Venom vs Jackie Estacado (Marvel vs The Darkness)

(Br3ndan5)

 

(Sentinel_Devil) 

(Lod)

Venom, the King in Black.

Jackie Estacado, the host of The Darkness.

Light and dark. Black and white. Yin and Yang. Whatever you call them, they’re direct opposites, and their existence together creates balance. But what happens when one tries to tip the balance? The lines between both sides start to blur, and a man that was once the worst scum of the earth can strive to do good, even when their powers come from the darkness itself!

When it comes down to it, these two anti-heroes will do whatever it takes to protect their families, even if it means using their dark powers against the very beings responsible for them! But in a battle between two wielders of darkness, only one can have their light snuffed out! Will the King in Black be dethroned, or will darkness fall upon Jackie Estacado? Let’s dive headfirst into the dark as we find out who would win a DEATH BATTLE!

Before We Begin

For this blog, we’ll be analyzing the feats and abilities performed by Venom during his time as the King in Black and Jackie’s appearances in Top Cow’s original continuity.

Credit for some of the info here goes to the following sources:

• The G1 blogs for Spider-Gwen vs Sakura and Catwoman vs Black Cat
• Mediamania’s Hulk vs Godzilla
• Round 1 Fight’s Archie Tails vs Franklin Richards and Molecule Man analysis blog
• NuzlockeMaster’s Gorr respect thread

And special thanks to Lod for the custom artwork. 

 

Background

Venom

In the beginning there was nothing: an eternal void of darkness occupied only by the slumbering, gaunt deity Knull. Then the Celestials invaded, bringing light into the universe. This light awakened Knull, and the god of the void lashed out, forming a sword from his own shadow and severing one of the Celestial’s heads. Knull’s fury grew when he saw the Celestials spreading out into the world, filling it with light and life, and he decided to wage war. Using the slain Celestial’s head as his forge, Knull tempered his shadowy sword into a true blade and began experimenting with his control over darkness. After some failed attempts and prototypes, he created a new form of life: symbiotes.

Connected to their creator through a hive mind, the symbiotes were sent throughout the cosmos to corrupt any life they came across, but things changed when his forces came across Earth. While invading Norway, the humans called upon their god, the Mighty Thor, for aid, and the thunder god’s lightning severed Knull’s connection to the symbiotes. Now able to think for themselves, some of the symbiotes inherited their hosts’ concepts of honor and nobility, and these traits quickly infected the hive mind. Knull’s creations rebelled against him and imprisoned him in the core of their home planet, one they would dub “Klyntar” after their word for cage.

Free from Knull’s influence, the symbiotes went on to become defenders of the cosmos and tried to redeem themselves by protecting the worlds they once terrorized. One symbiote, unaware of its people’s origins, would find itself stranded on Earth after bonding to the Amazing Spider-Man, and its intervention would change the life of one Eddie Brock.

Eddie had an incredibly rough upbringing. His mom had died in childbirth, leaving him to be raised by his abusive father Carl. Despite constantly working for Carl's approval, Eddie could never measure up to his standards, and their relationship only grew worse when Eddie got drunk as a teenager and accidentally ran over their neighbor’s son. Eddie was horrified and believed he deserved to be punished, but Carl covered up the crime and beat his son until he agreed to plead not guilty. The charges were dropped, but Carl’s reputation was ruined and his animosity toward Eddie worsened as the years went on.

As he grew older, Eddie eventually landed a job as a journalist for the Daily Globe and became incredibly talented at his job. He even got his big break when he interviewed a man who claimed to be a serial killer called the Sin-Eater. This interview put Eddie on the map as copies of the Globe sold out… but an hour and a half later, Spider-Man apprehended the real Sin-Eater. Eddie’s big moment as a journalist had turned him into the biggest laughingstock in the papers. He was immediately fired from the Globe and disowned by his father, and instead of big name celebrities and covers, he was now reduced to writing venomous exposes and tabloids just to make a living.

Eddie was enraged at how his life had turned out. In his eyes, if Spider-Man hadn’t gotten involved, his life wouldn’t have been ruined. This anger slowly turned to an obsessive hatred, so much that his wife, Anne, divorced him. Now abandoned by everyone in his life, Eddie saw no point in living, but being raised Catholic, he went to a local church- Our Lady of Saints -to beg God for forgiveness before he killed himself. And something happened at that church that changed Eddie’s life forever.

At the same time Eddie entered, Spider-Man had just rejected an overly clingy symbiote and driven it off using the church’s bells. The symbiote, sensing Eddie’s own rage toward Spider-Man, bonded to him. Together, they became the thing Eddie had been paid to spew for the tabloids: Venom!

Venom relentlessly hounded Spider-Man to get revenge for ruining his life, but as time went on and circumstances changed, their relationship flip-flopped between sworn enemies and begrudging partners. They'd eventually mellow out and become willing partners as they were forced to work together against mutual enemies like Carnage, a serial killer bonded to the Venom symbiote’s son.

After years of Eddie and the symbiote working together as protector of San Francisco and swapping symbiotes/hosts, they’d reunite and soon start receiving nightmares and encounters with a strange malevolent force that was taking over other symbiotes. This malevolent force was none other than Knull, who had finally clawed his way to freedom and reignited his long dormant war with the light.

While preparing for Knull’s arrival, Eddie learned that years ago the Venom symbiote had anticipated this and impregnated Anne with its matter to produce a son. That same son, Dylan, was now being raised by Carl, who was just as abusive to him as he was to Eddie.

After confronting his old man, Eddie took Dylan away from Carl to begin raising him properly. Venom, Spider-Man, and Dylan would work together to stop Carnage- now Knull’s herald -from unleashing a symbiote invasion as a prelude to his master’s arrival. But when Knull finally arrived, Earth was nearly dominated by his symbiotes and Eddie was slain, being stripped of his symbiote and dropped from the Empire State. He only survived thanks to intervention from Knull’s polar opposite, the God of Light, which gave Eddie the power to destroy Knull and take his place, becoming the new King in Black.

Wielding the powers Knull had once possessed, Eddie was able to become a true hero, using his connection with the symbiotes to maintain peace across the universe. Though mere weeks into his rule, everything would change when he received a cryptic message from the future telling him Dylan and the Venom symbiote were in danger. When he tried to ascertain what this threat was, Eddie accidentally jettisoned himself into the future, arriving in a symbiote garden where he met Meridius and several other Kings in Black.

In his attempts to learn more about this future threat, as well as being hit by a vision of Dylan being attacked by a mysterious symbiote, Eddie accidentally sent himself further into the future and encountered Kang the Conqueror, who claimed they were old friends.

Under Kang’s teachings, Eddie learned how to travel through time, but in doing so, he’d unknowingly set in motion the very events he was trying to stop. To make matters worse, he also discovered his time travel had caused a time loop where he would become Bedlam, the monster from his visions that killed his son, and eventually turn into the cold, power hungry tyrant Meridius.

More desperate than ever to prevent Dylan’s death, Eddie discovered more of his powers when he accidentally crossed dimensions into Limbo, where he met its queen Madelyne Pryor and her new partner Chasm. Chasm wiped Eddie’s memories and brainwashed him back into believing he was still his villainous self, but when he learned he was no longer bonded to the symbiote, his rage transformed him into Bedlam. Bedlam was then betrayed by Chasm, who seized Madelyne’s power and cast him into the depths of Limbo where he fought Darkoth the Death Demon.

But then something unexpected happened. Because of Limbo’s different rules of time, the timeline split into two outcomes: one where Bedlam killed Darkoth and one where he lost. The Bedlam that won returned to the symbiote garden and continued the time loop, but the one that lost became unmoored from the loop and descended into the King in Black’s home: the Un-Beyond. There, he reverted to Eddie and confronted the Eventuality, the final, inevitable stage of this time loop.

After asking the Eventuality five questions, the unmoored Eddie learned what he needed to do to stop Meridius’ plans. Returning to the world of the living, he seized control of Bedlam, turned him into a symbiote, and hijacked Kang’s time machine, crashing it into Meridius during his first meeting with Eddie. However, Carnage suddenly interrupted their battle and destroyed the garden, throwing the Kings in Black back into the timestream.

Realizing they were no longer constrained by his time loop, the other Kings in Black turned on Meridius and teamed up with Eddie to remove the Venom symbiote from Dylan and prevent the existence of Venomworld, the thing that caused Meridius in the first place. Arriving back in the present, the four Kings took over a wrestling ring and issued a challenge to Dylan to come with the Venom symbiote.

Unfortunately, things went awry when Carnage and Meridius worked together to unleash a plague of undead symbiotes- the Zombiotes. Eddie was able to cure the infection by combining an Anti-Venom symbiote with his control over all symbiotes, but Carnage turned the infection on him by inserting traces of himself into the Zombiotes and Anti-Venom. Left with no other choice, a future version of Dylan ambushed Eddie from behind and impaled him with a codex blade, removing his connection to the symbiote hive and his powers as the King in Black.

Still retaining his status as King in Black, Meridius fatally impaled Eddie, only to be destroyed by Future Dylan. With his son’s safety assured, Eddie went to Our Lady of Saints Church to spend his last moments before bleeding out. But when he arrived, he discovered the Carnage symbiote in a similar state. Eager to ensure its survival, it bonded with Eddie, and once again, his time in church had birthed a new lethal protector: Carnage.

Jackie Estacado

In the beginning there was nothing: a formless, empty void. Then God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. God saw that the light was good, and He separated the light from the darkness. But the creation of this light- the Angelus -elicited a visceral reaction from the darkness, and it struck back. 

These primal forces waged war with each other, and when God created humanity, they saw the perfect tools to destroy their hated rival. The Angelus would periodically possess random women to directly engage the Darkness, while the Darkness bonded to the worst men, acting like a parasite that spread from host to host. That was until it discovered a particularly fertile bloodline, one that would become known in the modern day as the Estacado family.

The Estacados were the worst of the worst: a family of thieves, rapists, murderers, and all around greedy men who wanted nothing but power and wealth. Even those not born into the family would have their souls corrupted by the Darkness and steered toward ruin.

Such was the case for Jackie Estacado. With his mother having died in childbirth and his father dead before he was born, Jackie was placed in Saint Garard’s Orphanage, where he befriended a young girl named Jenny Romano. Jackie was fiercely loyal to Jenny, making sure that anyone who abused her would be beaten until they were hospitalized.

These violent tendencies would be further stoked by mafia don Frankie Franchetti, who adopted Jackie at age 6. By the time he was a teenager, Jackie had become the Franchetti mafia’s local hitman, and his life would become marked by violence, money, and a love for the ladies. Then everything changed on his 21st birthday. Like with its previous hosts, the Darkness fully manifested inside Jackie, urging him to use its power and let it out.

With the power of the Darkness now his, Jackie found that he could create whatever he desired, including his own legion of goblin-like imps, the Darklings. These new powers made it easier as a hitman, but he now found himself thrown into a world of the supernatural. He was hounded by the Brotherhood of Darkness, a cult whose leader, Nino Sonatine, sought the Darkness for himself. And when he wasn’t dealing with that, he’d have multiple encounters with the Angelus, a Catholic assassin called the Magdelena, and Sara Pezzini, a police detective who’d bonded to the Darkness and Angelus’ offspring, the Witchblade. Even his secret sister Capris got in on the action!

But nothing they did could hurt Jackie as much as the biggest stipulation of his powers. Because of how the Darkness passed onto its host, he could no longer have sex. This shook Jackie to his core, and his newfound celibacy left him extremely frustrated and pent-up. However, there was one silver lining through it all. Without any women to bang, he was finally able to reunite with Jenny and started to realize he had feelings for her.

At one point, while attempting to help Frankie expand his business into Gotham City, Jackie would have a change of heart after meeting Batman (no, I’m not kidding. Their crossover is officially part of the story). Inspired by Jenny’s wish for him to do something good with his life and the Dark Knight’s ability to do good despite Gotham’s condition, Jackie decided to turn himself in. Unfortunately, Frankie witnessed this and got the wrong idea.

Believing Jackie was trying to rat him out, Frankie had Jenny kidnapped and mailed him a tape of her getting shot in the head. Being forced to watch her death and knowing he could do nothing about it broke Jackie, and with the one bright spot in his life now extinguished, he had nothing left to live for. He tricked Frankie and his mob into entering a warehouse, then had the Darklings douse it in gasoline and set it ablaze, killing himself and everyone inside.

Unfortunately for Jackie, the Darkness wasn’t done with him. Two days after his death, he was resurrected by it and tracked down by Frankie’s cousin Paulie. Under the threat of Jenny’s sister being assassinated, Jackie returned to being a hitman and eventually double-crossed Paulie, killing him and becoming the new head of the Franchetti family.

This wouldn’t last long, as after an encounter with the Angelus, Jackie lost everything and fled to Sierra Munoz, where he met a demented scientist named Dr. Kirchner. With Kirchner’s help, Jackie became a successful drug kingpin and fine-tuned his control over the Darkness, even learning to create an infertile woman named Elle to be his lover.

But like all good things in Jackie’s life, this soon fell apart when the Darkness caused Elle to become pregnant, giving birth to a “son” made to kill him and Kirchner. Their fight would eventually take things to space, where the sun’s rays burned it to death.

After surviving a fall from orbit (and being gaslit into killing demons by a sentient statue that supposedly had ownership of his soul), Jackie met Aram, a mysterious sorcerer who wielded the Darkness thousands of years ago. While Jackie was initially wary of him, this “witch king” proved a valuable ally in stopping Capris from starting a zombie plague with the traces of Darkness inside her.

Following this, Jackie wound up involved in a much larger scheme from a man called the Curator. As it turned out, the Darkness had possessed Jackie years ago and used him to impregnate Sara while she was comatose. Their child, Hope, was seen by the Curator as the “codex” that would bring about a new world. 

By bringing 13 Artifacts together, the Curator was able to slowly destroy the universe, but before he could kill Hope and ensure the world would be remade in his image, Jackie killed him at the last second. As a result, the only ones left to dwell in the blank, empty void were Hope, Sara, and Jackie, having been spared thanks to their connection to their daughter.

Unfortunately, as the Curator had told them beforehand, Hope’s death was the only way to ensure the universe would be restored. Left with no other choice, Sara was forced to kill her own daughter despite Jackie’s wishes.

The universe was reborn, but through some unknown means, Jackie had seized control of the process, using Hope’s power to create his ideal life and rewrite the memories of anyone that could’ve stopped him. In this new world, Jackie was a successful mafioso, Jenny was his wife, and Hope was their eight year old daughter. But as time went on, cracks started to form, both figuratively and literally.

Over the next few weeks, the bearers of the 13 Artifacts could feel memories of the previous world trickling in and slowly realized something was wrong, eventually picking up that Jackie was responsible. Things weren’t much better in the Estacado household, as during an argument over Jackie’s life in the mob, the Darkness nearly caused him to hit Jenny. This proved to be the last straw, and Jackie tried to have Aram remove the Darkness from him. After several days, they finally succeeded in exorcising it, causing its matter to transform into a clone of Jackie.

This new creature, the Doppelganger, seemed benevolent at first, helping Jackie assassinate his rivals in the mob while he stayed at home. But over time it became more aggressive and slowly took over his life, trapping Jackie in his own basement and spreading a Darkness-induced virus across New York. Things only got worse as Jenny rapidly deteriorated from early onset dementia, and Hope slowly grew more violent, aggressive, and un-childlike.

By the time Aram helped Jackie absorb the Doppelganger back into himself, his new world was already falling apart. The Artifact bearers were constantly targeting him and his family, and then he learned that Jenny’s resurrection had upset the natural balance, creating cracks across the world that risked summoning otherworldly gods called the Ancient Ones.

But at this point, Jackie didn’t care. His criminal empire was gone, his coworkers had died to the Darkness virus, and the Artifact bearers who were once his allies now wanted him dead. All he had left was his broken facsimile of a family. His wife had mentally reverted to a child and his daughter was now a monster, but he’d do anything to keep them together! Ignoring Aram’s warnings, he struck a deal with the Ancient Ones, offering to open a portal and let them through as long as they left him and his family alone.

