Toxin vs Witchblade (Marvel vs Top Cow)

 (Br3ndan5)

(Studio8558)

Patrick Mulligan, host of the Toxin symbiote!

Sara Pezzini, bearer of the Witchblade!

Symbiosis, a process in which two organisms bond for one’s benefits. This relationship can grant both participants a new lease on life, or one could fall victim to the other’s control, becoming a slave to their “partner’s” whims. And no one knows that difference better than these two!

After nearly being brought down in the line of duty, these New York detectives were given another shot at life through a chance encounter with an alien symbiote. But while their lives may have been saved, it wasn’t without its cost.

Now bonded to their murderous “partner,” these upstanding investigators have become roped into everyday encounters with the supernatural, all while constantly struggling to control their “other’s” more violent urges. But when their paths cross, who will emerge victorious? Will Toxin bring an end to the Witchblade’s line, or will Sara purge the symbiote from New York’s streets? It’s time to launch our investigation as we find out who would win a DEATH BATTLE!

Before we begin

This blog will be focusing on the original Top Cow continuity, the 2006 Witchblade anime, and the Witchblade: Takeru manga since there are official statements that the anime is canon to the Top Cow universe, their protagonists use the same Witchblade as Sara’s, and Masane makes a cameo in the comics alongside numerous other future Witchblade bearers. For Toxin, we’ll be primarily focusing on the Patrick Mulligan incarnation. However, given his general lack of feats and abilities and Sara’s shared connection with other Witchblade bearers, we’ll be providing Patrick the abilities and scaling of Toxin’s other hosts for the sake of fairness.

And credit goes to the following blogs and respect threads for links and/or calcs:

G1’s blogs for Spider-Man vs Deku, Momo & Okarun vs Cloak & Dagger, and Joker vs Green Goblin
Capejedi’s Angstrom Levy vs The Spot
The Versus Battle Arena’s Sauron vs Witch Doctor
Globsterzone’s Carnage respect thread
Blackspidey2099’s Agent Venom respect thread
GuyofEvil’s Life Foundation Symbiote respect thread


Background

Patrick Mulligan


Patrick Mulligan was a decent and normal cop, patrolling the streets of New York City. But one day, his life changed when he was attacked by the murderous symbiote Carnage. Unknown to Pat, the symbiote had become pregnant, and Carnage’s offspring had bonded to him.

Carnage perceived his own offspring as a threat to his power, but the birthing had weakened him so much he was unable to kill the symbiote. In order to stop it before it grew too powerful, Carnage would end up forming a temporary alliance with Venom, who decided to name the symbiote after himself for the power it would hold as the 1000th symbiote in his lineage… Toxin.

With the aid of Spider-Man and Black Cat, they would all defeat Carnage and Venom. Yet despite this, Pat felt unsure about this newfound power, feeling it to be too great a threat to his wife and newborn son, and he still had a lot to learn. He tried to make sure that he would still remain a good person, even stopping a robbery. But his struggles to control the symbiote and teach it right from wrong would be put to the test against the supervillain Razor Fist, who amassed a cult of child serial killers and tortured Patrick’s father to death.

Despite the pain and loss he suffered at Razor Fist’s bladed hands, Pat’s heroic nature shone through in the end, and Razor Fist was put back in prison. Now in better control of his symbiote, Patrick reunited with his wife, ready to be a family man once more.  

 Sara Pezzini



Born November 18, 1970, Sara Pezzini was raised by her mom and policeman Vincent Pezzini. Growing up, Sara idolized her father and wanted to be a policeman just like him, but tragedy struck when she was 8 years old. Vince’s partner Joe Siry appeared on their doorstep and explained that their father had died in the line of duty, shot by an unknown assailant.

Hoping to live up to her father’s example, Sara graduated from the police academy at 22 years old, becoming a homicide detective under Siry’s supervision just two years later. But her life would be permanently changed after a disastrous stakeout in the Rialto theater.

While investigating a tournament that had gained the attention of numerous crime families and wanted felons, Sara’s partner Michael Yee was discovered and kidnapped, set to be executed in front of a live audience. Before he could be shot to death by firing squad, Sara jumped in the way, taking multiple fatal shots in a failed attempt to save Michael. But in her rush to save him, Sara had unknowingly knocked over the tournament’s prize: a jeweled metal gauntlet called the Witchblade.

As she lay bleeding on the ground, Sara reached out for something that could save her, and the Witchblade reacted. The next thing she knew, Sara was back on her feet, still reeling from her near death experience as she used the Witchblade to torch the men responsible. When this adrenaline rush subsided, Sara fell unconscious and woke up in a hospital, having survived through what seemed like a miracle.

After finishing her recovery, Sara would meet the eccentric businessman Kenneth Irons. Though he seemed friendly and sympathetic to her losses at first, she quickly discovered he was only trying to get close to her to gain the Witchblade for himself, having organized the tournament in the first place. Unfortunately for Ken, Sara’s control over the Witchblade quickly resulted in his defeat.

From there, Sara and her partner Jake McCarthy would become more involved in the supernatural. Their cases became intertwined with super soldiers, cyborgs, demons, and multiple run-ins with Irons’ former bodyguard Ian Nottingham and the Italian hitman Jackie Estacado, who wielded an ancient force called the Darkness.

After years of increasingly supernatural cases, Sara was moved to the Special Cases Division to work on them with a new partner (and eventual boyfriend), Patrick Gleason. And with help from a mysterious antique salesman called the Curator, she learned the Witchblade’s origins and that it was one of 13 Artifacts that would decide the fate of the world. 

The Curator eventually gathered all 13 Artifacts together, planning to sacrifice Sara and Jackie’s daughter Hope to remake the world. This gathering completely destroyed the universe, and Sara was forced to sacrifice her daughter to restore everything. 

The universe was reborn, but Jackie had somehow rewritten everything to get his ideal life, now living with his resurrected girlfriend Jenny and their daughter Hope. And to maintain this “perfect” life, he planned to summon a group of otherworldly gods called the Ancient Ones. 

After failing to dissuade Jackie, Sara worked with the sorcerer Aram to kill him and destroy the Darkness, unknowingly doing so in front of Hope. Wracked with guilt and hated by her former daughter, Sara abandoned the Witchblade for two years, only briefly reclaiming it to defeat the Angelus and destroy the last traces of the Darkness. Then, after 20 years together, Sara and the Witchblade finally parted ways, allowing her to return to a normal life with Patrick.

 

Experience, Intelligence, and Skill

Toxin

In the 21 years since its first appearance, the Toxin Symbiote has been bonded to several different hosts, and through them it’s gone on numerous adventures against a wide variety of opponents. Shortly after its birth, Patrick and the symbiote were able to directly overpower Carnage and nearly killed him. He’s taken down bank robbers, and supervillains like King Cobra, Wrecker and Piledriver of the Wrecking Crew, and Razor Fist, all over the course of a few weeks.

But Toxin’s experience goes beyond just Patrick Mulligan. With its other hosts, it was able to fight the veteran soldier Agent Venom multiple times, robots like Megatek and the symbiote slayers, and even defeated Carnage in a rematch years later.

