even know how to spell his OWN NAME!

Capitalized for emphasis.

Dude, you just nailed the thing that bugs me most about this guy and always has: Is it Dark-SIDE or is it Dark-SEED? It should be pronounced SEED, given the spelling, and that makes it a retarded name. If it's actually pronounced SIDE, then it's either a long-running typo or ignorance on the writers' part.

[Lucky]

I choose to believe its Dark-Said. Just because. He's muslim.

And I guess naming himself DARK Said would be a bit racist too. Hmm...

[OpTard]

psychofish said:

then it's either a long-running typo or ignorance on the writers' part.

don't let serg here you talking about kirby that way.

[OpTard]

it's SIDE people! JEEZ!

[Lucky]

What do you know? You just misspelled "hear."

[OpTard]

but i pronounced it correctly

[OpTard]

you people have the worst taste in comics

[Lucky]

Hey, I haven't decided yet. But you aren't exactly making the case for us undecideds.

Unfortunatelly the most recent example of I have of Darkseid is in the horrid Superman/Batman comic with that crazy alternative universes story they did. And Supergirl. And Supergirl just sucked all over. Beyond that I don't recall Darkseid doing anything in forever.

Cartoon Darkseid probably gets balanced out by the Spidey 3 Venom footage and my excitement over that.

[OpTard]

sorry, i'm just not much of a case maker. darkseid's just a kickass character. he's got omega beams, and he rules apokolips. ands he has parademons and boom tubes and motherboxes. and crazy henchmen where one looks like a nazi or something. and he's in search for the anti-life equation. and he kicks superman's ass alot.

he's fucking darkseid!

[Lucky]

Ultimate Nullifier. Anti-Life Equation. You're really into these nebulous MacGuffins, huh?

Makes sense what with the Thanos thing. Infinity Gems and Cosmic Cubes. I've personally never been big on the big, intergalactic, "the fate of universe depends on you" stuff. I go for slightly more grounded stuff. Generally speaking. Each his own.

I find myself getting into the sappy melodramatic teen teams too much lately.

[OpTard]

yeah. i like the cosmic stuff.

[Batman]

"Seid" is German for "is" (or "are" or something) and is indeed pronounced "side." I pronounced it "darkseed" for years as a kid myself.

As much as I'm a Kirby fan, I can't make that great a case for Darkseid, either. He and his opposite number Highfather represent ultimate evil and good respectively, which isn't terribly interesting. What I find interesting is their sons. See, Darkseid and Highfather both knew that if their worlds kept up their war they would both be totally destroyed, but they didn't trust each other to keep a truce. So they sealed their pact by trading sons. Scott Free aka Miracle Man is Highfather's son raised by Darkseid's evil nanny Granny Goodness, and Orion is Darkseid's son raised by Highfather. Neat little "Nature or Nurture" experiment, eh? But the good side wins in both cases! So Orion is a great representation of learned restraint and conscious choice overcoming nasty instincts, while Free represents innate goodness and conscious choice overcoming bad upbringing. But they're both good guys, so they aren't really relevant except as part of Darkseid's intriguing milieu.

The Omega Effect is really cool. Darkseid shoots target-seeking death beams from his eyes. Like so:

[Deleted]

Glad to see I'm not the only one who had been mis-pronouncing comic names for years. I used to call him Mag-NET-o before I found out it's Mag-NEAT-o.

Anyways, I'm with whoever above posted about being more grounded. I prefer my stuff on the "human" level far more than I do on a cosmic scale. Although it always seems the only time we get really cool crossovers on a massive scale are when there's something cosmic going on.

Fuck Darkseid. Venom rules.

[Loki]

....because nothing says "human drama" like finding an alien symbiote on a planet that was composed of pieces of other worlds by a god-like being who brought together the forces of good and evil to do battle.... ;D

Intergalactic stuff is great if it is done correctly. Unfortunately, it seems like most comic writers just aren't that good at the cosmic level stories. Darkseid, for example, should be one of those grand cosmic players, but he is used too much and "weakened". I remember a fight scene where he fought Batman. In all reality, he should have obliterated Batman with one strike. But they had to bring Darkseid down to deal with Batman, and that just weakens the character.

One of the intergalactic stories I enjoyed was the Planet Heist / Rann-Thanagar War double set. That was great cosmic drama.

[Lucky]

I voted for Darkseid just because he looked so pathetic with only 2 votes.