Left with no other choice, Aram contacted Sara and informed her of Jackie’s plans. Having had her own encounters with the Ancient Ones, Sara went to the Estacado estate to dissuade Jackie, but he was too far gone to listen to reason. Sara and Jackie fought to the death, ending in her and Aram working together to behead Jackie and permanently destroy the Darkness.

While Jackie and the Darkness were now gone, they left behind their legacy in the form of Hope. No longer the sweet little girl she once was, she was now a vengeful creature working from the shadows to avenge her father, even if it meant spending centuries corrupting future Estacados to embrace their sinful bloodline.

Experience, Intelligence, and Skill

Venom

For years (in-universe) and decades (in real life) Eddie Brock has been many things: a villain and Lethal Protector of San Francisco as Venom, a disease-purging antihero as Anti-Venom, an obsessed bruiser and eventual hero as Toxin, and King in Black. As the King in Black, he traveled the cosmos with an army of symbiotes and battled numerous enemies like aliens, his future selves, Doctor Doom, Kang the Conqueror, and a godlike Carnage.

As Bedlam he battled Dylan Brock’s Venom and temporarily “killed” him, destroyed some techno demons, and fought Darkoth the Death-Demon.

By the time he became Meridius, he’d been alive for thousands of years, having spent centuries training under Kang to learn using combat, strategy, and how to use his powers. He later used his previous experiences as Eddie to set upthe events that would eventually turn Eddie into him.

Jackie

Since his birth in 1975 and adoption into the Franchetti mafia, Jackie’s taken to the role of a hit man as easily as he did to the Darkness’ powers. After killing his first man at 16, he became the Franchetti family’s top hit man by his teen years, and by adulthood he was an expert with various weapons and martial arts. He was such a brazen killer that over 100 eyewitnesses linked him to gang-related murders, yet he’d never been arrested.

He’s killed Yakuza on multiple occasions, killed from the shadows and remained hidden in them while avoiding detection, and infiltrated an army base by disguising himself as a target dummy.

He was able to defeat a 1200 year old Angelus host by tricking her into using up her power until she decayed, forcing the Angelus to abandon her and search for a new host. He’s attacked enemies through their shadows after having his armor and Darklings dispersed by light, killed people by summoning darkness  and Darklings inside them, exploited a man’s immortality by cutting off his limbs and sealing him in a vat of turkey shit, and created eardrums for a deaf rapist so he’d be caught in his victim’s illusion-creating song.

He tricked Frankie and his men into entering a warehouse before having it set ablaze for a successful murder-suicide. And when he was resurrected, he got Paulie to back himself into a corner at the right position to block out the sun and kill him. Years later in Sierra Munoz, he tricked his Darkling son into killing himself by entering space right as the sun rose.

Even without the Darkness inside him, he’s come up with some creative and horrific ways of killing people, like suffocating a comatose man with a piece of bubble gum or duct taping a man’s nose and mouth shut until he slowly suffocated, then having some junkyard dogs eat him.

Apart from everything else, Jackie’s got some insanely high willpower. He’s enduredtortureseveraltimes without breaking, retained his ability to fight after been exposed to the Light of the Magdalena, which forces the target to relive their past sins to the point of possibly commiting suicide, and psychically experienced all the pain and violence the Darkness had inflicted on others.

Forms

Venom

Upon becoming the King in Black, Eddie Brock’s life was thrown into a seemingly unending cycle orchestrated by a future version of himself, Meridius.

While not transformations in the true sense, each one is a stage in Eddie’s life from some point in the future. According to Meridius, Finnegan is a coward desperately trying to escape the cycle he’s just discovered. Bedlam is Eddie’s infinite rage at the discovery. Wilde is the cold cynicism and petty jokes that remain when the anger cools. When that eventually breaks, it leaves Tyro, an Eddie so desperate to escape fate he becomes Meridius’ student. Meridius is supposedly what Eddie will become no matter what, but his assuredness blinds him to a final step in Eddie’s evolution.

Finnegan

The result of Eddie’s panicked thoughts manifesting the Symbiote Garden after witnessing Dylan’s (supposed) death, Finnegan is the first step in Eddie’s journey to becoming a true King in Black. Normally appearing as a skinny gray symbiote, Finnegan can also use his shapeshifting to take on a buff form if he feels like it. 

 

Bedlam

After Chasm erased his memories of Dylan and reset him to his villainous ways, Eddie underwent a brief case of delusion where he thought he still had the Venom symbiote. When he realized he no longer had it, his anger transformed him into a red symbiote called Bedlam.

Bedlam is Eddie at his worst, his rage made manifest: a violent monster that only wants to hurt and kill others, even children. Despite being a complete meathead, he does retain some humor from his time as Venom, albeit in the form of lame jokes and pop culture references.

Wilde

 

When Bedlam’s anger eventually simmered down, the hulking symbiote shrank in size and grew increasingly bitter. The result was Wilde, a jaded symbiote who hides his cynicism with sarcastic jokes. Unlike most of Eddie's other selves, he doesn't get much screen time. The most relevance he has is explaining how Kings in Black aren't bound by linear time, and that's only a few seconds before turning into...

 

Tyro

 

After accidentally setting Finnegan on his path to save Dylan, Wilde’s sense of humor died and he became Tyro, an Eddie defined by his desire to escape the cycle by becoming as powerful as Meridius. Like Wilde, his screen time is pretty limited, though he does get a training montage in his accidental quest to becoming Meridius.

 

Meridius

After abandoning Meridius’ teachings and learning of his fate as the Eventuality, Tyro grew more desperate than ever to escape the cycle and fled to the future, where he began training under Kang the Conqueror. And upon witnessing Venom’s final form, Venomworld, the shock of it caused Tyro to become the sixth stage of Eddie’s evolution, Meridius. Having been alive for centuries, Meridius has changed from the man Eddie once was, becoming a cold, calculating, and self-assured monster that sees his past selves and everyone around him as fools to be manipulated. 

He’s the mastermind behind all of the events that drove Eddie into these previous transformations, all in an effort to obtain the Venom symbiote for himself and rule over the universe with an iron grip.

Unlike previous versions of Eddie, this one is unique since he has full control over the Symbiote Garden, a planet of symbiotes made out of his body. He can even create giant versions of himself if he wants.

 

The Eventuality

Upon dying, both Eddie and Dylan’s souls were sent to the Un-Beyond, where they met the final stage in Eddie’s evolution as the King in Black. No matter what choices he made beforehand, as long as any version of Eddie survives long enough as Venom, he will inevitably become this: a multiversal amalgamation of every Eddie as one, cosmically aware of all realities in the multiverse, especially ones involving symbiotes.

Usually manifesting as a disembodied hand with glowing Venom eyes behind it, the Eventuality can take on other forms like a skeletal Xenomorph, Eddie’s face emerging from his palm, or Eddie in a set of symbiote armor.

Unlike Meridius, who became a power-hungry villain in an attempt to escape his fate, the Eventuality has accepted his role as the King in Black. He’s far more relaxed and patient and performs his duties out of necessity, even accepting that when the time comes, he might become as bad as Knull to ensure a successor takes his place.

While he typically remains in the Un-Beyond, he can physically travel to other universes if he desires. And despite his screen time mainly being spent guiding different Eddies and Dylan, the Eventuality is immensely powerful. A potential future showed that if Eddie wasn’t stripped of his power as the King in Black, he would outlive Marvel’s current multiverse, the Eighth Cosmos, to become the “Anti-All” and threaten to destroy the Ninth Cosmos. 

 

Jackie

Dragon 

While battling the Angelus and her forces during the events of First Born, Jackie briefly transformed into a massive, fire-breathing dragon. With only 1 and a half pages, it somehow has less screen time than Wilde, but you gotta admit it looks badass. 

 

Equipment

Venom

Bedlam Symbiote 

After invading his mind and forcing him to confront the truth about his dependence on Venom, Eddie convinced Bedlam to join him as his symbiote. This allowed Bedlam to turn into a shapeshifting mass of symbiote goo capable of manipulating his body however he or Eddie desires, such as turning into a luggage bag or firing chains from his body. When bonded, Bedlam can take the form of a four-armed man or his usual appearance, and he can become bigger and stronger by eating other Kings in Black.

Symbiote Cane

Upon becoming the King in Black, this initially put strain on Eddie and aged him into an old man, forcing him to rely on a symbiote cane. If he needs to, he can throw it at an opponent, reducing it to goo and restraining them.

Sword and Axe

On occasion, Eddie’s been known to summon swords and axes out of his symbiotes during battle.

Necrosword

While Eddie himself hasn’t summoned All-Black, he should still be able to conjure a Necrosword as a King in Black based on different indirect and somewhat direct showings.

The first occasion he does is prior to becoming King in Black, where he uses a sword he created from his amalgam symbiote, made of multiple symbiote and host codices that also let him connect to the hive mind, to tear Dark Carnage and disconnect his minions from their symbiotes, similar to how All-Blood the Necrospear severed Eddie’s symbiote connections in Venom War. The second showing comes from later on when Carnage embarks on a quest to become the next God Butcher and surpass Knull, during which it hunts down Malekith in Hel and extracts his codex which contained the memory of the Venom symbiote when Malekith bonded to it during the War of the Realms to make a Necrosword. Carnage soon after uses the codex to act as a template for the dwarf Drorin to forge All-Blood in Nidavellir. Lastly, Eddie’s predecessor, Knull, himself drew a symbiote sword out of a shadow to kill a Celestial, before creating All-Black in his banishment. While it’s unclear if Eddie’s Necrosword carries the same soul-splitting properties as All-Black, it clearly maintains its immortality negating and hive mind severing capabilities. 

Given the King in Black’s own physiology as a being with access to multiple codices and capable of forming Necroswords on their own accord, the showings above should reasonably translate to them.

 

Jackie

Darkness Armor

 

Jackie’s standard creation whenever he manifests the Darkness. Formed from necroplasm, this armor can form over his clothes like liquid, has shown multiple times that it’s bulletproof, and swords will break against it.

Aram, a previous wielder of the Darkness, has implied the armor can take different forms, but Jackie doesn't have the courage or imagination to change it.

 

Constructs

With his control over the Darkness and his active imagination, Jackie has no shortage to what he can create from its matter. This includes:

• A knife and handgun
• Dual pistols
• Grenades
• A clamp and throwing knives
• Machine guns
• Chains
• Chainsaws
• Blades on his armsand wrists
• A scorpion tail
• Hands the size of a car
• Shields and cocoons tough enough to withstand building-destroying explosions
• A sentient labyrinth in Sierra Munoz that only guides him and those close to him to his destination, while leading others to Darklings
• An enormous Susanoo-esque avatar

Other users like Dr. Kirchner have made things like a giant mech that shoots flames.

 

 

Colt M1911 Pistols

Jackie’s preferred tools when carrying out assassinations. He’s used them extensively against some thugs and Paulie’s men.

Grenades

 

Aside from making them with his powers, Jackie’s stolen one from a hitman to use against other hitmen.

HK416 Machine Gun

An assault rifle with a magazine capacity anywhere from 10-30 rounds. It can fire 850 rounds per minute at a muzzle velocity of 790 m/s. Jackie used one against an entire group of hitmen.

MP5K-PDW Submachine Gun

A Heckler & Koch model with a magazine capacity of 15-30 rounds, a firing rate of 900 rounds per minute, and a muzzle velocity of 1230 fps (374 m/s). Much to Jackie’s dismay, it runs out rather quickly.

 

Sun Dagger

 

Forged by the Angelus from the heart of a small star over the course of 28 years, the Sun Dagger used the coalesced light energy and life force of an entire star system to create the perfect tool for slaying the Darkness’ hosts. With it, the wielder can inflict wounds that even the Darkness is unable to heal, and it can even kill the Darkness’ host in the right hands.

Originally used by Jackie’s accountant Regis Tyne in an attempt to kill him, Jackie took it for himself after accidentally killing Regis, storing it in his chest and eventually using it to kill the Heart of Darkness in the Darkness dimension.

Aside from being used as a weapon, Jackie can also use it to illuminate his surroundings and cut open portals to enter the Heart of Darkness’ home.

Powers

Venom

King in Black Status

After killing Knull, Eddie took his place as the new King in Black, becoming the one to maintain the universe using organic matter. As a King in Black, he is no longer human, but “pure mind, capable of inhabiting an infinite array of external bodies.” This lets him extend his mind through other symbiotes and take control over them. He also possesses a full connection to the symbiotes’ hive mind, so if his current body is killed, his consciousness will transfer itself to another symbiote somewhere across time or space. See the Symbiote Hive Mind, Symbiote Domination, Mental Time Travel, and Symbiotes sections below for more details.


While Eddie has never shown these abilities, his predecessor, Knull, has:

• Darkness manipulation: He’s ripped darkness-based power sources out of heroes in the past and absorbed them into himself. Even without being in his direct presence, Knull’s psychic energy was enough to merge Cloak’s darkness with his, corrupting Cloak and making him more sadistic
• Energy manipulation: Can fire blasts of purple energy capable of harming Silver Surfer and incinerate his symbiote dragons by firing red energy when enraged
• Portal creation: Can create portals to other locations, including other universes, by slicing through space 

Symbiote Hive Mind

 

As the new King in Black, Eddie was able to connect to every symbiote in the universe by being linked to the symbiote hive mind, a metaphysical plane where all symbiotes and their hosts’ codices are interlinked. Initially, it appeared to be a dark void with nothing but symbiotes and codices, but more information would be presented as the Venom stories progressed.

The first area of this realm is a purgatory where codices are held, but after its walls were broken down due to the damage to Knull’s link from Dylan and Thor, Eddie and co. were able to venture into the deepest layer, the God Hive, described as the central nervous system that connects all of the symbiotes in the universe.

However, this is not the full scope of the plane, as it’s later revealed in Spider-Verse vs. Venomverse to be one that spans the entire multiverse, mirroring the multiversal Web of Life and Destiny. In fact, the hive is sentient and capable of acting on its own, having cast forward in infinite directions to chart the course of possible fates and pulling dozens of symbiote fighters from across the multiverse in a survival contest against the Web Heart. The hive also states that each universe’s King in Black is “but a square face of the hive mind’s infinitely sided cube”, and this is supported by the Eddie Brock of Earth-2250 having been a King in Black himself, Knull being able to communicate with the Venom of Earth-1041 and portal him into 616 during his invasion of Earth, and the Eventuality’s ability to peer into other universes and affect them as well as bring multiple Venoms to the Un-Beyond.

Human/Symbiote Physiology

 

Since becoming the King in Black, Eddie’s body is no longer flesh and muscle, but the same material as symbiotes, and he can reconfigure each of his cells however he wishes. He’s only limited by his imagination.

This gives him full control over his body, letting him shut off his ability to feel pain, regrow muscles, and restart his heart. He’s used his intestines to choke a guy and turned his nervous system into webbing to reach into Bedlam’s mind. Bedlam created extra mouths out of his stomach, a hole in his body, and his back, and Meridius could turn into liquid to escape Eddie’s grasp.

Regeneration

In addition to the benefits stated above, Eddie’s status as a human/symbiote hybrid provides him with some impressive levels of regeneration. Eddie can survive as a severed head, fully restore himself from a mess of meat and bones, or regenerate from a stain after falling 6000 feet. He can be melted into liquid and blown up, yet he’ll still be willing to fight even with his muscles still regenerating. Even when his bones are dead, moldering, and have no symbiote material attached to them, they’ll still fully regenerate his body in seconds.

Eddie’s other selves have shown similar levels of regen. After being stabbed through the head, Bedlam was able to quickly regenerate and continue the fight, Finnegan regenerated in seconds from being splattered by Bedlam, and Wilde reformed himself immediately after being torn in half. Meridius has come back from having his chest ripped open, and been reduced to powder only to restore himself as a giant symbiote.

In addition to healing themselves, the Kings in Black can spread this healing to each other, like when Meridius healed Bedlam’s severed arm.