Sara

Over the course of 20 years, both in-universe and real life, Sara’s picked up an impressive track record of dealing with the supernatural. When she started off, she was the youngest homicide detective on the force, being top of her class in the academy physicals, graduating from the police academy in September 1993, and being promoted to a detective in January 1995. And after gaining the Witchblade, her life was thrown into one supernatural encounter after another.

She’s served as a homicide detective, an agent at Level 42 (the highest security area in all government agencies and independents), a private investigator in Chicago, and sheriff of Saratoga County for two years. And during all this time, she’s battled experimental super soldiers, robots, ghosts, demon lords, vengeful spirits, and creatures from other dimensions, among many other things.

Thanks to her connection to the Witchblade, her experience goes beyond what a normal human has endured.

According to Ken Irons, who’s studied it all his life, the Witchblade dates back as far as 304 BC, though later retcons would establish it existing as far back as Pangaea. And Sara has a direct connection to everyone that's beared it, giving her the “experience of millennia.”

Sara’s somewhat pragmatic at times, willing to go for low blows like the crotch to gain an advantage. And after realizing from their previous encounter that she couldn’t beat him in a straight fight, she dropped Gerard Irons off a building and let gravity do the rest.

While the extent of her formal training is unknown, it is shown in an early issue that she practices boxing in her spare time.

Equipment

Toxin

Toxin Symbiote


Birthed by the Carnage symbiote, Toxin was the 1000th symbiote in its family’s genealogy, prophesied to be stronger and more dangerous than all of its progenitors. This strength, combined with its risk of a psychotic breakdown, was so dangerous that Venom and Carnage agreed to a temporary truce to kill it, and even with Patrick teaching it morality, it still displayed violent tendencies in battle.

Toxin is connected to other symbiotes through a hive mind, letting them communicate and transfer knowledge to each other, which can then be sent to their hosts. It can also search through a host’s memories for information, and absorb knowledge and view memories by eating an enemy’s brain.

If the symbiote wants to act on its own, it can overtake its host’s consciousness, leaving them a passenger in their own body.

Tendrils


 

One of the many applications of its shapeshifting, Toxin can summon razor sharp tendrils to swing through the air, throw people around, or reel them in.
 

Wings

 

During the events of Extreme Carnage, Toxin was able to sprout wings and fly. Unlike the rest of its body, these appear to be made of feathers, which is weird considering Toxin’s basically made of liquid slime.


Sara

The Witchblade

Formed after the Darkness and Angelus had sex as part of a temporary truce, the Witchblade has been called by many names: the Balance, the Digitabulum, the Hand of God, the Demon’s Hand, the Gantelet des Epines, and the Cheetah’s Claw. No matter what it’s called, it’s a gauntlet of living metal made to act as a balance between the light and dark, keeping them from destroying each other and everything else. To carry out these duties, the Witchblade will bond to one woman per generation in both body and soul. Upon attaching itself to a "bearer," the Witchblade's mind becomes bonded with hers, responding to her thoughts and communicating with her.

While women are its ideal hosts, the Witchblade has occasionally bonded to men, though it’s extremely rare and requires prerequisites like taking control of it through magic runes or having your body modified to filter its energy. But doing this will cause debilitating effects unseen in its female bearers. Even if his body is modified to absorb it and he receives the mental training to control it, a male host will slowly be killed by the Witchblade and eventually lose control as it starts merging with him.

Should it encounter someone it deems unworthy or the current bearer begin doubting her ability to wield it, the Witchblade will destroy their right hand or incinerate them. It’s also been shown that the Witchblade will leave a bearer for doubting its power or if something happens to make it view them as unworthy, such as becoming a selfish drunkard whose actions lead to a child’s death. Though as shown from Katarina, they can be vindicated if another is there to inspire them.

When not in use, the Witchblade takes the form of a bracelet or necklace, activating in response to the bearer’s anger or when it senses danger, even if the bearer isn’t aware of it. This includes people who interacted with it in the past and beings spawned from itself. It’s reacted violently in when it sensed Ken Irons, his son Gerard while he was living under a different name, Sallah, the goddess Bastet, and the Weave (a being spawned from the Darkness and itself).

The Witchblade will automatically defend Sara from anyone or anything it sees as a threat, including her allies, former bearers, and unhealthy habits, even if she’s unconscious. By the end of the series, Sara’s used it for so long that it will act and transform on its own without her needing to think about it, and it can defend her without being attached. If a situation becomes too dangerous for her, it can latch onto someone nearby and force them to take her place, which happened to Lara Croft.

Despite its nature as the balance between light and dark, the Witchblade is naturally malevolent, requiring a strong enough bearer to keep it in check. Failure to do so will cause the bearer to become overwhelmed by bloodlust, relishing the violence she causes, becoming more violent, and actively trying to kill.

And while it’s one of the things the series is most famous for, the Witchblade doesn't tear through clothes too often. Across the main series’ 189 issues (counting annuals and specials), it’s only happened in 14 of them (8, 10, 14, 41, 47, 49, 66, 79, 103, 110, 164, 168, 174, and 175). Counting spinoffs and crossovers, it’s also done in Tales of the Witchblade #1, Shades of Gray #4, Medieval Spawn/Witchblade 1, Elektra/Witchblade, Vampirella/Witchblade: The Feast, and Monster War #3. This usually happens when the bearer or Witchblade gets angry, but it’s implied the Witchblade will stop if the bearer communicates with it… at least temporarily.

Tendrils

While the full list below encompasses everything it can make, the Witchblade’s go to for shapeshifting is the creation of tendrils. These razor sharp tentacles are typically summoned in droves to stab through enemies from behind, restrain them, or tear them to shreds. They can pierce straight through a man's head or helicopter glass, perform lobotomies, break falls, lift full grown men, pin people to walls, crush them to death, rip apart monsters, and break through molecular bonds.

If she really wants to be cruel, she can subject you to some horrifying executions like forcing it through your body and ripping you apart or what it did to the Cyberdata androids.
 

Constructs

Thanks to its shapeshifting, the Witchblade can take on many different forms, ranging from weapons to armor, and like the Witchblade itself, they’re bulletproof. These include:
Crossover exclusive constructs include a healing pod that lets Sara gradually regenerate from massive blood loss, a statue of her, and a buzzsaw.

In the anime, the Witchblade can create blades that elongate at will to cover wide distances. These blades can come from anywhere on the bearer’s body, even her legs.

Wings 

Can summon them to take to the air and fly or wrap around her to create a soundproof shield. But if she goes too high, she can lose control and risk crashing. 

Armors

 

When facing off against gunmen or more inhuman threats, the Witchblade can create different types of armor to defend Sara. These range from arm guards that can withstand grenades, an armored helmet, a metal infrared mask, body armor that can withstand a dragon’s bite and has wings, samurai armor, and full body armor that’s bulletproof, flame retardant, can withstand explosions, and take on a more monstrous form for intimidation. 
 

Revolver

 

A .357 sub-nose swing-out revolver that serves as Sara’s standard weapon when on duty. 


