Who’s held ultimate power in their hands? These 15 comics characters!

Throughout fiction, one of the most popular recurring plots is the pursuit of power. Readers are fascinating with seeing character seek out more and more power and, of course, discovering whether it is true that “absolute power corrupts absolutely.” The problem with too much power is that it takes away from the stakes of the story. You can’t really have a lot of drama with an omnipotent hero or villain.

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Therefore, what we get instead is a lot of stories where a hero or villain briefly has omnipotence, just long enough for the sake of the story (some are briefer than others). Here, then, is a list of fifteen comic book characters that have had a taste of ominipotence. This doesn’t count those characters who are permanently powerful (like Doctor Manhattan or Solar, Man of the Atom), but rather characters who had a temporary fling with ultimate power. While the numbers may count down, it is actually just a chronological list.

13. Wolverine

 

In the 1987 “Uncanny X-Men Annual” #11 (by Chris Claremont, Alan Davis and Paul Neary), a mysterious being known as Horde forced the X-Men to break into the Citadel of Light and Shadow to steal the Crystal of Ultimate Vision for him. The journey through the Citadel was a perilous one, as the Citadel tempted the X-Men (and Captain Britain and Meggan, who were along for the ride) with their fondest wishes. The story is a bleak one, as some of the fondest wishes of the X-Men are pretty twisted (like Dazzler is given the choice between being a successful artist, a successful judge or a bag lady and she chooses the one with the least amount of pressure – the bag lady).

It comes down to just Wolverine and he is about to get the crystal when Horde shows up and kills him, because he actually just wanted the X-Men to pave the path for him. However, before Horde can touch the crystal, a drop of Wolverine’s blood (from Horde’s vicious attack) hits the crystal and Wolverine is awarded the prize of the Crystal. Its powers resurrects Wolverine and he becomes one with the universe. He rejects omnipotence and just returns his teammates back to normal.

12. Thanos

Like Doctor Doom, Thanos was always seeking objects of great power. This is because he was driven by a desire to impress Death itself, and he needed more and more power to kill more and more people. This search led him from giant killer spaceships all the way to his own Cosmic Cube. His search came to its pinnacle in the mini-series “Infinity Quest”, where he hunted down all of the Infinity Gems from the Elders of the Universe that possessed them and formed the Infinity Gauntlet. Thanos was now the most powerful being in the universe and in the crossover event “Infinity Gauntlet”, he quickly proved it by killing half of the people in the universe!

Ultimately, Thanos’ old rival (and occasional friend), Adam Warlock, helped Thanos realize the truth – he always knew deep down that he did not deserve ultimate power, which is why he always self-sabotaged himself just like Doom did with his power.

10. Adam Warlock

Once Nebula lost the Gauntlet, there was a mad scramble for the glove, but in the end it turned out to be Adam Warlock who took a hold of it. He then cleaned up all the respective messes that Thanos had left over from his time of omnipotence and then vanished. When next we saw Warlock, it was in the debut issue of “Warlock and the Infinity Watch.” There, Warlock decided that the Gauntlet was too powerful for any one being to possess, so he instead split the gems up with a group of heroes (and one villain) who would each safeguard one of the gems.

Later, it turned out that during his time of omnipotence, Warlock had secretly (a secret even to him) split up the “Evil” and “Good” sides of personality, as the omnipotent Warlock felt that both of those impulses got in the way. Those sides of Warlock, now known as the Magus and the Goddess, formed the basis of the next two “Infinity” crossovers, “Infinity War” and “Infinity Crusade”.

9. Hal Jordan

 

During the “Reign of the Supermen,” the evil Cyborg Superman destroyed Coast City, the hometown of Earth’s greatest Green Lantern, Hal Jordan. The trauma of losing all of those people caused Hal to essentially snap. Later, it was revealed that Hal had been possessed by a malevolent entity known as Parallax. At the time, it looked like Hal was so distraught with grief that he decided that the only way he could make things right was to get more power. In the crossover “Emerald Twilight,” Hal traveled to the home base of the Green Lantern Corps and ended up absorbing the entire Green Lantern Corps power battery. He killed some folks along the way, but he felt that it did not matter, since his plan was to fix everything.

This led to “Zero Hour”, where the now nigh-omnipotent Hal (calling himself Parallax) decided to restart the universe to fix everything that went wrong in the world. He was defeated by Earth’s heroes. Hal later atoned for his sins by sacrificing himself to restart Earth’s sun in the crossover “Final Night.” Later (after a brief stint as the Spectre, also a kind of omnipotent being due to literally being God’s spirit of vengeance), Hal was resurrected and became human again.

7. Kyle Rayner

When Hal Jordan sacrificed himself to re-ignite Earth’s sun, he left over a lot of residual power floating around the universe, and ultimately in a storyline in the pages of “Green Lantern,” that power ended up in Hal’s successor as the Green Lantern of Earth, Kyle Rayner. In a story just a little bit earlier, Kyle had fought against Oblivion, a powerful villain who turned out to have been created by Kyle’s own subconscious. So Kyle had already intentionally dampened his powers, something he fixed when he absorbed Oblivion. When he added in Hal’s excess powers, the result was Kyle becoming an omnipotent being known as Ion.