Symbiote Creation/Summoning

Kings in Black can create new symbiotes through their blood or by vomiting them onto others, and they can even summon existing ones out of their skin.

Symbiote Telepathy

 

Eddie is able to telepathically communicate with other symbiotes across the entire universe, letting him communicate with them and issue commands across galaxies and receiving telepathic distress signals if things go wrong.

Through physical contact with a symbiote’s matter, tendrils, or his exposed nervous system, Eddie and the other Kings can enter a person’s mindscape to learn information or fight them on a mental plane.

As shown by Knull, this telepathy extends across universes, and he can bring alternate symbiotes into his current world.

Symbiote Domination

Like Knull before him, Eddie gained total control over the symbiote’s hive mind, allowing him to control any symbiote anywhere. He can use this control to force them to obey his commands, leave their hosts, prevent them from attacking him, possess them, or merge them together to create a larger vessel or a temporary “body” for himself. If these symbiote “bodies” are destroyed, Eddie can force them to possess anyone nearby.

Meridius is able to manipulate symbiotes by directly controlling them and, if he wants to, eating their minds, leaving behind lifeless symbiote matter that follows his commands. He can easily turn symbiote-based technology against their users or shut them off and was able to destroy the sentience of an entire planet of symbiotes. At his peak, he was able to take over all of the symbiotes in the Symbiote Garden to become a giant that’s at least 30 feet tall.

Acausality

Time isn’t linear for Kings in Black, allowing them to experience and travel through the past and future to explore forgotten pasts and possible futures.

Eddie was able to kill his past selves and have them die in front of him without any consequence, and Meridius still existed after Eddie lost his status and powers as King in Black.

While in the future, Knull was able to create a barrier in front of the sun that appeared in the past and could communicate with that time’s Mister E and restore his power.

Shapeshifting

Eddie and his future selves can turn their entire bodies into symbiote material, letting them travel through small spaces, shapeshift however they wish, possess those nearby, or restrain them by sending their flesh through cracks in the ground. They can create weapons out of symbiote material or their own flesh, including razor sharp claws, blades, guns, a 2000° Kelvin flamethrower, swords, shields, chains, or a chainsaw hand that cuts through webbing. He can stretch his arms, summon wings on his back to fly, or turn into a flock of symbiote bats. Bedlam could turn into a luggage bag, and Meridius can become a T-Rex or stretch his arms and look like Venom.

Mental Time Travel

After a missile strike blew up his body, Eddie discovered his mind could be sent to other time periods and manifest through symbiotes or their material.

Originally he could only travel by concentrating or experiencing intense emotions like panic, which would send him to random time periods. However, after receiving training from Kang, Eddie could travel back to the past by visualizing a specific moment in his mind.

Even after his training, Eddie’s consciousness can be jettisoned into another era or place if it’s attacked or devoured.

Over time, thanks to Wilde’s advice and further training from Kang, Eddie learned to send his mind anywhere in time and any direction in space as long as there’s even a scrap of symbiote. And because Kings in Black don’t operate on linear time, he doesn’t need to go forward or backward. He can enter whatever point in time he wants, and even go sideways through time to enter other universes or dimensions.

As Meridius, learned how to send his consciousness through time without needing to jump into symbiote matter and freely slip into the timestream with a thought. His control over this lets him make any preparations necessary for his plans, and he can redirect other Kings in Black mid-travel, trapping their consciousness inside another being.

Atom Manipulation/Battlefield Removal

 

Dubbed “atom-smearing” by Wilde, the Kings in Black are able to disintegrate a person’s body in a flash of light that spreads their atoms throughout history and sends them to another time.

Jackie

The Darkness 

 

An ancient primordial force that existed before time itself, the Darkness was there when the universe began, and when God created humanity, the Darkness took to this new creation like a parasite. After millennia of infecting men, it eventually settled on the Estacado clan. From then on, it would bond to the men of this family, corrupting them into a life of sin and chaos. These vessels would become the worst of the worst: murderers, thieves, rapists, warlords, and plunderers, and in exchange for sewing discord the Darkness granted them further power.

The Darkness passes to its hosts at the point of conception, killing the old one and remaining dormant in the new until their 21st birthday. Once it awakens, the Darkness becomes connected to all of the host’s cells (some statements go further and say it spreads to their molecules and atoms), and they gain access to an entire dimension of dark, mystical energy, letting them create anything their twisted black hearts desire.

Should it feel the need to, the Darkness can possess Jackie and use him as a puppet, leaving his mental state a blurred mess while he’s along for the ride. However, it’s only done this to impregnate Sara while she was comatose as part of a plan to kill the Angelus, and taunt her after she decapitated Jackie.

While only shown twice, the Darkness does have a true form: a green eye surrounded by tendrils. However, both depictions are on opposite ends of the spectrum. Its first appearance shows it as a massive green eye with a mouth of fangs and tendrils the size of a grown man, but the second makes it a green eye that can fit in your palm with small tendrils that writhe around uselessly.

Darkness Manipulation

Jackie can manipulate darkness and shadows to his whim. He can create constructs or Darklings with a thought, shapeshift his body, or even teleport through the shadows, among many other abilities.

His control over this was later fine-tuned by Dr. Kirchner, allowing his constructs to persist outside of his presence and letting him manipulate darkness at the molecular level, letting him create complex machinery, human bodies, and specific body parts. This included learning how to transform the darkness into liquids like water and acid, which he can use on attacks made from darkness.

Jackie’s separated parts of the Darkness that could be synthesized into a non-addictive drug whose effects last for hours. He can even remove the darkness from a person’s body, which he used to free Sara Pezzini from the Witchblade’s corruption and give her control over it. And while Jackie has never done so, the past wielder Idris was able infect others with the Darkness and turn them into Darklings. 

 

Enhanced Senses

 

Jackie is able to see events that occur under cover of darkness and shadows, letting him view people up to four blocks away and witness the deaths of some Algerian drug smugglers and pushers in a warehouse. Other wielders of the Darkness have even been shown to see and hear through their Darklings.

Shapeshifting

 

By manipulating the necroplasm in his body, Jackie can alter himself in any way he wants.

He can stretch his arms, create massive wings and necroplasmic tendrils fired from his hands or stomach cavity, take on a monstrous form for intimidation, or disguise himself as a Chinese hitman. 

 

Darkling Creation

 

Even early into his time with the Darkness, Jackie could summon an army of thousands of Darklings, and his go to method when dealing with a threat is typically to sic a swarm of Darklings on them. He can even summon them out of his body or inside someone.

In an alternate future, he was able to replace everyone on Earth except for him, Rachel, and Finn with Darklings, though he had to spend over 10,000 years gathering ancient artifacts and studying sorcery to accomplish this.

Cloning

 

On occasion Jackie’s cloned himself to trick others and escape an unwinnable battle. He’s used this strategy against the Angelus and the Hunter-Killers.

Electrokinesis

 

By using a bio-electric field and channeling it through a tendril, Jackie was able to electrocute Dr. Kirchner, though this was immediately turned on him.

 

Memory Reading

By touching his face, Jackie was able to see through David Lizewski’s memories before killing him.

Memory Manipulation

 

After the universe was remade during the events of Artifacts, Jackie through some unknown means altered the memories of his new family and the other Artifact bearers. Dani Baptiste went from a ballet dancerto a police detective, Sara Pezzini moved to Chicago and forgotshe hada daughter, Tom Judge became an FBI agent, and some of the 13 Artifacts swapped wielders, with everyone being none the wiser.

However, this process wasn’t perfect. Those affected could subconsciously recall seeing certain objects and people they previously knew or couldn’t remember events they supposedly experienced, and their old memories would eventually return given enough stimuli.

In the alternate future of The Darkness: Hope, he repeatedly wiped the memories of a Darkling version of Hope, though it’s unknown if this is specific to Darklings or if he can affect other species. 

 

Fissionism

 

Another power shown offscreen following the universal rebirth. After realizing he couldn’t destroy the Angelus, Jackie did the next best thing by splitting it into a hive mind of individual warriors to weaken it. It’s never shown or elaborated on how he did this. 

Teleportation

 

Jackie, his doppelganger, and individual Darklings could teleport to other places by summoning portals or going through shadows. 

 

Absorption/Soul Manipulation

 

While battling an army of cherubs, Jackie absorbed Jenny, Ripclaw, and Capris into himself to fuel his Darklings. This process broke them down into their component parts, turning them into fodder for his soul.

 

This absorption has been shown to span an entire town of Darkness-infected zombies, letting Jackie absorb everything from the citizens and buildings right down to their souls.

 

It was later revealed by Aram that when a user dies, their soul returns to the Darkness to live within its very being. This Darkness dimension is a universe that claims the souls of its former bearers and anyone they or the Darkness have killed (as long as they deserve it), locking them into constant war that absorbs the fallen warriors and spits them out to keep fighting.

 

Regeneration

Jackie’s regenerated in seconds after being shot in the chest on two occasions, been impaled through the stomach only to be fully healed on the next page, completely healed from radiation that destroyed his skin and killed a normal man, and had his body gradually reconstructed at the atomic level after burning himself alive. Even without his powers, he could still regenerate being riddled with bullets or getting ripped in half by a suicide bomb.

Even those attacked by the Darkness can inherit its healing abilities. Jackie’s grandma, who retained a small bit of Darkness upon giving birth, survived and quickly regenerated from being shot in the head. Don Alberto, an old enemy of Jackie’s, could do the same after having a Darkness bullet lodged in his brain.

Resurrection

While it’s rare, the Darkness has resurrected its host on occasion so they could continue fighting. It brought back a wielder from Ancient Rome that was impaled through the chest, and after Jackie burned himself alive, the Darkness rebuilt him at the atomic level from his jaw over the course of a day to ensure he’d pass on its curse to an heir. 

Anything attacked by the Darkness has a chance of becoming infected by its matter, which will eventually resurrect their bodies from the dead. This was able to affect the entire town of Wyrmwood, and it bound their undying bodies there.

The Darkness Virus

One of the most dangerous abilities the Darkness gives its users. While past wielders could transform humans into Darklings by infecting them with the part of the Darkness, modern users like Capris and the Doppelganger figured out a different method. By making someone consume their blood or simply touching them, a user can infect others with the Darkness’ matter, turning it into a virus that spreads through contact with the infected’s blood or puke. This virus contains thousands of unique mutations that make it impossible to cure, and the infected will spread it to others like zombies. When the virus starts out, it will reduce them to mindless, animalistic beasts, but as its influence spreads, their intelligence grows as well.

It’s also been said that this virus can take the infected’s soul, killing them and turning them into “a being of absolute corruption, a walking disease.” Though the validity of this claim is questionable since we see one of the infected is still alive after having the virus removed.

While Jackie has never used this himself, his Darkness-born doppelganger has on multiple occasions, and Jackie inherited the ability to telepathically control the infected. He can see through their eyes, hear their thoughts, and they’ll obey him without question.

Unlike his other Darkness creations, the virus will persist after Jackie dies, and within two years it will evolve into a giant, animalistic Darkling that can infect others through biting them or absorb attackers into itself. If this creature dies, the virus can still possess any infected to speak through them and cover their bodies in a layer of tendrils to attack and spread itself.

Despite how dangerous it is, the Darkness virus doesn’t affect its victims’ physical abilities until it evolves, which takes years, and the infected still die to anything that would kill a normal person. Additionally, it’s been shown that the virus can be absorbed out of a host and resisted, and large quantities of heat will destroy it. 

 

Resistances

Venom 

Viruses:

As a King in Black, Bedlam was able to burn out the techno-demon’s unstoppable, contact-based virus out of his body.

Radiation:

Venom and his symbiotes are unaffected by the vacuum of space, which would expose them to cosmic radiation.

Jackie

Memory Manipulation: 

When the memory-stealing witch La Bruja en Las Paredes tried reading Jackie’s memories and feeding on them, they were so vile and full of guilt that they acted like a poison and killed her.

Illusions:

Despite being affected by the Alkonost’s song, Jackie escaped her illusion within seconds.

Vampirism:

Because of the Darkness infesting his body, Jackie’s blood is naturally disgusting to vampires, and attempting to infect him will summon Darklings to rip the vampire to shreds.

Empathic Manipulation, Disease Manipulation, Death Manipulation, and Pain Manipulation:
At one point Jackie was touched for a prolonged period by all Four Horsemen, beings that can induce feelings of murderous rage and gluttony, infect you with debilitating diseases and fatal STDs, and ensure some form of death; all with the slightest contact or just by being in their presence. The Darkness- despite being in immense pain from their touch -protected Jackie by spewing out Darklings to act as antibodies that absorbed and destroyed their effects.

In terms of what Jackie’s resisted on his own, he’s survived exposure to the Light of the Magdalena, which forces the target to relive their past sins to the point of possibly committing suicide, and psychically experienced all the pain and violence the Darkness had inflicted on others.

 

Armies

Venom

Symbiotes 

Created by the ancient god Knull, symbiotes are a hive mind of amorphous, inorganic aliens that bond with a host to survive. This bond lets the symbiote learn from its host, gaining their memories, personality traits, and powers (if they have any) while feeding off phenethylamine (a chemical found in brains and chocolate) to survive.

Since they’re inorganic, symbiotes and (when bonded) their hosts are immune to most conventional weapons, being completely bulletproof unless the round in question is specifically tailored to counter symbiotes. They can even take shots from anti-tank rounds or grenade explosions with no issue. And if they do suffer damage, they can regenerate at the cellular level or regrow body mass by devouring/merging with an opponent.

Their shapeless, fluid nature also means the symbiotes have no set size, letting them grow or shrink however they wish. Even a small, severed piece of a symbiote still has sentience and can become the size of a fully grown man upon being freed from a container.

Symbiotes possess a genetic memory that lets them inherit the memories and powers from their previous hosts and pass them onto descendants, which is how Venom and its family gained Spider-Man’s powers. However, the symbiotes can also inherit traumas from their ancestors, such as being traumatized by sound and fire from Knull forging the Necrosword or terrified by the appearance of Galactus.

If a host and symbiote are separated, it will leave behind a “codex,” trace amounts of symbiote in the host’s cells that record their personality, memories, and powers inside the symbiote hive mind. This is done to share information about the hosts with the rest of the hive, though it’s possible for other symbiotes to absorb codices to temporarily gain the personalities and powers imprinted within.

Additionally, the codices’ connection to the hive mind serves as an afterlife for the hosts where they can bond with metaphysical remnants of the symbiote via their memories. Should one of these dead hosts make contact with a live symbiote inside the hive, they can “download” the codex into the symbiote to manifest through it in the real world.

While Eddie has rarely used the symbiotes in battle, he can summon swarms to attack a single target, assist in tasks, or merge into a larger form.

Jackie

Darklings 

Necroplasmic manifestations of the Darkness’ life essence created by the user’s mind. The Darklings are mischievous, violent, carnivorous, and perverted, often cracking jokes while eating their victims and ripping them to shreds.

Each Darkness bearer makes the Darklings in his own image, so their bodies can range from brutal, demonic warriors to goblins with a twisted sense of humor or eldritch monsters vomited from the pit of creation.

Jackie’s are typically goblin-esque imps, but they’ve been known to take other forms including dogs, large spiders, huge piranhas, horses, T-Rexes, giant berserkers, monsters, eldritch sea creatures, and even replicas of people he knows. That last one was taken to an extreme in the alternate future of The Darkness: Hope, where it was revealed he replaced almost everyone on Earth with Darkling copies of themselves, though this required over 10,000 years of researching mystic artifacts and studying sorcery.

After Kirchner’s fine-tuning, the Darklings were upgraded to become more muscular, bulletproof, more patient, and less talkative. However, they went back to their usual selves after Jackie temporarily lost and regained his powers.

Despite Jackie creating them, the Darklings are independent entities, and Jackie doesn't need to give commands for them to help out. They can manifest behind a target using the shadows, scout areas and attack enemies, or act as a form of Mission Control by sensing if a job went wrong and reporting it to Jackie.