Pistol

After her revolver was destroyed fighting a samurai ghost, Sara was shown using this for a few issues before going back to her old one. Though she seems to have gone back to this model following the two year timeskip.
  

Catsuit and Machine Guns

During a battle with a mutated Ian Nottingham, Sara outfitted herself with these for some heavier firepower. 

Fun fact: The catsuit was a gift from Lara Croft.


Shotgun and Bulletproof Vest

 

Used in Tomoe/Witchblade: Fire Sermon while dealing with a hostage situation involving mad cultists.

Misc. Equipment



Abilities

Toxin

Symbiote Physiology

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.

Symbiotes possess a genetic memory that lets them inherit the memories and powers from their previous hosts, such as Venom and its descendants gaining Spider-Man’s powers. However, they can also inherit traumas from previous symbiotes, such as being traumatized by sounds 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 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 symbiotes’ 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.

Those last two paragraphs are technically irrelevant since Toxin’s never demonstrated anything related to codices, but they’re traits shared by symbiotes in general, so it should still apply.

Extrasensory Perception

Symbiotes possess a “symbiote sense” that lets them sense each other’s presence and when other symbiotes are in trouble. Venom could sense Toxin’s presence shortly after it was born and sense Carnage’s presence, and the same applies for Toxin and Carnage. They also let their hosts detect the presence of other beings, as shown when Toxin sensed King Cobra.

Enhanced Senses

Toxin’s senses are enhanced to let him track another person by the scent of their blood, hear soft, almost imperceptible noises from far away, and sense the chemical reactions of fear.

Shapeshifting

Toxin can manipulate his body’s symbiote goo in any way his host desires, letting him create claws and tendrils, simulate clothing, extend his arms to blind people with goo or push them away, turn his arms into blades, or pull his bones out of their sockets and stretch his tissues to escape restraints.

Even when it’s decapitated, the symbiote can summon tendrils to restrain an opponent and form jaws to devour them.

Size-Shifting

For some unexplained reason, during Eddie’s time as its host, Toxin was massive in size, with Flash describing it as 10 feet tall.

Camouflage

While never shown in any of its appearances, the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe A to Z #12 says Toxin can change colors to match its surroundings and render itself nearly invisible.

Wall-Crawling

Thanks to the genetic memory it inherited from the Venom symbiote, Toxin can cling to any surface, allowing him to crawl, walk, or run up walls or ceilings even when wet.

Regeneration

The symbiote is capable of healing cuts and lost limbs in seconds, though larger injuries like impalement require more focus.

If it gets decapitated, the symbiote can use its shapeshifting to devour/merge with an opponent and regrow its/its host’s body mass. And while Toxin’s never shown this itself, other symbiotes have regenerated their host’s head seconds after it was blown off. Its father Carnage has also been regenerated at the cellular level. Toxin’s never done this either, but given the genetic memory shown by it and other symbiotes, it would likely share this ability.

 

Sara

Shapeshifting

The Witchblade’s main power and what allows it to create its various constructs. It can take on any form it or its bearer desires, limited only by their imagination. The Witchblade has even been shown taking its own forms, like a man, woman, and T-Rex. Aside from making constructs, this power has occasionally been used for lockpicking.


Self-Sustenance

 

According to Sara, the Witchblade prevents its bearer from feeling hungry.

 

Extrasensory Perception

 

In addition to detecting potential threats before they appear, the Witchblade can sense the arcane and supernatural, letting it pick out real witches, shamans, and “cyberoccultists” among regular people and charlatans, and tell when someone’s using a power that isn’t from this world. This includes fellow Artifacts, split off pieces of itself, and beings related to it like the Weave.

After Sara bonded with Chad, who can see ghosts, she gained the ability to do the same. She can see them even if they’re supposed to be invisible to regular people.

Non-Physical Interaction

The Witchblade and its constructs are capable of harming and destroying normally intangible beings like ghosts or the demon Agrat Bat Mahalat, who could phase through gunfire.

This power also applies to offshoots like Excalibur, which can potentially squeeze ghosts to death.

Illumination

If Sara doesn’t have a flashlight on hand, the Witchblade can be used to light her surroundings even with just its jewel. Its light can reach as high as an underground cave.

Acausality/Time Travel

The Witchblade exists in all times at the same time. It knows what is and what will be, and automatically recognizes bearers from other eras. This comes with the added bonus of letting bearers and those nearby travel through time, like when it sent Hyper Sapiens from the year 5030 back to 2003.

Precognition & Retrocognition

When it encounters or senses someone it’s met before, the Witchblade has shown Sara visions of the past, including past bearers, enemies, the murderers and motives behind the deaths in her cases. These visions can occur while Sara is awake, asleep, or unconscious.

It’s also shown Sara visions of the future at one point, which came true despite her best efforts.

Enhanced Jumping


 

By using the Witchblade, Sara was able to cross a massive gap between rooftops.

The anime expands on this by having its bearer, Masane, and manmade replicas called Cloneblades leap from building to building, across bridges, and even letting them cross water.

Wall-Crawling

 

With the Witchblade’s claws, Sara can pull a Spider-Man and climb up walls.

Pyrokinesis

When it isn’t being used for shapeshifting, the Witchblade’s primary form of attack is unleashing blasts of fire at its enemies. This fire can be focused into specific shapes, small beams, and a wide blast, burn through part of a column and the side of a subway train, split into multiple paths, destroy beings made of necroplasm, and are precise enough to cause decapitations. She can channel it through the Witchblade’s claws, tendrils, or constructs to shoot waves of fire.

Electrokinesis

A lesser used ability of the Witchblade that Sara’s used when she was angry with Joe and while fighting Nottingham.

Other users of this ability include Danette Boucher, who- with only traces of the Witchblade in her DNA- could fire blasts of electricity that burned others from the inside out, and Nottingham, who was able to electrocute Ken Irons while wielding Excalibur.

Energy Manipulation


While it mainly uses pyrokinesis, the Witchblade is occasionally shown firing regular energy blasts and channeling it through enemies to fry them from the inside-out. In the crossover Tomoe/Witchblade: Fire Sermon, the Witchblade could fire energy capable of making explosions and summon energy shields to defend her.

Mental Manipulation

 

While possessed by the souls of two dead children, Sara was able to transfer their memories into their neglectful parents via contact.

Biological Manipulation

 

During a homicide investigation where the only witness was so paralyzed he couldn't even twitch or blink, the Witchblade forced him to speak by shoving tendrils down his throat.

Soul Manipulation 

 

While rarely used, the Witchblade can absorb souls into itself or Sara. Sara’s used this to store souls inside her body, though this almost immediately exhausted her, absorb ghosts (as seen above), and once channeled the souls of 36 people to enhance the Witchblade’s firepower.

Immortality Negation

The Witchblade and its offshoot Excalibur have been able to remove immortality from Ken Irons, Sallah, and Bastet by stabbing them. This is despite their immortalities coming from things like the Holy Grail and blessings from the gods.

Absorption

 

After the future criminal Vox used it to spread techno-organic nanomachines that merged with New York and its civilians at the subatomic level, the Witchblade then absorbed all of the nanomachines out of New York, including Vox, his minions, and nearly the Ultra Sapiens.