Eventually, Kyle realized that omnipotence meant losing touch with his humanity, so he gave up the powers and used them to recreate the Green Lantern Corps power battery and create a new group of Guardians. Years later, it was revealed that Ion was a being like Parallax that sort of possessed Kyle rather than Kyle turning into Ion.

6. Genis-Vell

 

Genis-Vell, the son of Mar-Vell, took on his father’s mantle as the new Captain Marvel. He then bonded with Rick Jones following “Avengers Forever” and they worked together as superheroes. One of Genis’ powers, though, was Cosmic Awareness. The problem with Cosmic Awareness is that as it develops, it can pretty much drive you insane, as you instantly know the ramifications of every move you make. That’s exactly what happened to Genis, as he was driven mad by all of the knowledge that he possessed, but with that power also came nigh omnipotence. Ultimately, while insane (and insanely powerful), he was convinced by the children of Eternity to destroy the universe, which he does.

Once destroyed, Genis-Vell is, in effect, one with the universe and his insanity subsided a bit and he managed to convince Eternity’s children to restart the universe, so Genis recreates the universe just as it was before, only with some slight changes (like how he has a sister, Phyla-Vell).

5. Thor

Dan Jurgens relaunched “Thor” following “Heroes Return.” The son of Odin was called back to Asgard once his father died fighting Surtur. Thor now had to take over as ruler of Asgard, gaining him access to the Odinforce as a result. This made him basically omnipotent. While ruling in Asgard, Thor was becoming increasingly worried about being torn from Earth, so he came up with the solution of bringing Asgard down so that it floated over New York City. Soon, people began to worship Thor on Earth and in a powerful crossover, Thor, Iron Man and Captain America got caught up in a controversy involving worshipers of Thor. The battle between the three former friends showed how powerful Thor was, as he even managed to dent Captain America’s shield!

Thor’s control over Earth grew and grew until he was basically a tyrannical leader. As it turned out, earlier events in the series left Thor incapable of feeling the right amount of empathy for humanity. In a great plot twist involving time travel, Thor’s reign over the Earth was stopped before it ever actually began. Soon after was the “Ragnarok” storyline and when the Asgardians were eventually reincarnated, Thor was no longer in possession of the Odinforce.

3. Cyclops

 

The Avengers, knowing what the Phoenix Force did when it joined with Jean Grey (omitted from this list since her whole deal is that she’s usually its bearer and not just briefly in possession of the power), wanted to destroy it upon learning it was en route to Earth. Meanwhile, the X-Men wanted to see why it was coming first. Their squabble led to Tony Stark building a “Phoenix-killer” that instead split the Phoenix Force into five pieces, which then possessed Magik, Colossus, Namor, Emma Frost and Cyclops.

The “Phoenix Five” quickly turned the tables on the X-Men/Avengers war and soon began hunting the Avengers down (Namor practically destroyed Wakanda in the process). However, when the Avengers defeated Namor, his Phoenix powers were distributed to the other four. When Magik and Colossus were then defeated, Emma and Cyclops ended up with all of their powers. Cyclops was then driven to take Emma’s powers, so he basically became Dark Phoenix. He didn’t handle that well and even ended up killing his own mentor, Professor X! Dark Phoenix Cyclops was eventually defeated and the Phoenix Force went to Hope Summers after all, who transformed it into something that brought mutants back to Earth, undoing the events of “House of M.”

2. Captain America

Following “Avengers vs. X-Men”, a new Illuminati was formed, reflecting Namor being on the outs from the group and Professor X being dead. Beast took Xavier’s spot and Steve Rogers (who had returned to being Captain America) was now more involved with the group. The Illuminati discovered the existence of Universal “Incursions”, where the Earths of other universe were going to collide with their Earth. The heroes had to come up with some way to stop this incursion. Eventually, the only solution that they could come up with was to re-form the Infinity Gauntlet. Naturally, once they did so, the only person that they trusted to wield it was Captain America, who used the gauntlet to push back the Incursion.

However, something went wrong and a bunch of the Infinity Gems were destroyed. In addition, since Captain America could not bring himself to actually destroy the other Earth, the Incursion was only delayed, not halted. The other members of the Illuminati then erased Captain America’s memories of the Incursions, as they needed to come up with ways of stopping them and they had to at least have the option of destroying the other Earths on the table, something they knew they would never have if Captain America was involved.

1. Mister Fantastic

The Incursions continued, and basically two groups (a Cabal led by Namor and a group led by the Ultimate Reed Richards, known as the Maker) have been destroying other Earths whenever Incursions occur, to the point where it more or less came down to just the Ultimate Earth and the regular Earth. Those Earths were unable to destroy each other, so this led to a collision and that, in turn with the work of Doctor Doom with Molecule Man (who turned out to be a tool of the Beyonders), resulted in the Multiverse breaking and Doom using the power of the Molecule Man to stitch it together. That is, with Doom as the main god of the remaining, awkwardly put together, Multiverse (now one giant world known as Battleworld).

Reed Richards survived, though, and eventually he confronted Doom. The Molecule Man turned his allegiance to Reed and gave him the power that Doom held. Just as Doom feared, Reed was better at it than Doom. When last seen, Reed (working with Molecule Man and Reed’s powerful son, Franklin Richards) was currently busy fixing the Multiverse, one world at a time. So, so far, Reed has handled omnipotence better than anyone!

 

Source : God Mode: 15 Comic Book Characters Who Had a Taste of Omnipotence – CBR