Jackie’s Darklings possess extremely acidic spit, can grow stronger by absorbing energy from the void, merge into a buff Darkling or giant dragon, travel through technology, and telepathically communicate with him, even following battle plans he thinks up in his head. Some have also survived decapitation and bifurcation, though this is inconsistent with their other showings.

While Jackie’s have never shown these abilities, the spinoff series Tales of the Darkness further expands on what Darklings are capable of. Vassal, the Darkling of a future wielder named the Dark Prince, was shown absorbing the life and soul from others to turn them into zombies, mind controlled her creator for years, tricked him with illusions, and could resurrect him from dust in a matter of seconds.

Elle

After some less than ideal first attempts, Jackie’s training with Dr. Kirchner eventually taught him how to create a functioning woman named Elle. Fully sentient and indistinguishable from a real woman, Elle is made from the Darkness down to her very cells, created by Jackie for the sole purpose of having sex with him. And to make sure he could do this without dying, he created her without a reproductive system… but that didn’t stop the Darkness from ensuring her pregnancy anyway.

Despite only being made to serve as his sex doll, Elle’s sentience caused her to gain emotions and actually fall in love with Jackie, while also becoming somewhat immature, naive, and protective of him. She even briefly gained control over the Darkness itself after it decided she was more worthy of its power than Jackie. This gave her the ability to create razor sharp tendrils and quickly regenerate from gunshots, though she still shared its weakness to light.

After spending several months healing from her son tearing her stomach open, Elle was able to fertilize Jackie’s seed to directly give birth to many bloodthirsty Darklings, but she eventually died after Jackie’s sister Capris sliced her in half.
 

The Infected 

The unfortunate victims of the Darkness virus, these former civilians were transformed into a growing hive mind telepathically controlled and monitored by Jackie. Despite retaining enough individuality and intelligence to speak, they lack any free will, only feeling the urge to spread their infection to others and defending Jackie if he’s in danger.

Feats

Venom

Overall 

 

• Killed Knull and became the new King in Black
• Defeated Bedlam and forced him to become his symbiote
• As Bedlam, he helped save New York from a demonic invasion and killed Darkoth the Death Demon in one timeline
• As Meridius, he set up the events that would lead Eddie into the cycle to become him
• United his other selves into turning against Meridius
• Cured the Zombiote plague 
  
  

Strength

• Punches Bedlam
• Punches Kang, knocking him to the ground
• Kicks a guy into unconsciousness and through the front window of his car
• Throws a knife into a thug’s hand, then throws him through a window
• Rips a bar countertop off, smacks Bedlam with it, and jams the countertop into Bedlam’s stomach
• Rips a Doombot in half
• Rips his past self’s head off and crushes it
• Decapitates Tyro

Finnegan

• Tears Wilde in half
• Elbow drops Carnage and punches him

Bedlam

• Punches and elbows Spider-Man 
• Kills some demons 
• Tackles Finnegan and tries to rip him apart 
• Bites a chunk out of Eddie’s chest 
• Slams Dylan through a wall, throws him into a car, smashes his head into the ground, restrains him with tendrils, and stabs him through the chest 
• Punches Misery and beats on Dylan Brock Venom 
• Rips off Meridius’ arm 
• Flings a techno-demon over his head, smashes him to pieces, breaks his arm in half, and bites another’s head off
• Pulls the Soulsword toward him, breaks it in two, stabs Darkoth in the head with the pieces, then rips his head off
• Rips a Doombot apart
• Bites Dr. Doom
• Bites a Kang’s head off and reduces another to blood by eating him

Wilde

• Pulls a wrestler toward him

Tyro

• Slashes Eddie across the chest
• Punches a wrestler

Meridius

• His body is made up of the symbiotes in the Symbiote Garden, a perverted, remade version of a planet of symbiotes
• Defeated Darkoth while bonded with Thor
• Blasts Thor with Hellnir
• Kicks Eganrac and punches him
• Stabs Eddie in the stomach and lifts him with one hand

The Eventuality

• Threatens to destroy the Ninth Cosmos in a possible future

 

Speed  

 

• Can swap to other symbiotes in less than a second
• Dodges a Skrull’s laser rifle while possessing Paul
• Dodges a swing from Kang’s time sword and a shot from one of his blasters
• Dodges gunshots
• Dodges blasts from Dr. Doom
• Travels “as fast as a thought” into the body of a symbiote 12,000 lightyears away from Earth (631,103,268.115 - 7,571,904,960.998 c) 

 

Durability 

 

• Shot by one of Kang’s blasters to test his defenses
• Has his head bashed against a bar counter 4 times
• Hit by maximum voltage electrocution from some Doombots, which stops his heart, and restarts it
• Shot by Doom twice
• Survives crashing into the ground hard enough to create an explosion and a crater
• Stabbed in the back by future Dylan, though he still lives 

 

Bedlam

• Gets a car slammed into his face by Dylan, punched, sweep kicked, choked by a chain, and stabbed through the head
• Had his arm severed by All-Black the Necrosword
• Gets his eye sliced out
• Slammed into the ground by Ms. Marvel’s hands and thrown across New York
• Cut on the chest by the Soulsword, blasted by Darkoth’s horns, and has his fingers severed
• Blasted away by Dr. Doom 

 

Wilde

• Unphased after being ripped in half 

 

Meridius

• Shrugs off having his arm ripped off
• Blasted by Dr. Doom
• Burned by Darkoth’s fiery touch and blasted by Thor’s lightning
• Survives a stronger lightning blast from Thor, though it leaves him incredibly weakened
• Chokeslammed and punched in the face by Eganrac

 

Jackie

Overall

 

• Became the Franchetti’s number one hitman even before gaining his powers
• Has slain the Angelus on multiple occasions
• Helped prevent the end of the world with Sara Pezzini
• Defeated the Magdalena
• Defeated an army of one million cherubs with his Darklings
• Killed himself and his uncle Frankie to avenge Jenny’s death
• Killed Paulie Franchetti
• Became a well-respected drug kingpin in Sierra Munoz
• Survived the destruction of the universe and remade it in his image
• Killed the Heart of Darkness
• Took his powers back from the Doppelganger with Aram’s help

 

Strength

• Without his powers, he beats two gangsters to near death and beats a man bloody while forcefeeding him 40 grand
• Upon first awakening his powers he was said to be too strong for the Angelus warriors
• Beats up the woman-hating hitman Jake Nightly
• Cuts a man in half
• Can rip off heads or rip out an entire skeleton
• Punches another Darkness user, Rashad, through the chest and rips out his heart
• Tears the Angelus’s wings off
• Kicks the cyborg Ripclaw in the balls, but he shrugs it off because of his cybernetic testicles
• Rips two massive doors off their hinges
• Rips a metal vent cover off
• Beats up and kills two Angelus warriors without his armor
• Throws a helicopter blade at another helicopter and blows it up
• His giant arms can lift cars and blow up helicopters (0.011 tons of TNT)
• Cuts the Sovereign’s statue to pieces with a shovel
• Decapitates the Sovereign’s diorite body with a punch
• Rips a tank open
• Lifts a slab of concrete to redirect a car
• Absorbs the town of Wyrmwood and its inhabitants (156.97 tons of TNT)
• The following feats are debatable or inapplicable. See Cosmologies for why:
• The Darkness is one of the 13 Artifacts that will destroy the universe if they’re brought together, which eventually happened
• Scratches the Curator across the face, who was unharmed by the previous universe’s destruction
• Stabs the Heart of Darkness in the heart and plunges it deeper, killing him and destroying his dimension
• The following are from crossovers. See “Before the Verdict" for an explanation:
• Causes Painkiller Jane to scream in pain as he wraps her in tendrils
• Makes Batman bleed with a punch
• Batman admits Jackie is infinitely stronger than him and could easily kill him
• Drew blood by sucker punching Superman

Darklings

• Impale and decapitate some hitmen
• Rip Reckoning to shreds
• Tear apart some of the Cuban’s men
• Can rip apart human bodies without issue
• Take out the support of an oil rig
• In crossovers, they:
• Briefly overpowered Wolverine, though he almost immediately tears through them after
• Merged into a dragon that briefly made Superman struggle
   

Speed

 

• Blocks fire from the Witchblade
• Catches a woman dropped from a helicopter
• Dives out of the way of a shotgun blast
• Dodges and blocks shots from a sniper rifle (Mach 0.325)
• Dodges a bullet by turning his head (Mach 1.57 - 2.84)
• Blocks gunfire with his tendrils

Durability 

• Stabbed through the hand by Tora no Shi
• Endured hours of being whipped to the point his skin dripped with pink fluid
• Slashed by Ripclaw and has a rock thrown into him hard enough that he slams into a car
• Has his arms popped out of their sockets and popped back in
• Endures torture from a master torturer
• Stabbed in the hand and beaten up by the Magdalena, including getting a boot to the balls
• Has withstood being shot on several occasions
• Beaten by Don Alberto and his men and gets back up
• Hit by a fiery blast from the Angelus and gets stabbed through the chest in one of their rematches
• Has been hit by C4 and a point-blank suicide bomber explosion (0.00684 tons of TNT) and come out unharmed
• Takes a rocket launcher to the face
• Survived a helicopter crash (0.0578 tons of TNT), an airplane exploding, and being crushed by an exploding helicopter
• Can spend days laying on the floor without any food or rest and later does it again
• Impaled and slammed into the ceiling and concrete
• Has his wings ripped off
• Survived a fall from orbit (0.126 tons of TNT)
• Gets beaten up by some Sovereign bodies after ultraviolet light removes his armor
• Punched by Clark McKendrick, another Darkness wielder, and impaled through the stomach
• Unharmed when he’s caught in Hope’s giant explosion, which destroyed a house (0.545 tons of TNT)
• Electrocuted by his own bio-electricity and squeezed by Dr. Kirchner’s mech, then rips the Sun Dagger out of his own chest
• Unharmed by the destruction of the universe and the Darkness’ dimension, which Sonatine and its creator describe as a universe (See Cosmologies)
• Survived the following while depowered:
• Torture for 4 days after being shot in the throat
• Having his stomach blown open by a suicide bomb that could shear a humvee in half (0.206 tons of TNT)
• Being thrown from the top floor of a hospital onto a taxi
• Beatings from Aram lasting anywhere from four days to a week
• The following are from crossovers. See “Before the Verdict" for an explanation:
• Has his armor blown off by a grenade, gets kicked in the face and balls by Painkiller Jane, and is repeatedly punched by her
• Dropkicked by Batman
• Being crushed by an amped Hulk
• Sucker punched by Vampirella
• Scratched by Wolverine’s claws
• Punched off a building by Superman 

Darklings

• Beaten up by Batman

  

Scaling

Venom

Knull

The King in Black. The destroyer of stars. The god of the void. The onyx king. Knull was Eddie’s predecessor, and while Eddie’s higher showings are comparatively limited, given their similar abilities and cosmic positions, it should be reasonable to assume he’s physically comparable to Knull.

• Has the power to unmake the stars in the sky and is called the destroyer of stars
• Rips Sentry in half and absorbs the Void
• Fought Odinforce Thor, regenerated from Mjolnir destroying his jaw, and stabbed Thor through the back
• Decapitated a Celestial that brought light into the universe and forged the Necrosword in its skull
• Blasted with hellfire that melts his sword and burns his face, then caught in an explosion of it, only to come out annoyed as he regenerates
• He and his symbiote dragons flew from Klyntar to Earth in two weeks (1,565,359 c) (Inapplicable; See “Before the Verdict”)
  
  

 Carnage

Venom and Carnage have fought each other numerous times over the years, and each time- whether working with Spider-Man or solo -Eddie has consistently overpowered his other’s “son.” This didn’t change when Carnage was resurrected as Knull’s herald, and by the time they’d reunited, Carnage required numerous power-ups to stand up to Eddie and overpower him.

• Impaled and killed multiple Venom variants
• Destroyed an entire planet made of symbiotes by causing a planetary implosion
• Killed Venomized versions of Man-Thing and Valkyrie, and an alt universe Silver Surfer
• Impaled alternate versions of Captain America, Cyclops, Phoenix, and Doctor Strange, bifurcates Thor, and decapitates a symbiote Celestial
• Killed an alternate version of Knull and absorbed his power

 

Heroes

 

Following from Knull and Carnage, both the symbiote god and his herald have shown the ability to fight, overpower, or corrupt beings like Odinforce Thor, the Silver Surfer, the Sentry, the Hulk, and members of the Fantastic Four. Thus, as a fellow King in Black, it would be natural to assume Eddie possesses a similar level of power.

Thor

• Pre-Odinforce Thor:
• As a baby, his cries created storms capable of shaking the world tree Yggdrasil, which connects all realities, including an infinite array of Asgards
• Clashing with another Thor created energy comparable to the Big Bang and merged infinite timelines
• Defeats Surtur, whose fight with Odin sent shockwaves through the nine realms
• Traveled to another universe in the time it took someone to pray (9.275 quintillion c)
• Has regularly flown from Earth to Asgard within moments (At least 1.5 - 15.79 quintillion c, likely infinite or immeasurable speed)
• Flew to Omnipotence City, which is at the center of infinity (Infinite)
• Can spin Mjolnir faster than mortal minds can conceive and throw it hard enough that it transcends the boundaries of space and time (Immeasurable)
• Odinforce Thor:
• One-shot Desak who was empowered by the Destroyer Armor, which can maim Celestials
• Uses the Destroyer Armor for training
• Overpowered various Phoenix hosts like Echo, Dark Phoenix Mystique, and Moon Knight
• Has repeatedly fought Hulk (See below)
• While depowered, defeated MODOK who had harnessed the Odinforce and the power of Yggdrasil
• Matched and defeated Zeus, who is on even footing with Odin (See Cosmic Beings section below)
• Zeus has previously defeated Hulk
• Defeated the Elder God Gaea, who is in the same pantheon of gods like Seth and Toranos
• Seth’s power has long rivaled the Wyrm, who threatens all existence
• Toranos quickly returned to Earth after being banished to the Far Shore by Thor (Infinite, likely immeasurable)
• Later in their second fight, Toranos is unable to catch Mjolnir
• Thor is superior to Valkyrie (Jane Foster), who can search the Ten Realms and every point in between in the blink of an eye (Likely immeasurable)
• Multiple Valkyries in the space between worlds weave through the fabric of reality, piercing through truth and eternity with a thread of light and near-instantly pulling it back through dimensions, seeing and feeling everything as the needle moves through the ever and all (Immeasurable)

Silver Surfer

• Combined his power with Khatylis and Kismet to create infinite abyssal wormholes that began devouring the entire dimensional plane itself
• Matched the power of the Infinity Gems
• Channeled his Power Cosmic into a singularity to bridge together infinite universes
• Fought the Griever at the End of All Things for 16 minutes
• The Griever is the abstract living embodiment of the entropy, destruction, and death of the multiverse, operating on a similar scale as Eternity and the Never Queen
• Can travel through time through speed alone (Immeasurable)
• Flew back into the physical universe from the Overspace (Immeasurable)
• Outpaced a wave of possibly omniversal destruction caused by the destruction of the Never Queen, which represented the end of all realities and possibilities in existence (Immeasurable)

Sentry

• Destroys a Celestial’s head
• Has multiple statements of having the power of a million exploding suns
• Reshapes the universe just by existing
• Casually creates and destroys an alternate timeline
• House of M, an event that tore apart and rearranged the Omniverse, is nothing compared to him and something he could cause another of

Hulk

• His thunderclap destroyedNightcrawler’suniverse
• Punched Onslaught hard enough that the universe exploded
• Channeled the energy to destroy two universes
• Shook infinite dimensions while fighting Ironclad
• Resisted an attack that warped the Crossroads of Infinity, which is an intersection of infinite realities

Doctor Strange

• Has beaten Dormammu in a fistfight
• His fight with Shuma Gorath threatened to destroy all nether realms (See Cosmologies)
• Dr. Doom admitted that Strange's magic powers exceeded that of his standard armor even when he'd increased his armor's power reserves tenfold
• Forged a mace capable of channeling all of his mystical energies and used it to strike Galactus when he was vulnerable at the peak of his power, after he had absorbed enough energies to threaten the multiverse, which destroyed his form, releasing all the energies he contained
• Tanked hellfire from an enraged Zarathos, who is comparable to Mephisto (See Villains below)
• Gets stabbed in the chest with a powerful magic spear that Daimon Hellstrom said could've wounded his father, Mephisto

Spider-Man

• Took hits from Wayeb, who created a blizzard over Manhattan (102.51 - 650.28 kilotons)
• Survived mountains explodingon two occasions (525.238 tons of TNT at best for the first, 31 kilotons for the second)
  Fought Insomniac’s Spider-Man, who’s comparable to his version of Miles surviving an explosion that would’ve vaporized Harlem (15.03 megatons of TNT)
• Has regularly beaten Electro, who could absorb all the energy in New York City (580 kilotons) and power a Quantum Particle engine that would destroy New York (316.5 megatons) (Debatable, likely inapplicable; See “Before the Verdict”)
• Dodged Lightmaster’s light beams
• Has dodged lasers explicitly stated to be light speed
• Blitzed Daredevil, who could barely track Spider-Man with all his speed and reflexes
• Daredevil can dodge Iron Man’s repulsor beams (94.71% the speed of light)

Misc Heroes

• The Thing battled Miracle Man, who created a star, and survived a blast of the Power Cosmic that could split a planet in two
• An early Human Torch can reach the temperature of an exploding star and maintain it for a couple of minutes (31.659 yottatons)
• Juggernaut killed Cyttorak and destroyed the dimension inside his gem
• Hyperion survived the destruction of two universes and was completely unharmed

Villains 

While Eddie has never fought any of these people himself, he should be on par with or above them, either because they wield the same weapons (Gorr) or because his status as counterpart to the Beyonders would naturally make him more cosmologically powerful than the Marvel universe’s Asgardian gods and Hell Lords. See Cosmologies for a larger explanation.