It can also absorb other beings like Excalibur and arcane energies like magic, though it needs to vent this off so it doesn’t overload.

Fissionism 

On occasion, the Witchblade has been known to split itself into multiple copies to protect multiple bearers. It’s done this to save Sara after she died in childbirth and after she was captured by Alisa, and in a crossover to give Vampirella some extra strength to fight demons. This process can even occur accidentally, as pieces of a shredded cocoon became sentient and ambushed Sara shortly after she unlocked the Witchblade’s secrets.

No matter how much it splits off or who bears these copies, the ones that were split off feel an instinctive nature to rejoin with their original and will leave their current host should the Witchblade demand it.

Even when the Witchblade rejects a woman from wielding it, attempting to force it onto them will cause traces of it to bond to their DNA, leaving them horribly mutated.

And while it’s most likely non canon (the only JLA/Top Cow crossover that’s explicitly canon is with Cyberforce), JLA/Witchblade establishes that even a sliver of the Witchblade is able to quickly transform itself into a full replica, complete with giving Oracle a spider body and webs.

Evolution

As time passes, the Witchblade’s abilities change and metamorphosize, letting it evolve to gain new, unknown abilities. This includes becoming more sapient, as it went from issuing warnings with few words to being capable of full sentences and conversations.

Additionally, the Witchblade is capable of adapting to its surroundings and enemies, learning from previous encounters to discover how to kill something it had difficulty with before. It’s created an infrared mask to fight the invisible Aphrodite IV, and formed underwater armor to let Sara fight as fluidly as she does on land.

Power Nullification


Because the Witchblade is designed to maintain the balance between light and dark, it can keep the Angelus and Darkness from destroying each other when they come into conflict by canceling them out.


Darkness Disease Purging

 

The Witchblade is able to nullify diseases spawned from the Darkness. It can even do this to a fake version of the Darkness by whispering promises of chaos and destruction to it to draw it out, take in the infection, and destroy it.

Regeneration

From the moment she first gained the Witchblade, its healing abilities have saved Sara from crippling or fatal wounds numerous times. After the failed bust at the Rialto theater, Sara was shot in numerous vital areas, yet with the Witchblade at her wrist, wounds that would’ve taken months to heal were healed in days. Being shot in both shoulders, a deep stab wound in one, getting shot three times in the chest, cut on her side, and impaled through the diaphragm have all healed in seconds, and after being shot in the side and losing enough blood that she was about to black out, it restored her to full health the instant she agreed to accept it.

After having her face bashed against a mirror, Sara was left a bloody mess, yet was fully healed by nightfall.

Sara can extend this healing to others, letting her restore Jake to full health after he was impaled, healing Gleason’s burns and broken arm, and bringing Jackie back from being impaled twice.

This regeneration even applies to offshoots of the Witchblade. After being stabbed through the stomach, Excalibur was able to revive Nottingham a few seconds later.

Resurrection

After Sara died in childbirth, the Witchblade revived her by splitting itself apart. And after a lance stabbed through her back and out her chest, she got revived over the course of five minutes when even CPR couldn’t bring her back.

Additionally, the Witchblade can be used to revive the recently deceased, though their heart won’t be beating, they won’t have a pulse, and their skin will remain cold.

Resistances

Toxin

None. 

Sara


Fire and acid:
While testing it, Ken submerged the Witchblade in fire, acid, and every imaginable liquid, and it came out unharmed.

Electricity:
Sara endured prolonged blasts from Danette, whose electricity burned its victims from the inside out.

Illusions:
The Witchblade dispelled the illusions of the unholy trinity to reveal their demonic true appearances.

Life Absorption:
When a mystical tree began draining her life force, she endured it long enough for the Witchblade to cut through the tree and kill the family that imprisoned her. She later resisted similar effects from Miranda Smalls’ Flesh armor.


Sleep Manipulation:
Was unaffected by a hypnotic lullaby that caused Jane to fall asleep.


Darkness-empowered diseases:
Thanks to the Witchblade, Sara and Katarina have been able to absorb and destroy diseases spawned from the Darkness and similar beings.


Corruption and Mental Manipulation:
The Witchblade was able to purge Katarina of Alisa’s influence, which causes those with “corrupted souls” to follow her and gain her will and desires. In Sara’s case, she resisted mind control from the telepath Kaliope and Keene’s hypnosis magic.


 Forms

Toxin

Larry

After repeated disagreements, Toxin punished Pat by using his shapeshifting to turn him into a weak, ineffective nerd until he agreed that he needed Toxin. While not useful for combat, he frequently used it to watch over his wife and son and ensure their safety.


Buff Mode

Under Patrick’s time as a host, letting his rage get the better of him or willingly giving the symbiote control would cause it to increase in size and muscle mass, make its claws longer, and greatly enhance his strength.

When used by Bren Walters, this was its default look.


Sara

Dark Witchblade

After Sara died in childbirth, the Witchblade split itself in half to save her, giving her the dark half while another bearer, Dani, got the light half. While the effects weren’t obvious at first, this Dark Witchblade started to slowly influence Sara, causing her to do things she normally wouldn’t like crack jokes during a murder case and manipulate a crime scene to cover up a death. Over time the effects became more obvious, making her really irritated, bitchy, dismissive, and neglectful toward her boyfriend and daughter, only focused on obtaining the Witchblade and becoming whole.

It even turned her constructs into the black and green associated with the Darkness and gave her the ability to summon Darklings, necroplasmic manifestations of the Darkness’ life essence created by the user’s mind. While the number is unknown, it’s apparently enough to fill the Brooklyn Bridge. 

However, this transformation also gave her the Darkness’ vulnerability to light, which allowed the Angelus to purge the Darkness’ influence from the Witchblade, returning it and Sara to normal.


Support

Toxin

Each Other

Through bonding, the Toxin symbiote and its host are able to communicate during everyday life and combat, letting them share potential strategies, desires, or general thoughts.
 

Sara

The Other Bearers

 

During her journey to gain a better understanding of the Witchblade and unlock its secrets, Sara obtained a spiritual connection to every one of its past bearers, gaining the memories, skills, strength and experience they had in life. She can actively communicate with them to learn about her current situation. 
 

Feats

Toxin

Overall

Patrick
  • Nearly killed Carnage and was so dangerous Venom and Carnage had to team up to try and kill him
  • Defeated Wrecker and Piledriver of the Wrecking Crew
  • Defeated Razor Fist and prevented him from raising a cult of child psychopaths
Eddie
  • Became a member of the Savage Six
  • Killed Megatek and a Symbiote Slayer
  • Helped Agent Venom save West Philadelphia High from the Symbiote Slayers
Bren
  • Helped Sleeper, Silence, and Anti-Venom against Carnage’s corrupted symbiotes
  • Helped Eddie, Dylan, and Sleeper against a Zombiote plague in Venom War

Strength 

Patrick
Eddie
Bren
Rick Jones
 
Patrick

Sara

Overall

  • Was the youngest homicide detective on her force
  • Stopped Ken Irons and his wife Danette Boucher from obtaining the Witchblade
  • Teamed up with Lara Croft to fight supernatural threats multiple times
  • Took down a cult of cannibals on her own
  • Unlocked the Witchblade’s secrets and became more in tune with its past bearers
  • Has prevented numerous gods, demons, and monsters from invading or taking over New York and Chicago
  • Was one of the three survivors of the universe’s destruction
  • Killed Jackie Estacado and destroyed the Darkness
  • Became sheriff of Saratoga County for two years
  • Defeated the Angelus
  • Finally let the Witchblade go
  • By the year 5030, she becomes a legendary figure in history and is considered the greatest legend of the Witchblade’s wielders

 

Strength

Speed

The Witchblade

Scaling

Toxin

Venom


Toxin’s hosts have battled the Venom symbiote’s hosts on several occasions. In their first fight, Venom said if Toxin was allowed to mature, it would be the end of both him and Carnage, and by the end of it, an enraged Toxin beat him and Carnage so badly they were forced to retreat.

During their encounters, Agent Venom admitted Toxin was stronger than him on two occasions, and Marvel’s guidebooks back up Toxin’s superiority to Venom and Carnage, saying he’s stronger than both of them combined. Even recap pages call Toxin stronger and more dangerous than all of its progenitors, which would include Venom and Carnage.

Agent Venom
Toxin has defeated his “father” multiple times regardless of host, nearly killing him and forcing him to retreat from a rematch early in Toxin’s career. Even in its more modern adventures, the symbiote on its own defeated Carnage in the symbiote hive mind.

Misc Symbiotes 


Because of how he’s hyped up early on, it would make sense for Toxin to be at least comparable to his fellow symbiotes.

Spider-Man


While they’ve only fought once and it ended with Patrick being defeated off panel, Toxin should still be around the same ballpark as Spidey in terms of power and speed. As stated above, Toxin was hyped as stronger than Venom and Carnage combined, and both of them were noted in past encounters to be stronger and faster than Spidey.

Misc. Street Tier Heroes and Villains 


You’ve read a Marvel prediction blog before. You know the drill.

Wolverine

Sara

The Other Bearers


Aside from having their experiences, memories, and strength thanks to their connection, Sara’s fought against Dani and Katarina, holding her own against them and nearly killing the former on two occasions. It’s also been confirmed by Kazasa Sumita, the artist of Witchblade: Takeru, that the Witchblade used in the manga and anime is the same as Sara’s.

Katarina
Jackie Estacado
Others

The Angelus

Sara fought multiple Angelus hosts across the series and directly overpowered her near the end of it.

Lauren Franchetti
Celestine Wright

 

Ian Nottingham


Sara fought him on numerous occasions, easily defeated him every time, and absorbed the Witchblade copy Excalibur, so she should scale to his feats.

Other Artifact Bearers

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

The Magdalena
Sabine
As the 1000th of its generation, Toxin has great potential as a symbiote, but its ability to live up to the hype is a different matter. When Patrick was its host, his fear and distrust toward Toxin made him extremely dismissive of it, and he’d often struggle to control its violent urges. He did eventually manage this by his final appearance… after throwing himself in front of a train and constantly gaslighting the symbiote with suicidal thoughts, but it counts!

In terms of more general weaknesses, like the rest of its species, Toxin is vulnerable to high frequency sounds and fire, which will force it to recede from its host and disintegrate it with enough exposure. It’s also been affected by symbiote-nullifying sedatives, anti-symbiote rounds, and Anti-Venom, which melts symbiotes on contact and burns them even when suppressed.

Also like other symbiotes, Toxin’s not autonomous and needs a host to survive, so if it’s separated from a host while exposed to any of these, it will slowly die unless it rebonds with them or finds a new one. Its healing abilities are also somewhat limited, as it’s been implied a bullet to the head would kill its hosts.

While comparatively minor, the symbiote’s blood-based tracking has a glaring weakness since it can be tricked by dousing yourself in perfume.

Sara

Sara’s proven her worth as the Witchblade’s bearer time and again, but that doesn’t mean their union is completely flawless. Sara is constantly fighting the Witchblade’s bloodlust and can fall victim to it if she isn’t careful, often needing a third party to snap her out of it. This constant struggle has sometimes led to friction between them, though this isn’t a problem by the end of the series.

Sara’s been noted to be highly manipulable, and has been tricked by people like Ken Irons, Tau’ma, and Alisa in the past.

The Witchblade’s influence can be shut down by magic runes, allowing people to wield it when they normally wouldn't be able to, including men. Magic has also been used to make the Witchblade fully possess bearers in the past, remove it from them, knock them out, or erase memories. And strangely enough, the Witchblade has been tricked by the art of Shinjutsu, which disguised an unworthy user so thoroughly it couldn’t sense a human presence, allowing her to briefly wield it.

The Witchblade doesn’t provide any inherent defenses against spiked alcohol, drugs, psychic attacks and illusions, possessions, or Sara’s memories being rewritten, and it has refused to manifest at times because it didn't think she was in danger.

Additionally, its healing powers are somewhat limited. While it can save Sara from falling 800 feet and 40 stories, a 108 story fall would still be lethal. It can’t resurrect a bearer or anyone else if they’ve been strangled to death or shot in the head, and when Sara died to a dragon god’s explosion, she had to be brought back by a mystical statue instead.

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.

Toxin

Debunking a few Spider-Man Megaton feats


In Xena vs Red Sonja, we talked about how Spider-Man survived being hit with enough electromagnetic energy to destroy a city, a blast from a scepter that could power a machine that requires 1 exajoule of energy, and how he’d scale to these calculations of Electro absorbing New York’s energy and powering a quantum particle engine that would destroy New York. However, there have been counterarguments that cropped up since then.

Electro absorbing New York’s energy

The calc for Electro absorbing New York’s energy had a yield of 754 megatons of TNT, but it uses New York’s total yearly energy consumption. With how much Electro would’ve been absorbing, it’s more sensible to only use a day. Since New York consumes 886,107 TJ (or 8.86107e+17 joules) in a year, dividing that yield by 365 would give a result of 2.42769041e15 joules, or 580 kilotons.

Electro powering the quantum particle engine

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, but more realistically it’s an outlier since nobody else in Spider-Man’s comics has a feat on this level.

The exajoule feat

As explained in the G1 blog for Spider-Man vs Deku, Peter was nearly knocked out by the blast, further attacks would’ve killed him, and it’s unlikely he was being hit by a full exajoule of energy since the attack was a warning shot.

The electromagnetic energy that could destroy New York

Brigham was referring to the full output of the experiment’s power. Spider-Man was only hit by a small amount and briefly knocked out by another, larger blast, so he wouldn’t scale to the full thing.

The Gene Bomb


During the Axis event, various heroes and villains had their moralities inverted. As part of this inversion, the X-Men and Apocalypse began constructing the Gene Bomb, a DNA-based bomb whose explosion would “flash fry” anyone that didn’t possess the X-gene. In issue 8, Spider-Man initially tries disarming it and plans on smothering the blast as much as possible with his webbing, but an inverted Carnage realizes the only way to truly contain it is with his body. He proceeds to do just that, smothering and containing it at the cost of getting blown into globs of symbiote goo.