Gorr the God Butcher

• Created a planet
• Defeated three Thors simultaneously
• Blitzed Young and present Thor, attacking faster than the former could see
• Took several “world shattering blows” from Thor
• Was blown through a planet and cleaved a star in half
• Tackled into a sun and turned it black
• When his body was slain, his consciousness became one with the Necrosword, turning into an ocean of darkness that engulfed the stars and the entire universe, turning him into the universe itself

Loki

• Destroyed the Purple Dimension and claims he has the power of the universe
• Traveled from Asgard to Earth in the wink of an eye
• Sent Ulik from Asgard to Earth “faster than a human eye could scan these words”

Nightmare

• Comes from a universe above the sixth dimension
• Commands and warps the entire Dream-Realm, which has been stated to be higher-dimensional
• By just sleeping on Earth, he was merging the Dreamland (a universe) with the real world as a side effect
• Has mentally gained control of all magic users at once, including Ghost Rider, Magik, Scarlet Witch, and Dr. Strange

Mephisto

• His clash with Satannish threatens to destroy the main mortal universe, Mephisto’s realm, and the dimension they were fighting in
• His clash with Hela was compared to Ragnarok, which is the destruction of Yggdrasil

Shuma-Gorath

• Can manipulate magic on a planetary scale
• A small portion of his power gave Doctor Strange the power to destroy galaxies
• Doctor Strange is unsure if he is able to withstand Shuma-Gorath’s attacks, stating to have never felt such power in any other foe
• Strangled Dormammu and was explicitly stated to be his superior
• Dormammu has enough power to destroy the Dark Dimension, which exists above the sixth dimension
• Nightmare acts as one of his servants and is terrified to fight him
• Agamatto himself said he is unable to kill Shuma-Gorath
• Resides in a place where Mephisto and Satannish would be like "mice in a great temple"

Cosmic Beings 

As already mentioned, Eddie, being a King in Black, is considered the cosmic opposite of the Beyonders. And befitting their name, the Beyonders are naturally above the power of beings like the All-Father Odin or the Celestials. 

 

 Odin

• Even while weakened, Odin’s fight with Seth tore at the fabric of the multiverse
• His battle with Forsung shattered dead planets, created suns across a galaxy, and would rage beyond all time, space, and thought
• His fight with Infinity at the edge of the universe put the universe at stake and could be felt from Earth
• One-shot Hela
• Absorbed Surtur and could nullify his flames that would’ve destroyed Yggdrasil, which exists in the infinite planes of reality
• Shook the Infinite Embassy during combat, which exists above infinite dimensions
• Can destroy the entire multiverse and create a new one
• Reacted to Mjolnir near-instantly flying back to him and Thor after it was sent by Sif to “an endless abyss beyond the eyes of even the most ancient, abstract, and primordial gods”, beyond the farthest point of known existence (Infinite, likely immeasurable)

Celestials

• Can casually create numerous planets
• Are aspects of one being linked across the entire multiverse
• Possess a transfinite level of power many orders of magnitudes above Kubik, who wields infinite power but admits his is nothing compared to theirs
• Eight Celestials defeated Odin while he was in the Destroyer armor
• The Celestial Arishem would’ve destroyed the Heroes Reborn universe

The Beyonders

• The Beyonder from Secret Wars, who was a child at the time:
• Casually destroyed a galaxy and formed Battleworld from its remains
• His rage at Dazzler’s death unleashed a bolt of pure force that sliced through space and time, instantaneously obliterating a galaxy a billion parsecs from Earth
• Defeated multiple Celestials
• Casually defeated the Phoenix (Rachel Gray), who could destroy an entire galaxy in one minute and survived an attack from Necrom that destroyed a solar system
• Causes multiversal destruction when enraged and is confident he could (and would) destroy the multiverse and all existence
• Intended to erase all of existence down to its conceptual beings and his memories of it
• Is bigger than the multiverse and more powerful than all of its forces, in every kind, combined
• Even when weakened, he’s still more powerful than all of the Marvel universe’s abstract entities
• Took multiple blasts from Molecule Man, including one that would’ve slagged several billion dimensions
• Unleashed a death stroke that tended Earth and space, destroying everything in its path all the way to the ends of infinity (Infinite)
• The Beyonders:
• Exist outside the multiverse
• Are superior to the Beyonder
• Can create universes
• A single Beyonder can kill 4 Celestials, another finished off the entire race, and each Beyonder killed the Celestial race one by one in every universe
• Individual Beyonders have killed abstract beings like Infinity, Eternity, Order, and Chaos; and 3 of them killed the Living Tribunal
• Eternity encompasses the sum of all things in the universe, and can create and destroy universes with the smallest fraction of his power, and controls the boundless universe
• The Living Tribunal can access 16 dimensional spaces to hold conversations

Jackie

Darkness Hosts 

During his time in the Darkness dimension, Jackie battled and ultimately slew the Heart of Darkness, a being so powerful he claimed he was the Darkness itself. While the Heart folds a few pages later and admits he’s actually just a host, given that Jackie was able to kill one as ancient as him who used its power to craft an entire dimension (albeit overtime), this should make Jackie at least on par with some who’ve wielded the Darkness in the past. 

• The Darkness’ avatar spawned a garden in the Sahara Desert and turned it to ash (3.49 kilotons of TNT)
• Christian Estacado’s reign of darkness was so potent it was said to blot out the sun (Likely hyperbole)
• The Heart of Darkness created the Darkness dimension, an “inter-dimensional realm”described by Sonatine as a universe and by the Heart as “a black, broken universe” (See Cosmologies) 

The Angelus

 

Jackie has fought and slain the Angelus’ hosts time and again, and there are multiple statements that the Darkness is stronger than the Angelus.

• The Angelus’ fights with the Darkness destroyed the Tower of Babel, tore down the walls of Jerusalem, and caused the eruption of Krakatoa (200 megatons of TNT)
• In a series of backup segments going over the Top Cow universe, assistant editor Ryan Cady describes the Angelus performing a “self-imposed act of divine judgment in 1883, when it caused the island of Krakatoa to explode,” implying it might’ve been a solo feat
• Lauren Franchetti:
• Blew up her home and a casino (0.0018 and 0.562 tons of TNT)
• Has the power of the sun flowing through her arms (Likely hyperbole)
• Celestine Wright:
• Without the Angelus, she somehow survived her suicide bomb exploding
• Burned a man to a skeleton with a kiss
• Blew up a bar (0.029 tons of TNT)
• Danielle Baptiste created enough light to destroy a metal casing around the Brooklyn Bridge (1.3 - 4.3 kilotons)
• The following feats are inapplicable. See “Before the Verdict” for why:
• A nameless Angelus host “hastened through the ether at a speed beating the hands of time” and spent 28 years in front of a small star to craft the Sun Dagger, which was forged from the star’s heartusing the coalesced light energy and life force of an entire star system (16.08 - 21.249 petatons per second, 36.424 - 54.302 zettatons for the Sun Dagger’s creation, possibly Immeasurable speed)
• Patience seemingly moves as a beam of light
• The Angelus force traveled 725 lightyears in 725 years (Lightspeed)
• The Angelus force caught up with and possessed Velocity, and Danielle later grabbed Velocity mid-run. Velocity can:
• Break the sound barrier and create a sonic boom (Mach 1)
• Move at Mach 3, over 3,300 mph (Mach 4.3), Mach 7, and 10,000 mph in a canon crossover (Mach 13.03)
• Outrun a radio wave and create a global sonic boom by pushing herself to her limits (97.91 teratons of TNT and lightspeed)
• In an apocalyptic future where the Angelus had decades to store her power, she unleashed all of it in a nanosecond, completely destroying Earth over the course of a few minutes (68,100,445.7 c)

Sara Pezzini

Jackie and Sara have fought against or alongside each other multiple times, and the Witchblade has been described as equal to the Darkness’ power in the past.

• Accidentally burned through part of a column and the side of a subway train
• Tilted her head to avoid an arrow and blocked another with the Witchblade’s bracelet form
• Caught bullets (Mach 0.858 and Mach 0.86)
• Caught in an explosion beneath the Statue of Liberty, though it knocks her out and she was away from the epicenter (0.1126 tons of TNT)
• Survived an oil tanker exploding while being on top of it (2.61 tons of TNT)
• Survived explosions that could collapse buildings (0.078 - 0.085 tons of TNT for the first, 9 tons of TNT for the second)
• Unharmed by Hope’s massive explosion that destroyed a house (0.445 tons of TNT)
• Unharmed by the universe’s destruction (See Cosmologies)
  
  

Other Artifact Bearers 

 

Jackie’s shown the ability to match if not surpass them physically, having fought them or fought alongside them before.

The Magdalena

• Mariella killed an alligator and cut down a pillar
• Patience:
• Accidentally killed a man by kicking him
• Impaled a demon and cut him to pieces
• Incinerated a zombie pharaoh with a blast from the Spear of Destiny
• Killed an avatar of the Darkness
• Impaled an Angelus soldier and split another in half
• Killed Chernabog with the Spear of Destiny
• Patience claims Chernabog would end all creation, all history, and all futures (Likely hyperbole since he has no feats)

Ian Nottingham

• Has consistently caught bullets (Mach 0.716 - 1.97)
• While using the Witchblade, he caused and survived an explosion of energy that collapses a building (0.078 - 0.085 tons of TNT)
• While he’s left injured and bedridden afterward, he gets out of bed and is still able to fight the next day
• Used a Witchblade copy to create an explosion beneath the Statue of Liberty (14.63 tons of TNT)

Michael Finnegan

• Accidentally froze his apartment
• Froze a street in New York and part of a lake
• Survived a fall that created an explosion and a massive crater, though it knocked him out

Glorianna Silver

• Burned a man alive and blew up an airplane
• Created a massive, dragon shaped crater (1.88 - 226.78 tons of TNT)
• Incinerated a polar bear

Sabine

• Killed a monster that was going to devour time (See Cosmologies)
• Can use the Wheel of Shadows to slip between seconds

 

Crossover Scaling 

Like many comics, The Darkness has had its fair share of crossovers over the years, and Jackie’s fought his fair share of heroes from other companies. However, thanks to an official statement from one of Image’s founders, it’s unlikely he’d scale to feats from their home series, so the most we can do is scale him to what happens in his crossovers. But even then, whether Jackie would fully scale to these guys is another matter entirely.

See Before the Verdict for a more in-depth explanation.

• Hulk tore a subway train car to shreds
• Wolverine caught a sniper round
• Superman intercepts gunshots with his chest

Weaknesses

Venom

 

If a symbiote becomes possessed or controlled by another King in Black, he’ll become unable to control or communicate with it, and they can be cut off from his control by Dylan Brock’s codex blade. The codex blade can also be used on him to cut him off from the symbiote hive, which is how he lost his powers by the end of the story.

His mental time travel can become unstable if he starts panicking, causing him to become unmoored from time and sending him through the timestream. While Meridius has enough control over his time travel to render this a non-issue, his prior selves don’t. 

He has no defenses against having his memories erased or rewritten, which is part of the reason he turned into Bedlam.

Speaking of Bedlam, in addition to being a meathead that focuses on brute force over strategy, he’s also unpredictable and disobedient at times, forcing Eddie to reign him in, and he still has the Symbiotes’ signature weaknesses to sound and fire.

Jackie

 

As its name implies, the Darkness can only be wielded in the dark and shadows. Should he be in the presence of natural sunlight, bright lights, intense radiation, or holy light, Jackie’s armor and Darklings will start melting, instantly disintegrate, vanish, or won’t spawn at all, and he’ll be unable to use his powers. Similarly, magic from beings that predate the Darkness will cancel it out and prevent it from touching certain targets. Artifacts meant to exorcise and contain demons will work on it despite not being a demon, and incantations that dispel evil can permanently destroy it. Should the Darkness, Angelus, and Witchblade come into conflict, the Witchblade will cancel them out, and Jackie won’t be able to summon the Darkness period if he’s too injured. However, he has at least overcome his light-based weakness before by using smoke grenades, shadows, or summoning darkness inside someone to attack them.

He also once lost his Darkness powers because he was tricked into thinking it had used the last of its power to resurrect him from near-death. This caused a psychosomatic effect that left him with a small fraction of power, and he only regained his full power after learning he’d been lied to.

Jackie doesn’t have any inherent resistance to mind control or hypnotism. He’s fallen under the spell of a hypnotic pendant and telepathic abilities before, and he never showed any improvements in this regard.

Beings infected by the Darkness can’t be harmed by attacks using its material, and they can even turn it against Jackie. When he shot up Don Alberto’s men with his pistol constructs, they just absorbed the shots and suffered no damage, and later on dispersed his armor with their own shots.

While the Darklings are effective assistants, they’re canon fodder against a strong enough enemy, will become violently sick if they eat beings like the Four Horsemen, can sometimes misunderstand Jackie’s orders, and will even refuse his orders if they’re in the presence of someone who commands higher respect, like Kirchner or other Darkness users.

But Jackie’s biggest weakness is the Darkness itself. While it has protected him on occasion and even brought him back from the dead, it refuses to let Jackie access the memories of its previous hosts, and over time it’s slowly come to hate him because he refuses to follow its nature, which has led to it refusing to manifest at times.

At one point it got so sick of Jackie that it stripped him of his powers, gave them to one of his constructs, and induced pregnancy in said construct so she could birth a son that would kill him. Then some time after this situation, the Darkness told him to his face that it wanted a new host unless he started using it the way it was intended. That’s not even getting into the numerous times it’s been absorbed out of him and other hosts, though to his credit he always manages to get it back.

And at the end of the day, Jackie still runs the risk of dying and passing the Darkness onto his next of kin if he has sex with a woman… at least that’s what I would say if the series didn’t show Jackie having sex several times without consequence, plus the fact that this stopped being an issue after the universe was remade.

Cosmologies

Marvel

This blog goes into more detail, but here’s a condensed version:

Marvel’s cosmology is insanely large in scope. A single universe consists of the third dimension (space), the fourth dimension (time), fifth dimension, sixth dimension, thirteenth, sixteenth, eighteenth, up to an infinite number of dimensions stacked atop one another. Within these single universes are other dimensional planes like Asgard and its Ten Realms, the Dark Dimension, the Everinnye, and numerous afterlives and underworlds. Containing all of these dimensions is the abstract being Eternity, the personification of all that exists.