Since this event came out in 2014, taking the world’s population at that time and assuming “flash fry” means vaporization, this means Carnage would’ve contained an explosion worth 1.76 gigatons of TNT, or island level. Otherwise, assuming the worst damage would be third-degree burns, it only comes out to 3.7 megatons.
 
Why does this not scale to anyone? Well for starters, you can’t really scale Carnage to this because it blasted him to kingdom come. It's a good upper limit for regeneration, sure, but Carnage doesn’t actually tank the explosion. 

“Shocker’s” Gauntlet Feat


In issue 19 of Zeb Wells’ Amazing Spider-Man, a small tremor happens during Spider-Man and Black Cat’s weekend getaway, and Spidey explains how a uni-directional tremor like that could only be caused by the Shocker’s gauntlets. When they head into the mountains where the tremor originated, they find a group that looks like the Sinister Six attacking White Rabbit, but it turns out they’re all actors wielding copies of the original villains’ gear. When he talks afterward with Rabbit and the gear’s mechanic, Mychal, they explain that the devices were upgraded and modified to include safety features. The tremor was from the Shocker actor’s gauntlets suffering a glitch.

You can probably see where I’m going with this. The gauntlets in this issue are upgraded from Shocker’s normal gauntlets and suffered a glitch, a malfunction that caused it to go out of control. This means it likely sent out a blast far more powerful than the casual ones created by the real Shocker. Sure, Shocker can make his blasts stronger if he wants, but if his regular gauntlets had this level of power, he’d be destroying New York in every fight with Spider-Man, which obviously never happens.

Wolverine reacting to Cyclops’ optic blast


Despite the statements that the optic blasts move at the speed of light and Wolverine seemingly moving in tandem with it in the scene, previous comics establish that he can sense the beams before they fire and the sound of the visor’s servos can be used to judge where they’ll fire before they actually go off. This would make Wolverine’s feat aimdodging, so nobody scales.

Herald scaling?


You might've noticed we included some feats for Toxin and Agent Venom where Toxin defeats Toxin defeats Wrecker and Piledriver of the Wrecking Crew and Agent Venom does things like make Red Hulk bleed with a kick and take hits from him and Super-Skrull without being harmed too much.
 
So does this mean Toxin and Agent Venom would scale to these heavy hitters and get chainscaling to guys like Hulk and the Fantastic Four? 
 
No. Toxin is regularly depicted as being a street tier hero and lacks any fights on this level to back it up. Agent Venom is in a similar boat, and while he does tend to fluctuate a bit, there's nothing to suggest Eddie's brief fights with Flash would scale in any way to Toxin’s other hosts.

Sara

Crossover Scaling


Like any series, Witchblade’s had its fair share of crossovers throughout the years, and while under normal circumstances we’d exclude them, with the crossovers from Top Cow/Image, things are a bit different.

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 version from their own series.

Even with this in mind, Witchblade has several crossovers that have been officially acknowledged in the comics.

The Tomb Raider crossovers are the most consistent in this regard. Items and plot points from them appear in the main series and spinoffs like Tales of the Witchblade, there’s an entire story arc taking place between the two series, and Lara makes several appearances in the main Witchblade comics.

However, other crossovers get in on this too. Issue 11 has Mephisto appear at the end with a text box stating the story continues in Wolverine/Witchblade.

Medieval Spawn/Witchblade is shown to be retroactively canon through things like Katarina showing up in issue 92, the Bearers of the Blade guidebook, issue 168, and a backup story of Faerie’s history in 158 mentioning a “mysterious knight”/”Hell knight”/”undead knight,” with 168’s profile also acknowledging her fight with Savage Dragon in Altered Image.

The ending of the Top Cow/Marvel crossover Unholy Union leads directly into the start of First Born, and is referenced by Dani in First Born #2. Unholy Union also has Jackie reference meeting Hulk in a previous crossover.

So that would make at least 6 crossovers explicitly canon, potentially more depending on how you interpret Larsen’s statement. But even if we gave Sara scaling to all of the Witchblade crossovers, it wouldn’t really change anything.

Most of them are relatively low tier in power and scale. The only impressive feats are from Lady Death/Medieval Witchblade, where Sister Sara (a completely different bearer from Sara Pezzini) tanks an explosion created by a weakened Lady Death and works with her to destroy a crystal talisman that would’ve let a sorceress unleash darkness across the world.

But what about when Wonder Woman used the Witchblade to defeat the rest of the Justice League?

While it’s definitely an impressive feat on the surface, thanks to Erik Larsen’s statement, these aren’t the the Justice League from DC's main canon, just a variant of the League that’s unique to Top Cow. Even if they were the mainline versions of the JLA, there’s nothing in the comic to suggest Sara is physically comparable to Wonder Woman. The closest we get to a confrontation between them is a Witchblade-possessed Wonder Woman telling Sara it refuses to return to her, only for Sara to stretch her hand out and force it to anyway.

Cosmic and FTL Top Cow feats


We’ve gone over these arguments in greater detail in Venom vs Jackie Estacado, but if you want some summaries:

The Angelus’ nanosecond statement

In The Darkness #75, we see an apocalyptic future that only ends when the Angelus releases all of her pent-up power “in a nanosecond,” burning the oceans and destroying Earth.

Despite being calculated at over 68 million times the speed of light, it assumes the Angelus fired a blast that reached the Earth in a nanosecond (a billionth of a second). This wouldn’t make sense since the Angelus is already on Earth, and in the same page where the Angelus unleashes the energy, the narration says, “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 mean the narrator’s use of “nanosecond” is more likely describing a very brief moment, and since both the narration during her release and Jackie’s dialogue say she’s been conserving her power for decades/centuries, this clearly isn’t something the Angelus can do any time she wants.

And right after this sequence, it’s revealed the comic’s narration comes from a fortune teller explaining Jackie’s future, so the use of nanosecond would fall under scrutiny since it comes from character-based narration instead of an omniscient narrator. Additionally, while he says he’s seen the same future multiple times and admits 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 are inconsistent with the series’ other feats.

The Sun Dagger’s creation comes out to 36.424 - 54.302 zettatons, over 182 trillion times stronger than her second highest feat: causing the eruption of Krakatoa, which is only 200 megatons. And that’s from comparing the Sun Dagger’s creation to a lore feat! If we only use what she’s done on screen, her best feats otherwise are blowing up houses, bars, and casinos, and her only showing above building level is destroying a metal casing around the Brooklyn Bridge!

While this could lead you to argue the Angelus’ Sun Dagger feat is an outlier, it plays a key role in the following arc since Jackie uses it to kill the Heart of Darkness. This means that despite the gap between it and her other feats, the Sun Dagger is narratively important, and it being used to defeat a major villain would make it valid for scaling.

For the possible immeasurable statement, it’s character-based narration from an Angelus worshiper who uses flowery language elsewhere in his descriptions, so 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, so it would be an outlier.