Each of these universes- each Eternity -is contained within Marvel’s multiverse: infinite universes with infinite adjacent dimensions and transfinite spatial dimensions. In other words, an infinite number of infinities, each one greater than the last. And the embodiment of this multiverse is Multi-Eternity, a being so massive that each universe’s Eternity is but a small facet of itself.

Beyond Multi-Eternity are different planes of existence, both with positive and negative sides.

Traveling above the multiverse leads to the Neutral Zone, the edge of known science. A dimension containing crystals of frozen spacetime and non-Euclidean angles, the Neutral Zone is a dimensional plane between realities that acts as a border between the Superflow (the space between universes) and the Outside, dimensions that exist beyond Multi-Eternity’s influence (aka outside the multiverse).

Among these Outside dimensions is the Beyond, which is so above the multiverse that those originating within the multiverse can’t see it. Contained within the Beyond are subsectors like the Overspace, which exists above all other realities and contains beings that ascended beyond the multiverse. These beings, the Beyonders, are reality’s engineers, managing its existence by creating the Concordance Engines. 

The opposite of the Overspace is the Underspace, a void beneath the multiverse that exists outside of it. Traveling beneath the multiverse leads to the very center of the hellish dimensions known as the Splinter Realms, Limbo. It is the dark mirror of the multiverse where time forks and crosses over itself, a border realm between the reality above where if one falls into the abyss below they will find themselves in the “Under-Engine” of creation: The Un-Beyond.

The Un-Beyond is the Qlippoth of the Omega, the heart of the symbiote hive and true home of the King in Black: the engine room. This is where the Kings in Black perform their duties. Where the Beyonders are Ivory Kings, the embodiments of light magic who control everything from outside, the Kings in Black are their opposites, onyx kings who work within the world through organic matter- wet, messy goo.

There are other realms above and below the Beyond and Un-Beyond, and while they’re irrelevant since Venom stops scaling past this point, let’s just go over them for the hell of it.

Existing beyond the Beyond is the White Hot Room, a nonlinear realm unaffected by space or time and home of the Phoenix, the being that powers the Concordance Engines. Its opposite, the Dark Cold Room, embodies mankind’s fear of predators and houses beings like the Phoenix’s opposite, the Tiger God.

Finally, at the very top and bottom are the House of Ideas and the Below Place. The House of Ideas is the highest point in Marvel’s cosmology, the place where everything that is, was, and will be exists and home of the highest being in creation: the One Above All. The Below Place is the lowest point in reality: an empty, desolate place embodying the very concept of Hell. It’s the home of the One Below All, God’s anger made manifest.

How does Venom scale to this?

 

As a King in Black, Venom is considered the opposite of the Beyonders and resides in the “negative” equivalent of their domain. Using the above notes as reference, this would put him at Outerversal in terms of cosmology.

Top Cow

It’s been said by Tilly Grimes that her grandfather Horace mathematically proved the universe as a whole consists of 20 dimensions. These dimensions intersect our own, and the fifth dimension, which exists beyond time, is where Hell is located.

Between our three-dimensional universe and the afterlife is the Ashen Lands, a parallel dimension for displaced spirits. Above this is the Black Lands, the world beyond the Ashen Lands where the dead are meant to be, though it’s unknown if the Black Lands are Heaven, Hell, or an eternal, silent sleep.

There also exist other afterlives, some of which are considered interdimensional and extradimensional realms like the Darkness dimension and Shadowlands. And we know from various Top Cow series that there are multiple realities/dimensions overlapping with our own universe, other realms of existence, other universes that are separated by barriers, and alternate futures.

How does Jackie scale to this?

That's the weird part. He doesn't.

If you look at how VS Battles Wiki or YouTubers describe the universal destruction and recreation from Artifacts 12 and 13, it's treated like something Jackie can casually do whenever he wants. But according to the series, that clearly isn’t the case.

As early as the zeroth issue, it’s said that bringing all 13 Artifacts together would remake the world anew. The recap pages all state that the universe will be destroyed if the 13 Artifacts are brought together, the Curator says the same in issues 1 and 9, we see this outright when the universe ends in issue 12, and it’s still brought up afterward in issues 15 and 16. So while it is true that Jackie and the Artifact bearers contribute to the universe’s destruction, this is only caused by a chain reaction from a ritual. This means Sara, Jackie, the Magdalena, Tom Judge, Aphrodite, and all the rest can't scale to it.

What about Sara, Jackie, and Hope surviving the destruction of the universe and Jackie remaking it? Jackie says he remade the world, a doppelganger says Jackie changed the universe, Tom Judge says it multiple times, recap pages say he remade the world/universe, and the Darkness says he brought it back when he remade the universe. So what’s the problem?

 

In the same sequence where it’s revealed they survived, Jackie says their connection to Hope is what prevented the universe’s destruction from killing them, implying it wasn’t really a matter of durability, just that they’d been protected by her at some subconscious level. And despite the number of statements attributing the universe’s rebirth to Jackie, we see it in the previous issues and Jackie has nothing to do with it! He was trying to stop it from happening! The one that actually remade the universe was Sara when she killed Hope. Jackie's lack of a role is only compounded by later statements from in-universe characters, an official timeline, and the editors at Top Cow that Hope was the one who remade the universe and all Jackie did was manipulate its events.

But wouldn’t Jackie still scale to this since he’s generally comparable to Sara and she caused the reset by killing Hope?

No. From the way it’s described by the Curator, Hope’s death would remake the universe regardless of what causes it. In the last link, he even offers to kill her while the universe is in the middle of being destroyed to try and remake his.

Even without all this, Sara and Jackie having universe level durability isn’t consistent with any of their other feats. For the most part, Top Cow’s universe is surprisingly grounded and realistic in scale, with the best durability feats being things like surviving buildings exploding or explosions that destroy houses. An earlier arc in Witchblade had Sara briefly die to this explosion, which isn’t anywhere near universal!

At the very least, there’s an argument to be made about Jackie destroying the Heart of Darkness' dimension and tanking its destruction. This dimension is described by Sonatine and its creator as a universe, and despite being where Darkness wielders go when they die, it’s later revealed Jackie created an extra heart in his chest the moment he “killed” himself, allowing him to still be “alive” in the Darkness dimension. So this is a legitimate universal durability feat…

But it’s a blatant outlier. In the same run where we get this universal feat, earlier issues establish the Darkness needs to protect him so he doesn’t die from a fall from orbit, and right before Jackie kills himself to enter the dimension, he gets messed up by a helicopter exploding on him, which does kill an exact duplicate of him. That’s not even getting into how Jackie’s consistently harmed by far less in previous runs and never displays this kind of durability again.

You can’t even scale him to the Heart creating the Darkness dimension since not only has Jackie never displayed such an ability on his own, the Heart’s dialogue implies that the dimension’s creation took place over time.

Credit where it’s due, Sara and Jackie aren’t the only ones with universal arguments. Near the end of Witchblade, another Artifact bearer, Sabine, kills a monster that’s said to be consuming and weakening time. Since time is below the afterlife, which resides in the fifth dimension, you could easily make an argument for this monster- and by extension Sabine -being universal…

But we only get two pages of the monster slowly devouring whatever’s in front of it, so it’s likely this process would be over time as opposed to destroying everything in one go. And our only indication of it being a universal threat is an Angelus warrior saying it would cause the end of everything, which could just be chalked up as hyperbole since the monster was eating everything in its way.

TL;DR:

Jackie’s Artifacts feats are caused by a chain reaction or come from characters assuming he caused them despite the scenes and other sources (both in-universe and real life) depicting otherwise.

The universal durability feats are outliers that are inconsistent with the rest of the characters’ durability feats or required protection from a character nobody scales to.

The time consuming monster is over time since the absorption shown on panel is extremely slow.

Before the Verdict

Both

Space travel feats

 

If you paid close attention to the scaling sections, you may have noticed both characters have some inapplicable scaling to characters traveling from the depths of space to Earth, with those feats coming from the Angelus and Knull with his legion of symbiote dragons. Considering the timeframe of these feats and the distance between their destinations, their space travel would come out to the speed of light and over 1.5 million times the speed of light, respectively. What’s the problem with them?

To summarize a lengthier explanation from G1’s Catwoman vs Black Cat, the biggest problem is these are travel feats, not reaction feats. There’s no evidence for either the Angelus or Knull’s army ever reacting to anything as they travel through space, which isn’t helped by the fact that space is largely empty, so there’s very little they’d need to react to in the first place. Even if they were reacting to any objects that were in their way, those objects would be large enough for the Angelus/Knull’s men to spot from miles away and adjust their course long before they’d ever come into contact with it.

Venom

Is King in Black Venom a cosmic character or street tier?

With what we listed for Venom’s scaling section, this question might be a bit confusing, so let’s explain.

When he starts off as a King in Black, Eddie is said to have gained Knull’s power, letting him control symbiotes across interstellar distances, but across the 2021 run all the way through Venom War, there are a few showings that suggest his power is kind of inconsistent. One second Eddie’s blown up by missiles and dies, the next he’s punching Kang to the ground. Bedlam can pick fights with streets tiers like Spider-Man, Misery, Ms. Marvel, and Dylan Brock Venom, even “dying” from getting stabbed in the head, then he’s fighting an old enemy of Thor, tearing through Doombots, fighting Doom himself and surviving his blasts, and decapitating Kang. He even gets beaten by a tag team of Spider-Man, Dylan, and Eddie near the end of his life when earlier both he and Finnegan fought Carnage, who had just “killed” a planet sized Meridius, and all of Eddie’s selves survived a planet imploding later during that fight. So what gives?

While we don’t get a concrete answer in-universe, there's a pretty easy explanation for Bedlam's underperformance. When Bedlam "died" to Dylan in issue 7, he was impaled through the head, but recovers quickly offscreen because we see him track down Dylan and tackle him just a few pages after. During their first actual fight, Dylan taps into his hive powers to become Codex briefly and uses All-Black to sever Bedlam's hand and cut out his eye.

Against Dylan, Kamala, and Normie, Bedlam is clearly physically superior. He beats down on Dylan pretty hard, bites Kamala's hand to force her off, and easily breaks out of Normie's webs. It’s only because of his rage and confusion that he doesn’t mop the floor with them.

When Eddie, Dylan, Spider-Man, and Flash beat him in Venom War #4, it's a similar case to issue 7. Dylan once again taps into his hive powers and wields a Codex Blade, which separates Bedlam Eddie from his symbiote and leaves it hostless. At that point, it's not connected to the hive and is just another symbiote that's neutralized by Anti-Venom's powers.

That just leaves Eddie’s death at the start of the series, but this can be chalked up to an outlier. He and his counterparts survive worse damage than a missile strike as the series progresses.

Electro’s quantum particle engine feat

 

This one’s not as big a deal as what we listed above, but we felt like bringing it up.

In Xena vs Red Sonja, we talked about how Spider-Man would scale to Electro’s feat of powering a quantum particle engine that would destroy New York, but upon revisiting the comic this feat is from, we noticed some things about it that don’t check out.

It’s shown right after Electro does this that it completely drained him of his energy and left him weakened, and despite Otto’s statement about it destroying New York, the explosion doesn’t actually cause any damage when it does go off, making its validity questionable. Even if we give it to Electro anyway, at best it would be a massive high end feat, if not an outlier since nobody else in Spider-Man’s comics has a feat on this level.

Jackie

Crossover scaling?

 

Under normal circumstances something like this wouldn’t be considered unless it’s fully canon, but The Darkness actually has several crossovers acknowledged in the series.

The Darkness/Batman is referenced in volume 1 through text boxes in issues 25, 35, & 37, and Frankie’s dialogue in issue 27. The ending of the Top Cow/Marvel crossover Unholy Union leads directly into the start of First Born, and this same story has Jackie reference meeting Hulk in a previous crossover. So that means at least three crossovers are canon. 

What about the rest? Is it also canon that Jackie fought Superman and Wolverine?

Technically yes. According to Erik Larsen, one of the founders of Image Comics:

“Every character that comes into another character's book exists in that universe, as well as in their own. When characters meet we get to see events, which take place in both characters' respective universes. In other words: When Savage Dragon meets Invincible, it's an event that Invincible experienced in his life in his universe and it's an event that Savage Dragon experienced in his life in his universe. Duplicate events took place simultaneously in both universes! You ever listen to a friend tell a story about an event that you were part of? You ever notice that it's often a little off from the way you remember it happening? Same deal in the ‘Image Universe!’ When you read about Savage Dragon in the pages of ‘Invincible,’ that's Invincible's side of the story. That's the way he remembered things happening.”

Basically, the crossovers are canon, but characters from other companies are A version of them specific to this crossover, not THE main version from their own series. So how would that affect Jackie’s scaling?
 

For the sake of argument, we’ll mainly just look at feats exclusive to those crossovers, meaning Jackie would scale to things like Hulk ripping a subway train car to shreds, Wolverine catching a sniper round, and Superman intercepting gunshots with his chest… on paper, anyway. 

When you actually look at what happens in these crossovers, Jackie’s track record in them is surprisingly terrible. Going in more or less chronological order:

Painkiller Jane vs The Darkness starts off strong with him causing her to scream in pain as he wraps her in tendrils, only to become completely one-sided as she slips a grenade that blows off his armor, kicks him in the face and balls, and beats him with her fists until some ninjas interrupt.

The Darkness/Batman has Jackie make Batman bleed with a punch and Batman admits Jackie’s infinitely more powerful and could easily kill him, though because Jackie’s heart isn’t in it, Batman manages to disorient him with smoke pellets and uses the Bat Signal to melt his armor.

The Darkness/The Incredible Hulk has Jackie spend most of their “fight” running like hell. The only time he tries fighting back is by summoning an army of Darklings to slow Hulk down, which immediately backfires as Hulk somehow absorbs them and begins crushing Jackie in his grip. The only reason Jackie doesn’t die here is because some terrorists attack Hulk, causing him to switch targets.

When they meet up again in Unholy Union, their physical interactions consist of Jackie and Ghost Rider getting punched by Hulk, Dani stopping Hulk from landing a direct hit by blasting him with fire, then Jackie’s dragged behind Ghost Rider’s motorcycle until he uses GR’s chain to pull him off the bike. And right as Hulk’s about to hit Jackie with an overhead punch, Doctor Strange shows up to bail him out with a stasis spell.

The Darkness/Wolverine has the two engage in a brief fight. Jackie’s machine gun and chainsaw constructs fail against Wolverine, and after getting scratched on the cheek he sics an army of Darklings on Wolvie. To their credit, they do briefly overpower him, but when we cut back to it after a flashback Wolverine’s shown tearing through them with ease. And just when it looks like things are about to get serious, Jackie calls a truce because he realizes with how this fight’s going, one of them will die, and they instead work together to kill a rebellious Darkling.

The Darkness vs Eva: Daughter of Dracula consists of a regular, Darkness-less Jackie admitting she’s too fast for him and getting overpowered, and they never properly fight when he uses the Darkness. Instead it gets taken over by Orlok, a sorcerer who stole it in the first issue, and Eva absorbs it by accident after killing Orlok.

And while it’s not in this position chronologically, I made an exception in saving the “best” for last. There have been a few arguments online from powerscalers that Jackie can physically scale to Superman based on their fight in The Darkness/Superman #2. There’s already a major flaw here thanks to Erik Larsen’s statement about the Image crossovers having different versions of existing characters, but let’s ignore that for a second and instead analyze the fight on its own.

A lot of people who argue Jackie scales to Superman use this page of Jackie punching him and causing him to spit blood, and that his Darklings would also scale because Jackie turns them into a giant dragon that overpowered Superman. However, both of these arguments take the pages out of context.