Lightspeed/FTL arguments

Despite Sara and Jackie both fighting the Angelus, who has a lightspeed feat, this was done in her true form where she’s a living mass of energy, and neither have interacted with or reacted to her in this state. And while the Angelus can manipulate light for attacks, Sara blocking it has no proof she moved in tandem, while Jackie’s only interaction shows that her light has force, meaning these aren’t actual lightspeed attacks/blasts.

There’s also a possible argument where the Angelus force could catch up with Velocity and Danielle Baptiste could grab her mid-run, with Velocity being able to outrun a radio wave. The problem is Velocity outrunning it required her to be in an emotional state that pushed her past her limits, and there’s nothing in either encounter that suggests she was even moving at Mach speeds. Non-speedsters like Cyblade could visibly see the Angelus and Velocity’s chase and tell it was gaining on her, while Dani’s encounter has no visuals or sound effects present to convey that Velocity’s going at supersonic speeds before being grabbed.

The universal rebirth in Artifacts

From the start of the Artifacts series, it’s consistently shown in recap pages, the Curator’s dialogue in issues 1 and 9, the actual sequence in issue 12, and Tom Judge in issues 15 and 16 that the universe’s destruction is a chain reaction caused by all 13 Artifacts being brought together, so nobody would scale to it.

As for the aftermath, despite the number of statements that Jackie was responsible for remaking the universe, these are directly contradicted by the actual scene which shows Sara doing it while Jackie tries to stop it, and later statements from in-universe characters, an official timeline, and the editors at Top Cow confirm Hope was the one who remade the universe while all Jackie did was manipulate its events.

You might think Sara causing the reset with Hope’s death would let her scale to universal, but it’s established in earlier issues that Hope’s death would remake the universe regardless of what causes it.

Sara and Jackie’s universal durability feats

In the same sequence where it’s revealed Sara, Jackie, and Hope survived the universe’s destruction in Artifacts, Jackie says their connection to Hope is what prevented the universe’s destruction from killing them. This implies it wasn’t really a matter of durability, just that they’d been protected by her at some subconscious level.

Jackie does have a feat after the reset in Artifacts where he destroys the Heart of Darkness' dimension and tanks it, with this dimension being called a universe by two different sources. Unfortunately, it isn’t consistent since he’s repeatedly harmed by far less in previous runs and never displays this kind of durability anywhere else. Even in the same run this feat is from, the Darkness needs to protect him so he doesn’t die from a fall from orbit, and right before Jackie enters the dimension, he gets messed up by a helicopter exploding on him, which does kill an exact duplicate of him.

The time-eating monster

Near the end of Witchblade, an Artifact bearer named Sabine kills a monster that’s said to be consuming and weakening time, which an Angelus warrior says would cause the end of everything. Combine that with how time is below the afterlife, which resides in the fifth dimension, and you could argue the monster’s universal, but we only get two pages of it 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 the statement that the monster would end everything could just be hyperbole since it was eating everything in its way.


Verdict


Stats

Starting off with stats, we’ll compare their direct feats first, then consider their scaling for the full scope of their abilities.

Strength and durability

For Pat’s Toxin specifically, his best feats are destroying Razor Fist’s prosthetic knives, beating Carnage to the point of nearly killing him, getting hit by a hot iron hard enough to crack a wall behind him, and Venom smashing him through a tombstone. If we look at later points in Toxin’s life, its strength improves into lifting and destroying cars, tearing through metal doors, mortally wounding Agent Venom, and the symbiote directly overpowering Carnage on its own. Durability’s a similar story, with Eddie’s time with Toxin letting him withstand multiple blows from Agent Venom, including having one of his arms and fingers bitten off, and survive being stabbed in the chest.

Meanwhile, Sara’s direct strength feats include cutting through grown men and punching their jaws off, obliterating robots with the Witchblade’s blasts and tearing through some rock with its claws, and destroying heavily armored cyborgs. But there’s a difference between their durability feats: Sara’s have quantifiable numbers. Whether it’s surviving an explosion that collapsed a building for under one ton of TNT, an oil tanker explosion worth 2.61 tons of TNT, or another building-collapsing explosion worth 9 tons of TNT, Sara’s got Toxin beat in this department.

And this is just with their direct feats. It gets worse when we use scaling.

Given what was already stated above and the statement that he’s stronger than Venom and Carnage combined, Toxin should scale above feats like Venom tanking a sound blast that broke windows for 10 miles, which- when factoring in Venom’s distance from the epicenter -would require withstanding 3.78 kilotons of TNT; Agent Venom fighting Jack O’Lantern, who can harm suits capable of withstanding 50 megaton nukes; Venom and Carnage shrugging off blows from a serious Spider-Man and overpowering him, or both taking beatings from Kaine, a guy that made quick work of Spider-Man.

With all that in mind, this should let Toxin easily scale above Spider-Man’s feats. This would include taking hits from Wayeb and overpowering a weakened Dracula, who have feats like creating blizzards over Manhattan, conjuring thunderstorms over Boston, and snowstorms over London, which would be worth hundreds of kilotons and over 1 megaton. And with chainscaling, we could bump those numbers to 15.03 megatons from Spidey fighting his Insomniac counterpart, who’s comparable to his Miles, who survived an explosion that would’ve vaporized Harlem. So even if you think the 50 megaton scaling has issues, there’s still enough consistency for Toxin to be in the high kiloton to low megaton range.

For Sara, she’s directly overpowered the Angelus, whose feats include destroying a metal casing around the Brooklyn Bridge, which gets 1.3 - 4.3 kilotons, causing the eruption of Krakatoa on her own for 200 megatons, and enduring the energy of a sun while crafting the Sun Dagger, which would be 16.08 - 21.25 petatons for her durability and 36.42 - 54.3 zettatons for the Sun Dagger. If we only stick to the comics, this leaves Sara over 271 TRILLION times stronger than Toxin’s 50 megaton scaling!

But if you think the Sun Dagger’s too high scale compared to the rest of Top Cow, we can still look to the anime. Thanks to the confirmation that Masane from the anime wields the same Witchblade as Sara, we could easily scale Sara to the anime Witchblade causing an earthquake that flooded Tokyo without even a fraction of its power or creating a shockwave that could blow up all of Tokyo, putting it at over 99 megatons, possibly even low or hundreds of gigatons.

In other words, even without the Sun Dagger scaling, Sara’s still 6,506 times stronger than Toxin, easily giving her the strength advantage.





Speed

Toxin’s only direct showings are diving away from a gunshot and catching attacks from Black Cat as a civilian, and the symbiote surrounding him before a subway train can hit him. Sara can catch bullets at slightly under the speed of sound. It’s obvious who has the better direct feats.

Scaling is a different story. Sara can scale to Ian Nottingham catching bullets, which can get a little under Mach 1 or nearly Mach 2, Jackie Estacado dodging a bullet at Mach 1.57 or Mach 2.84 depending on the calc, and future Witchblade bearer Masane Amaha jumping away from gunfire at Mach 3.76. At her highest we could scale her to Jackie flying past the Karman line in under a minute at Mach 27.33.