Jackie punching Superman is a sucker punch after an argument between them gets overly heated. Superman clearly wasn’t expecting Jackie to hit him, and right after being hit, Clark responds by saying “All right… the hard way” and punches Jackie off the building. And after Jackie’s dragon “overpowers” Superman, the very next page shows a serious Supes destroying it with a blast of heat vision and holding Jackie in place until the sun comes up. This is important to note because after the dragon’s destroyed and Superman catches him, Jackie doesn’t even bother fighting back. He blatantly admits after his armor’s destroyed that that was his best shot and he knows when he’s lost. 

In short, crossover scaling would give Jackie a worse chance here. His best scaling from these is pressuring a casual Superman, which has context behind it, is admitted to be his limit, and even if you somehow want to argue this is the same Superman from mainline DC, it would easily be considered an outlier. Not just because none of his other scaling is on that level, but because if we’re really going to use crossovers, then Jackie’s consistently getting bullied by street tiers!

The Angelus’ nanosecond statement

 

In The Darkness #75, we get a depiction of an apocalyptic future ruined by Jackie and his Darklings. The Earth is so ruined and covered in smog that light can’t shine through, creating a perpetual darkness around Earth that lets the Darklings live indefinitely. But when the resistance known as the Order discover the Angelus’ prison deep in the catacombs and free her, she’s able to unleash all of her power. This release is described by the narration as “Centuries of pent up power released in a nanosecond” and the energy burns the oceans and causes Earth to crumble and be destroyed, leaving behind only rubble.

This is inarguably one of the biggest feats in Top Cow as a whole and has been calculated in the past at over 68 million times the speed of light. On the surface it would seem that there’s nothing wrong with this. Jackie regularly fights and kills the Angelus, it could unleash this massive blast in that timeframe, so he should scale to this, right?

No. 

Starting with the calc itself, it assumes that the Angelus fired a blast that reached the Earth in a nanosecond. But as we explained above, the Angelus is already on Earth, so the reasoning behind this calc is completely invalid.

The feat itself isn’t any better since it completely falls apart when you dig into the comic.

Let’s start with the use of the word “nanosecond.” As we explained in Makoto vs Leone, “nanosecond” can mean one billionth of a second or an informal way of describing a very brief moment. In the same page where the Angelus unleashes the energy in this supposed timeframe, it is stated by the narration, “Mere minutes after the boy first cut into the Angelus tomb, the planet and all who stood upon it were mere cinders spinning their last remaining heat out into the implacable cold of space.” This energy destroying the planet in minutes would contradict the first definition of “nanosecond,” so the word in that sentence is more likely applying the second definition.

Even the text box with the nanosecond statement highlights a problem with its usability. “Centuries of pent up power unleashed in a nanosecond” means this blast is the result of the Angelus having an enormous amount of time to conserve her energy for a final release, and Jackie states right before these pages that the Angelus has got decades of backed-up power seeking release. It’s clear from these lines that releasing this amount of energy isn’t something the Angelus can do whenever she wants.

The comic’s ending only makes the context behind this statement worse. After Earth is destroyed, it’s revealed this entire comic has been a fortune teller explaining Jackie’s future, meaning the use of narration is character based and not from a third-person omniscient narrator, so it’s even more viable to fall under scrutiny. It certainly doesn’t help that while the fortune teller’s dialogue says he’s seen the same future multiple times (“I’ve read the bones six times now and the outcome is always the same”), he also admits at the end of the comic that while the visions were real, he isn’t sure if he actually saw the future or was just explaining something he saw in panic. So not only is this statement contradicted by its own page, it’s from an event that wasn’t even real to begin with!

The Sun Dagger Feat and Immeasurable Angelus

In The Darkness #82, the opening scene has narration from an Angelus worshipping cult where it’s stated “Borne on the towering wave of her believers eternal souls, she hastened through the ether at a speed beating the hands of time.” We then see this nameless Angelus host spend 28 years in front of a distant small star, using her magic to slowly shrink it until she can condense it into the form of a dagger.

On the surface, both of these sound promising, with one being an extremely high tier feat and the other being a potential argument for immeasurable speed. However, both aren't exactly consistent with the series' other feats.

The Sun Dagger feat

In order to withstand even a second in front of a star of that size would require a little over 16 petatons, and creating the Sun Dagger within that 14 year timespan would need at least 36 zettatons. The Angelus’ best feat aside from these is causing the eruption of Krakatoa, which she’s implied to have done solo. This would only be worth 200 megatons, over 182 trillion times weaker than the Sun Dagger’s creation! Even if we just compare the Krakatoa feat to the Angelus staying in front of that star, there’s still an 80,400,000 times difference between them!

And it only gets worse with how low scale ALL of the Angelus’ other feats are. Her most impressive on screen feats are blowing up houses, bars, and casinos, or destroying a metal casing around the Brooklyn Bridge, and only that last one gets above building level!

You could use this to argue the Angelus creating the Sun Dagger is an outlier... but the dagger is important to the following arc since Jackie uses it to kill the Heart of Darkness. So while it's not consistent, it's still technically usable.

The possible immeasurable statement

Like the nanosecond statement, this is from a character’s narration, not an omniscient narrator, so it would fall under scrutiny. And since it comes from an Angelus worshipper who uses flowery language elsewhere in his descriptions, it’s unlikely this narration is from an unbiased perspective or meant to be taken literally.

Even if we do buy this, the Angelus doesn’t have any showings of speed to back this up, and there are no feats of this level anywhere else in the Top Cow universe. And as you’ll see below, many of the higher arguments for her speed are heavily flawed.

The Angelus’ other speed arguments

Those previous sections covered the Angelus’ best statements, but in terms of feats, she has a few arguments that could potentially give Jackie some decent speed scaling… in theory. Sadly, any examples you could point to fall apart under scrutiny.

While you’d think it would be easy to scale him to the lightspeed feat with how many times they’ve fought, this isn’t the case. That feat was performed by the Angelus in its true form, where it’s a living mass of energy, and Jackie has never been shown interacting with or reacting to it whenever it flew in this state.

Even when one of its hosts, Patience, seemingly chased after him by turning into a beam of light, she only did that after he started running from her human form and she turns back to normal when she meets up with him in a tunnel. Some construction workers are shown gasping when they see her coming from off screen and shielding themselves in the panel where she transforms, but it’s hard to tell if she’d already transformed into that beam of light when they saw her.

Some of you might be asking, “What about the Angelus’ power to manipulate light? Jackie has to have dodged some sort of beam that would give him relativistic or FTL scaling!” Unfortunately, no, it doesn't work that way.

There’s one time across the entire Top Cow universe where Jackie interacts with a light-based attack from the Angelus, and it’s shown knocking him back and destroying a bridge. This means the light she’s firing has force, and thus it can’t be considered an actual beam moving at lightspeed.

And for our final Angelus speed argument, there’s the Angelus force catching up with Velocity and Danielle Baptiste grabbing Velocity mid-run. Velocity is the Top Cow universe’s resident speedster, and her home series Cyber Force has numerous feats and statements for her speed that put her anywhere at Mach 1, 3, 4.3, 7, or even 10,000 mph (Mach 13) via a canon crossover with Justice League. This would put Velocity anywhere from the Supersonic to Hypersonic range, but her best feat was when she pushed herself past her limits and outran a radio wave. Considering radio waves travel at the speed of light, this would easily give Velocity FTL speeds… except nobody scales to it.

Velocity explicitly struggled to perform this feat and never managed to replicate it anywhere else in the continuity. And from what we see of her brief encounters with the Angelus, her emotional state and speed are nowhere near what she was experiencing while outrunning the radio wave.

It doesn’t help that from what we see of their interactions, there’s nothing to prove Velocity was even going supersonic against the Angelus. 

In the scene where the Angelus possesses Velocity, Cyblade- a non-speedster -is able to call out to her and warn that the Angelus is gaining on her. If Cyblade, someone who’s never displayed any speed feats on the same level as Velocity, could visually tell that the Angelus was gaining an advantage, it’s unlikely the Angelus or Velocity were even going fast enough to break the sound barrier.

And in the scene where Dani grabs Velocity, there's a ton of scrutiny from a narrative perspective which prevents Velocity from moving at Mach speeds. We don’t have any indication, either visually or through sound effects, that she knocked back Abby or the Magdalena by creating a sonic boom. And it would be a massive stretch to assume the aura surrounding her is meant to be her breaking the sound barrier, because when Dani picks her up, the energy’s clearly shown coming from her hands.

In short, none of the Angelus’ speed feats are usable for scaling, and there’s nothing suggesting she can scale to Velocity’s Mach feats/statements.

Lightning round of various Darkness misconceptions

 

All of these are shorter explanations for false claims that have been thrown around by various battleboarders or powerscaling Youtubers throughout the years.

“The Darkness and Angelus are conceptual beings and the only way to kill them would be to erase darkness and light as concepts.”

While it is true the narration, recap pages, Sara’s internal monologue, and dialogue from her and Dani refer to the Angelus and Darkness as primal forces, nothing in the comics suggests destroying them would also destroy the concepts of light and darkness, or that such a thing is required to destroy them. Sara and Aram destroy the Darkness near the end of the Witchblade comics, and things like night and shadows still exist even after a two year timeskip.

“Jackie is a conceptual being who will regenerate as long as darkness as a concept exists.”

The absolute best we see of Jackie’s regeneration is him getting brought back at the atomic level, which required a piece of him remaining around, and even then took over a day to fully restore him. And that’s ignoring the fact that Jackie’s not able to perform this kind of regeneration on his own. The Darkness is responsible for his regen, and as we explained in his Weaknesses section, it’s entirely possible the Darkness would refuse to let him regenerate if it felt like it.

Even looking at other Darkness hosts, the best showing is Vassal, a Darkling, resurrecting the Dark Prince from dust in seconds, which is impressive, but it still required some remains to be around. There’s nothing in the comics that suggests Jackie or another host can regenerate or resurrect from being completely destroyed to the point there’s nothing left.

“The Angelus and her soldiers are completely invulnerable to manmade weaponry and all forms of damage that aren’t designed to kill godlike beings.”

Not at all. From the first few issues of The Darkness, it’s established Angelus warriors can be dissolved with acid, wounded by bullets, threatened with a knife, and killed by a rudder. In later runs we see them get shot dead by bullets and whacked over the head by an ice club. Even the ones that are shown to be bulletproof can still be injured by bullets internally, while others can get briefly taken out by head shots and are implied to die to chest shots.

“Jackie can manipulate concepts because he brought back the Angelus when he recreated the universe.”

As explained in the Cosmology section, Jackie didn’t recreate the universe and thus didn’t bring back the Angelus. Even putting that aside, there’s nothing in the comics to support him having the power to manipulate concepts.

 

Fight Art 

(Lod)
 

Verdict

Stats

In terms of stats Venom sweeps. While you can debate Jackie vs Venom in terms of Spidey stats, since we’re looking at them in their prime, Venom would be directly scaling to Knull, who has statements of unmaking the stars in the sky and being called the destroyer of stars. This alone would give Venom star level scaling, but Knull has shown he can fight on par with Silver Surfer, Odinforce Thor, and the Celestials. One of Eddie’s future selves, Meridius, has even bonded to and briefly fought Odinforce Thor, so this should make it easier for Venom to scale to.

Silver Surfer can use his Power Cosmic to form a singularity that bridges infinite universes and spent 16 minutes fighting the living embodiment of the multiverse’s death. Odinforce Thor was able to defeat a MODOK who’d harnessed his own power source and the power of Yggdrasil, a world tree connecting an infinite number of realities and infinite versions of Asgards -while depowered! And the Celestials have been able to defeat Odin while he was amped inside the Destroyer armor, the same Odin who can destroy and recreate the entire multiverse and whose fights have side effects like shattering planets and creating suns across a galaxy, tearing at the fabric of the multiverse while weakened, and shaking a structure that exists above infinite dimensions.

But since Venom and Knull are direct counterparts to the Beyonders, we could compare them as well.

The classic Beyonder as a child was able to casually destroy galaxies and when enraged destroy the multiverse or all existence with attacks that would reach to the ends of infinity. And the adults of his race are superior to him!

Even just scaling him to the villains of Marvel, Venom should be comparable to beings that can cleave stars in half, become the universe, merge universes in their sleep, and destroy three dimensions as a side effect of their fight, or be on par with Shuma-Gorath, who’s superior to beings capable of destroying the Dark Dimension, which exists above the sixth dimension!

To summarize, going off feats alone, Venom’s attack potency would be Star level as his lowest possible end, and Multiversal or beyond with more consistent ends.

When we look at Jackie, he doesn’t have any way of matching Venom in stats. His best direct feat, absorbing the town of Wyrmwood, only comes out to Multi-City Block. Even with scaling to the Angelus, that leaves him anywhere from low kilotons from her destroying a metal casing around the Brooklyn Bridge, 200 megatons of TNT from causing the eruption of Krakatoa by herself, or potentially petatons to zettatons from spending 28 years in front of a star and shrinking it to make the Sun Dagger. But even with her highest stats (and ignoring the potential debate that the Sun Dagger’s creation is an outlier), it still wouldn't be enough to help Jackie.

It only gets worse when we factor in cosmology scaling. Jackie… doesn’t scale to his cosmology at all. Him surviving the universe’s destruction was the result of outside help, and other characters’ claims he recreated the universe are false as shown by the comic itself and statements from other characters, an official timeline, and the editors at Top Cow.

Even if Jackie did scale to it and we went as far as to scale him to Tilly Grimes’ 20 dimension statement, Venom as a King in Black is comparable to beings that exist above the multiverse and beyond its influence, a multiverse containing infinite universes with infinite dimensions and transfinite spatial dimensions. This would make Venom Outerversal, which is so beyond Jackie’s scope that even with maximum wank, he’s still completely outclassed!

What about their speed? Surely that gap can’t be as bad?

While Venom’s direct feats as a King in Black are relatively limited, he has been able to travel “as fast as a thought” into the body of a symbiote 12,000 lightyears away, which would require him to be moving at 631 million times the speed of light at minimum! And comparing him to the heavy hitters Knull has fought like Thor and Silver Surfer, Venom should scale to feats like Thor traveling to Asgard and crossing universes at quintillions of times faster than light, flying to Omnipotence City at the center of infinity, and throwing Mjolnir hard enough that it transcended time and space. And with scaling to Silver Surfer, Eddie should be comparable to the ex-herald of Galactus, who can travel through time through sheer speed, fly from a higher dimension into the physical universe, and outraced a wave of omniversal destruction! We could also just scale Venom back to the Beyonders, whose attacks could reach the edge of infinity, which is straight up infinite speed.

In short, Venom with his best showings scales to massively faster than light speeds at worst, and infinite speeds at most!

For Jackie, his best speed feat is the time he dodged a bullet by turning his head, which could get anywhere from Mach 1.57 to 2.84. That’s decent by all means, but what about his scaling? Surely he must have some feat that can get him higher, right?

Shockingly, no. Jackie doesn’t have any higher speed scaling. He is the higher speed scaling!

There are feats in Top Cow that can get higher, like Velocity running at Mach 7, 10,000 mph (Mach 13.03), and faster than a radio wave (FTL)… but as we already explained, nobody in the verse scales to her. This means Jackie hard caps at Supersonic speeds.

Venom demolishes Jackie with his King in Black stats, but let’s say you’re curious what it would be like if we used classic Venom. No cosmic scaling, nothing from the Cates and Ewing runs, just the good, old fashioned Lethal Protector. 

The best Venom would get then is chainscaling from Spider-Man fighting his Insomniac counterpart, whose version of Miles survived an explosion worth 15.03 megatons of TNT, and he’d vastly upscale from Daredevil dodging Iron Man’s repulsor beams at 94.71% the speed of light. With these stats, Jackie actually has the edge in attack potency at 13.30 times stronger, while Venom would be over 290,000 times faster!

From this, it’s clear that Venom would need his King in Black scaling and abilities to stand a chance, so let’s see what else these two have going for them and if it changes anything.

Tertiaries

Experience is weird to talk about. Despite having decades worth of comics, the exact amount of time Eddie’s been active as a villain, anti-hero, and otherwise is in a murky, nebulous span of under 15 years. However, Jackie doesn’t have this problem. From the end of Witchblade and guidebooks like Bearers of the Blade and Witchblade: Case Files, we know that the Top Cow universe progresses more or less in real time. Thus, Jackie’s adventures started in the 90s and (accounting for the two year timeskip after his death) he spent roughly 18 years with the Darkness. 

While this technically means Jackie has more years of experience, the sheer difference in comic appearances would mean that Eddie has more experience overall. Considering his numerous fights with symbiotes, many of which have the same powers as Jackie and other Darkness wielders, he’d be more than familiar with what Jackie can throw at him.

Jackie does have him beat in skill and intelligence due to better training, showings of strategy, and the brutal creativity he displays in killing others… until we factor in Meridius. By that point, Eddie has been alive for thousands of years and spent centuries training under Kang in combat, strategy, and using his powers. Thus he not only has even more experience, but it ensures that Venom dominates Jackie in Tertiaries.

Arsenals

This is a case of quality vs quantity. On paper you think Jackie would take this due to the sheer number of firearms, grenades, and constructs, but in practice things are a bit harder to pin down.

Due to sharing the same physiology as the rest of his species, Bedlam would be able to no-sell many of Jackie’s weapons, seeing how symbiotes are completely bulletproof and have shrugged off shots from anti-tank rounds and grenade explosions. This is a bit of a problem considering Jackie’s arsenal is largely made up of guns and grenades. 

 

Even the constructs are matched by Bedlam’s shapeshifting since both can summon chains, form chainsaws, and transform into giants. Eddie does have an edge in close range with his sword and axe, and his cane could be used to trap Jackie. Meanwhile, Jackie’s biggest advantage is that he could create a sentient labyrinth to trap Eddie and have him get jumped by Darklings… but not only was this under an area exclusive to Sierra Munoz, it’s possible for Eddie to just escape it using his mental time travel.

The only other thing Jackie has on him is the Sun Dagger, but not only is it outclassed in range by Eddie’s blades, its main power- harming the Darkness and Darkness-created beings -is useless when Eddie and his symbiotes aren’t related to the Darkness.

Even if you want to argue verse equalization would mean the Sun Dagger can harm any being created from primordial darkness, including symbiotes, you’d have to apply the same logic to the Necrosword affecting Jackie, which would be far more devastating. The Darkness acts like a hive mind connected to Jackie, letting him operate the Darklings in a way similar to how Eddie does with his symbiotes. Necroswords can cut off a symbiote’s connection to its hive mind and are powerful enough to affect Kings in Black, so if we’re arguing that symbiotes and the Darkness are similar, this would give Venom the means to depower Jackie by cutting him off from the Darkness.

With how much Eddie counters Jackie’s arsenal and Jackie lacking any specific counters to Eddie’s symbiote or weaponry, Venom should take it.

Powers

Looking at their powers, Eddie and Jackie have some similarities at first. They both share hive mind connections to their respective creatures, can create and command them telepathically, and shapeshift their bodies to fit the situation. On a purely physical level, they seem comparable enough, but when diving deeper, their differences are very apparent.

For starters, we're not given much indication as to the full scope of Jackie's range of control over his Darklings, while we have outright confirmation that Eddie can control a much larger quantity of symbiotes, ranging from hostless minions to humanoid sentries to titans spanning planet-wide, over interstellar distances, and throughout time, which are significantly more impressive than what Jackie has shown. 

While Jackie has been able to replace everyone on Earth in an alternate future, this took millennia to accomplish and mystical knowledge his main self doesn’t have, while Eddie had a similar level of control at his fingertips after only a few months. 

Should Jackie try to fly or portal away, it's safe to say Eddie would still have eyes on him no matter where he goes. Going off of Knull's and the Eventuality's showings, we also know Eddie's control spans beyond dimensions and the former is capable of creating portals between realities as well, giving Eddie another way to keep track of Jackie's movements or force him back into the fight.

So Jackie can't keep his distance for long, so what about when the fight inevitably gets up close- does he have an edge there? Unfortunately not. On top of lacking the physical strength to even hurt Eddie, he surprisingly doesn't have reliable ways of capitalizing on the symbiotes' weaknesses of heat and sound. While he does have electricity, Venom in his base form has resisted it without much issue so it's not likely to help Jackie here. In fairness, Knull was separated from the hive by Thor's lightning, but his weakness to the divine does not appear to have translated over to Eddie, and Jackie's lightning is nowhere near the thunder god's anyway. When comparing their shapeshifting, Kings in Black have shown complete symbiote physiology and more, letting them transform into anything from liquids to a flock of bats to even dinosaurs, giving him a greater inherent agility and versatility advantage. Jackie can try making it up with his clones but again, Eddie has a large numbers advantage in his favor. 

With physical abilities out of the question, Jackie’s next best option would be to try messing with Eddie's mind and powers. He could read Eddie's memories through contact or even alter them without it, which has worked on Eddie before as it’s what led him to becoming Bedlam. However, at most, this would only give him information and briefly set Eddie back, not just because his memory manipulation isn't perfect and can be recovered from naturally, but because symbiotes can also manipulate memories and restore any Eddie has lost. And obviously, Jackie would still have to deal with Bedlam should that divergence occur, bringing him back to square one. 

Nullifying Eddie’s powers by disconnecting him from the hive mind, however, is an actual problem for the King in Black, and doing so is what concluded the Venom War and led to him bonding with Carnage out of desperation. Without his status as the hive’s ruler, Eddie would be forced back to being a regular human with only his standard symbiote stats, which creates an important opportunity for Jackie if he has the means to do it, but he's in short supply there too. The closest we’ve seen from him manipulating another hive mind is through his fission ability, which split the Angelus into multiple connected beings, but both the unclear nature of how he performed this and the fact that the symbiotes operate as a hive mind already make its applicability here questionable, if not low.

So this leaves Jackie with two options: both involving attacking his opponents’ very being.

First, soul manipulation. Arguably Jackie's most useful tool here as the symbiotes' resistance to soul manipulation is somewhat debatable, with only a few recorded instances that are context-dependent. With decent range, spanning a town, Jackie could potentially eat Eddie's army of symbiotes over time to absorb their souls into the Darkness, but it should go without saying that doing so would take an extremely long time (only made worse by the town-wide absorption taking almost all of Jackie’s energy to do) and is something Eddie would be aware of pretty quickly.

Even if Jackie did manage to absorb Eddie’s soul, that’s not a guaranteed win. Anyone killed or absorbed by Jackie is automatically sent to an interdimensional realm of dead souls, but Eddie still has ways around this. Whenever Eddie “dies,” he’s either sent to a different point in time, enters the symbiote hive mind, or is summoned into the Un-Beyond by the Eventuality. As we explained in the Cosmologies section, the Un-Beyond is far beyond the Darkness’ dimension in scope. It, and by extension the Eventuality, are at such a transcendent level of existence it would supersede the Darkness’ dimension and give Eddie enough time to recover before either crawling out or being sent back into the fight by the Eventuality. And since Kings in Black operate in non-linear time, Eddie could get back into the fight like he never left.

But let’s say the Eventuality didn’t intervene for whatever reason and just allowed Eddie to be dumped into the Darkness dimension. There’s nothing to stop Eddie from using his mental time travel to travel sideways and leave it. And considering the symbiote hive mind spans the entire multiverse and a King in Black’s telepathy extends across universes, he could keep up the fight by issuing commands even while trapped, or plug back into the hive and form a new body for himself by controlling some symbiotes.

The second option Jackie has is his Darkness virus, which can transform beings into a zombified hive mind, debatably targeting the soul as well. Since these infected can infect others too, it's possible that infecting one symbiote could lead to a chain reaction that makes its way to Eddie or touching Eddie himself could turn him... if not for the fact that this has been resisted by forces similar to the symbiote before (see Armies section), and Eddie as Bedlam resisted a similar contact-based virus from the Technarchs. 

Eddie could possibly even absorb the Darkness (both the virus and the entity) into himself or corrupt it like Knull did against Sentry's and Cloak's dark powers, with the former being something Jackie’s been victim to on multiple occasions. If the argument is made that Knull’s absorption abilities as a void god shouldn't transfer to Eddie since we haven't seen him use them, the same could be said for the Darkness virus since Jackie never actually used it himself. The closest the series gets to Jackie using it is with his clone, the Doppelganger, who was so immoral he did things Jackie never would. 

Evidently, Jackie is without a reliable way to kill Eddie or separate him from the symbiote hive mind, but can he at least survive what Eddie can throw at him? Bluntly, no. While his regeneration is impressive and even similar to Eddie's, he's still at a massive stat disadvantage and something like severe dismemberment would take time for him to heal from. Additionally, Eddie himself has numerous ways of ending the fight instantly through his own abilities. 

Starting with his hive mind, he can mentally time travel to different symbiotes across history and kill Jackie in the past, effectively paradoxing the latter out of the present since he hasn't shown acausality like the King in Black has. Atom smearing could scatter Jackie's atoms across time, completely bypassing his regen and trapping Jackie in another time period. Not only would Jackie be stuck since he has no means of time travel, even if he did, his regen wouldn't be strong enough to get back into the fight in time. The only time he regenerated at the atomic level, it took over a day and required nearby matter to do so. There's also the aforementioned Necrosword severing Jackie's connection to his Darklings, leaving them wide open to being hijacked by Eddie's symbiotes and piloted against him or killed with no way of being recreated. Hell, Eddie could just bond to Jackie and take over his body like he did with the trolls in Limbo!

And given Jackie's literal weakness to daylight, there's nothing stopping Eddie from simply throwing him into the sun. Speaking of Jackie’s weaknesses, there’s also ironically, the Darkness itself. It has betrayed Jackie in the past by refusing to cooperate and manifest, and at times, even plotted to kill him or leave him should he not bend to its will, which could be a huge detriment mid-fight. Compare this to Eddie, who has a relationship of trust built around his symbiotes, who choose to join his hive at will, along with his ability to forcefully control them if needed, and it's apparent he doesn't have the same problem.

It’s also worth noting the Eventuality’s reflective nature to the Beyonders and connection to magic as these could give Eddie access to even more abilities on top of this, and its transcendent level of existence means Jackie literally has no way of reaching or affecting it.

All this being said, with Eddie's more effective abilities, battlefield control, and showings as a leader of a hive mind, paired with Jackie's lack of counters and more exploitable weaknesses, the powers category goes to Venom.

Armies

Much like their weapons, we’ve got quality vs quantity. Jackie has more variety with his Darklings, Elle, and the infected, while Eddie has an army of symbiotes spread all throughout the universe.

Comparing the symbiotes and Darklings, both can communicate with their leaders and take different forms, including merging together into giants. The difference is that the symbiotes are waaaaay harder to put down. They’re inorganic alien slime that can regenerate at the cellular level, become the size of a grown man even when separated into tiny pieces, and regrow body mass by devouring/merging with an opponent. This means that even if the Darklings tried to devour them, it’s likely the symbiotes could just regenerate from inside and force themselves out. And with the power to fully take control of their hosts, the symbiotes could just do that to the Darklings or any of Jackie’s other support.

Elle could produce more Darklings to help Jackie out… but this would only amount to a temporary fix before the symbiotes overcome these extra numbers and Elle herself.

As for the infected, while the Darkness virus would be useful under most circumstances, it’s questionable if this would even work on the symbiotes. Both the virus and the symbiotes were spawned from darkness/the primordial void, and seeing how the infected were unable to affect beings related to the Darkness like Sara Pezzini (who’s bonded to the Darkness’ “son”), it’s possible trying to infect the symbiotes would backfire and leave the infected open to the symbiotes bonding to them and puppeting their bodies.

All in all, Venom has the better army to back him up.

Conclusion

This is a complete wash. Jackie gets demolished in stats even if you wank him with out of context scans and statements. Even restricting Venom to street tier stats, he still blitzes Jackie hard, has multiple ways to depower him, and hard counters his arsenal and abilities. And when we factor in their armies, Venom’s outnumbers Jackie’s at a cosmic level, is unkillable to just about everything Jackie can do, and can convert Jackie or anyone on his side by having the symbiotes possess them.

The few advantages Jackie actually has can be counted on one hand, and all of them are rendered null in some way. 

Jackie’s more intelligent and skilled in combat… which does little against an army that spans across the entire universe and is unkillable to his own forces. And he loses this anyway once we factor in Meridius.

Jackie can kill Venom or the symbiotes by absorbing their souls… an ability he only ever used twice whose best showing- absorbing a town -completely exhausted him. This wouldn’t even put a dent in Venom’s numbers, and his army is so beyond that range that Jackie trying to replicate the town absorption would leave him open to Venom, the symbiotes, or his own possessed men overwhelming him afterward. Even if he got lucky and absorbed Venom's soul, Venom’s nature as a King in Black and connection to the symbiote hive mind make it a temporary setback at best.

Jackie can alter memories… something he’s never done in combat whose only showing in the main universe was the side effect of a universal reset he can’t recreate, and it would be countered by the symbiotes if Venom didn’t eventually overcome it himself.

We went into this expecting it would be closer, but it just isn’t. This is, without a doubt, one of the worst stomps in any blog. The stat gap is infinite magnitudes high, Venom realistically counters everything Jackie can do, and his army would make quick work of Jackie’s by killing or converting them.

Jackie was a Meridius man with a Wilde style and was Finnegan for a win. But Tryo as he might, no amount of Bedlam could escape this Eventuality. 

The winner is Venom.

 

Summary

Venom

Advantages:

• King in Black scaling dominates Jackie in AP whether or not you use cosmology scaling
• Blitzes Jackie with and without scaling
• Way more experienced
• Has fought opponents with similar powers to Jackie
• More intelligent and skilled post-Meridius
• Bedlam symbiote counters Jackie’s weaponry and can match his constructs with shapeshifting
• The Eventuality is beyond anything Jackie can reach or affect
• Has multiple ways of depowering Jackie and countering his hax
• Could just bond to Jackie and possess him if he felt like it
• Could freely time travel and kill Jackie in the past
• Atom smearing would completely bypass Jackie’s regen and BFR him
• His symbiotes could counter Jackie’s memory manipulation if he ever used it
• While it’s out of character for Jackie to use it, he and the symbiotes would likely be immune to the Darkness virus
• Symbiotes are more plentiful than Jackie’s support, and he has a better relationship with them than Jackie does with the Darkness
• Symbiotes are practically unkillable to Jackie’s armies and could possess them to add onto Venom’s ranks
• Defeated Superman

Disadvantages:

• Loses his AP advantage with street tier stats
• Less intelligent and skilled pre-Meridius
• Venom War’s rushed, garbage ending
• We’re never getting another good Eddie Brock adaptation

Jackie

Advantages:

• Has an AP advantage with Venom's street tier stats
• More intelligent and skilled than Eddie’s pre-Meridius selves…
• Could absorb the souls of Eddie and his symbiotes or alter his memories…
• The Darkness games

Disadvantages:

• Infinitely weaker than King in Black Venom, which only gets worse with cosmology scaling
• …but loses this advantage post Meridius
• …but they only delay the inevitable and Venom has multiple ways around them
• Infinitely weaker, which only gets worse if we factor in cosmology scaling
• Blitzed by Venom’s direct speed feats and becomes infinitely slower with scaling
• Venom matches or counters his arsenal
• Has no way of reaching or affecting the Eventuality
• Has no counter to being killed via time travel or possessed by Venom and his symbiotes
• Atom smearing renders his regeneration useless and BFRs him
• His support is vastly outclassed in numbers
• His Darklings and infected can’t kill or infect the symbiotes and are vulnerable to being possessed by them
• His rocky relationship with the Darkness could hinder him overtime
• Lost to Superman
• Was cucked by his Darklings and his own clone
• Got anal probed by the Predator
• We’re never getting The Darkness 3

Tally

Venom (7) - Br3ndan5, Bang, Aggra, thealmightyjobber, lod, Spidey, Sentinel_Dude

Jackie (0) - At least he's not modern Venom