By comparison, Toxin at minimum would be upscaling Mach 3444 from Dagger throwing her daggers into space, making him 126 times faster than Sara’s best scaling, to say nothing of the relativistic feats like Ben Reilly dodging debris launched from the moon to Earth, Moon Knight reacting to a laser, and Daredevil dodging Iron Man’s repulsor beams, which widen the gap to nearly 30,290 times faster! 

Whatever feats we scale him to, Toxin takes speed.




Tertiaries


This category easily goes to Sara.

Thanks to 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, her adventures started in the 90s and (accounting for the two year timeskip after Jackie’s death where she got rid of the Witchblade) she spent roughly 18 years using the Witchblade to fight super soldiers, robots, ghosts, demons, spirits, creatures from other dimensions, and many other things. And that’s without getting into her link to every one of its past bearers that reached as far back as Pangaea and gives her all of their memories, skills, and experience!

Patrick- hell, all of Toxin’s hosts combined -are much more limited in comparison. Pat only fought a handful of criminals and villains for a little over three weeks in consecutive 2 hour periods, and even with the rest of his hosts accounted for, it’s barely an improvement! While Toxin’s time with Eddie did lend him more combat experience, the same can't be said for Bren and Rick. When he’s with them, Toxin's mostly relegated to a punching bag that jobs to various symbiote weaknesses. It really doesn’t help that because of Marvel’s 15 year timescale, Toxin’s actual experience and skill are far more limited even with those extra hosts.




Versatility

When it comes to weapons, Toxin only has the symbiote itself. Sara has a few firearms, but those are useless against a symbiote that can regenerate from far worse.

Being the son to Carnage and grandson to Venom, Toxin has a lot going for him as a symbiote. His shapeshifting gives him immense versatility, being able to make any weapons out of his hands, summon ensnaring tendrils, crawl up walls, go invisible, and grow over 10 feet tall. He also has extremely heightened senses that let him track people through blood and fear, and warn him of people in the area or oncoming danger. And perhaps most important of all, Toxin has extremely potent regeneration that can let him get up from any injury, and even absorb the mass of others as a means of regrowing its body.

Sara’s Witchblade on the other hand has a far deeper bag of tricks. It also has shapeshifting and construct making, and she can also crawl up walls and sense danger, primarily the supernatural. But it goes a little beyond that. 

The Witchblade can see invisible foes, which would render Toxin’s camouflage moot. Lots of her firepower comes in her energy attacks, electricity, soul storing, absorption of city-wide nanomachines, other symbiotes, and magic, and most importantly, her pyrokinesis. Fire is one of the Witchblade’s main attacks, and it's also one of a symbiote’s most detrimental weaknesses. Fire can separate a symbiote from its host, making it and the host all the more easier to kill, and disintegrate the symbiote entirely to a point beyond repair. Soul manipulation is also deadly, but given this ability can drain Sara of usage, it more than likely wouldn’t come up unless it is a very last resort. Her evolution allows her to constantly adapt and evolve, her fissionism/resurrection can circumvent lots of Toxin’s options, and she could kill the symbiote outright by absorbing it, leaving Pat helpless. Even if she were to be killed or is in any danger of being killed, the Witchblade can circumvent this by replicating itself to act as a damage sponge, something it's done to save Sara before when she gave birth. 

Sara also has regeneration, but it's more limited than Toxin’s, which can allow him to regenerate from far worse conditions, though the Witchblade’s resurrection can let her come back just as fast, as fast as five minutes, so that would likely even out there in scenarios where either die, so both can come back to the fight quick. And unlike Toxin, the Witchblade's tendrils can bypass its opponent’s regen by setting him ablaze or destroying his molecular bonds, which is a more potent level than Toxin’s possible cellular regeneration.

Other abilities such as precognition and immortality negation are more magic based in nature, so they wouldn’t really apply to Toxin, as he isn’t really considered magic or supernatural in nature.

Overall though, Sara’s exploitation of Toxin's major weakness and wider array of powers wins her this category. While Toxin has superior iterations of some of her powers, it's not enough to make up for the versatility the Witchblade has.



Partnership

When it comes to their teamwork, Toxin and the Witchblade are similar. At first, neither pair seem fond of their humans, and Patrick/Sara often find themselves working against their symbiotes frequently, having to fight off their bloodlust and darkness. Though by the end of their tenures, they show some cooperation with each other, but neither really hold an advantage over the other with this, and if one partnership is struggling with violent urges, odds are the other will as well. But when they know death is on the line, both symbiotes have shown to put aside their hunger and work together to beat an opponent or complete a task. Thus, this category is a draw.




Conclusion

After the public execution that was Venom vs Jackie, it might be a surprise to find a Top Cow character beating a symbiote, but unlike his grandfather, Toxin didn’t really have much going for him.

To give you an idea for how bad this is for Patrick, Venom would’ve been at an AP disadvantage against Jackie if he only had street tier stats, but he made up for it with his enormous speed advantage, plethora of hax, and an ingrained connection to the symbiote hive mind that made him unkillable. The ONLY thing Toxin has out of that list is the speed advantage. He has zero hax, his most useful power (invisibility) comes from a guidebook and is something the Witchblade’s countered in the past, and despite having better regeneration than Sara, her main attacks completely nullify it. Even if she somehow didn’t counter it with fire and molecule-breaking tendrils, she could still just absorb the symbiote or it and Pat’s souls. And unlike Venom, Toxin doesn’t have ANY showings of resurrecting himself through the symbiote hive mind, so once he dies, that’s it. End of story.

No matter witch way you look at it, Sara had this fight down Pat.

The winner is Sara Pezzini.




Toxin

Advantages:
  • Faster with scaling…
  • The symbiote’s bulletproof nature negates Sara’s guns
     
Disadvantages:
  • …But Sara would blitz if we went off direct feats
  • = Neither has any distinct edge in partnership with their parasites
  • Gets AP stomped whether we use the comics or anime 
  • Less durable
  • Outclassed in experience even when composited
  • At constant risk of exposing himself to one of his main weaknesses (fire)
  • Smaller pool of powers
  • Worse showings of shapeshifting
  • The Witchblade’s main attacks nullify his regen
  • Vulnerable to Sara’s absorption and soul manipulation, with the first being superior to his own
  • Was killed off panel by getting beaten to death in a gutter
  • His only mainstream appearance was an exposition dump with one of the worst line deliveries and an unceremonious death
  • Became a bum and a jobber in recent years

Sara

Advantages:
  • Faster with direct feats…
  • AP stomps regardless of what we use 
  • More durable
  • More experienced than all of Toxin’s hosts
  • Larger variety of powers
  • More versatile shapeshifting
  • One of Toxin’s biggest weaknesses (fire) is one of her main method of attack
  • Tendrils and fire bypass Toxin’s regen 
  • Can absorb Pat and Toxin’s souls or just absorb Toxin outright
  • David Wohl, Paul Jenkins, Ron Marz, and Tim Seeley’s runs are great
  • The art from Michael Turner, Keu Cha, Francis Manapul, Stjepan Sejic, and Diego Bernard

Disadvantages:

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