When the subject of comic book characters comes up on internet forums generally the conversation quickly turns into a versus thread in which one poster's favorite hero or villain in pitted against another poster's picks. Generally the conversation gets very silly very quickly and a great deal of people posting typically display a great deal of ignorance when it comes to the people they are supposedly championing. Aside from being the nature of the beast that is an internet social board, it's rather sad to see so many people weigh in with confidence when it's embarrassingly obvious that their only real knowledge comes from the array of modern comic book themed movies and perhaps the odd graphic novel or two...or what their friend told them once -- but certainly not from the official comics themselves.

Now there's certainly nothing wrong with being ignorant as life is all about learning (or suffering...or both) and we are all in a perpetual state of ignorance until we actually obtain knowledge in those areas in which we are sadly lacking and slowly begin to stumble around with a bit more confidence. Yet surprisingly even on comic book boards it's rather sad to see a lot of the same common silliness going on when it comes to one on one arguments/discussions. There's of course the person who posts a random out of context picture of their hero slugging the other with a degree of convincing power. Hey folks...I got a picture of a panel of Spider-Man punching the bejeezus out of Superman. Guess what? Yup, you're embarrassing yourself. Then of course there's the ultimate embarrassment from the modern kids that generally happens in all big power discussions when some sad, ignorant fool posts a picture of Doctor Manhattan from The Watchmen. :roll: Hey kids, molecular and atomic structure manipulation is not unique to that character. Not only are there characters in both DC and Marvel that can manipulate molecules and other folk's atomic structures, but there are quite a pesky handful of characters whose structure can't be manipulated so he couldn't even affect them. Please stop embarrassing yourselves to an amazing degree. Thank you.

One of the big problems that even fairly knowledgeable comic folks struggle with of course (besides the realization that the writer can pretty much make anything happen with editor approval) is ramping it up too far so that you end up struggling with the higher cosmic beings whose power levels and abilities are generally kept somewhat ambiguous...because nothing says power like mystery. So usually we end up with the big boys of Hulk vs. Superman (Hulk at first then a triumphant regrouped Superman) or Thor vs. either of them (Thor of course) and then perhaps some Omega level mutants or perhaps we'd go slightly cosmic with some Thanos vs. Darkseid (Thanos duhhrr) or ....well, you get the picture. It's kind of hard because definitions of power levels are always changing to the whims of the writers and editor in chiefs and it's hard to know where to place people at times. Sure it's the modern age and they create all sorts of official nifty power level bars for all sorts of abilities, but really that stuff can just go right out the window at a moment's notice. Yet...there is a comic book series that has some characters just kicking around Earth with the most mind boggling power that it puts all the characters at Marvel and DC to shame. It may not surprise you to hear that it comes from Japan -- no it's not Dragonball.

This is a series called JoJo's Bizarre Adventure from the very, VERY strange mind of Hirohiko Araki. Mr. Araki is not only quite obsessed with fashion, but he's also quite fond of Western rock music, so much so that most of his characters and their powers are named after famous rock stars and their various album titles. To be quite brief as I've already blathered on a bit, the story centers around the Joestar family and initially their struggle with their ultimate foe Dio. The power of these characters in this series are called "stands", a sort of guardian angel manifestation that have a wide range of powers from typical comic book stuff like elemental control and superhuman powerful physical attack skills, to really extreme things such as Dio's ability to stop time for a set period of...um time. Some of these stands can get quite bizarre such as the guy who can create zippers that he can walk through on anything...including people, and some stands actually grown and change in power. You would think that the ability to stop time would be more than powerful enough and normally you wouldn't think anything could top that. You would be wrong. Brace yourselves.

The man's name is Giorno Giovanna and he's the son of the aforementioned time stopping Dio. Initially he has a stand called "Gold Experience" which possessed several powers. It could turn non-organic material into a living organism, it could accelerate a person's thought patterns so that they could either lose control of their bodies or he could use it to make them experience sensations for a greatly prolonged period, and he could change foreign objects within a person to reform into that very thing that they destroyed thus healing them. But then his stand evolved into "Gold Experience Requiem".

The power of Gold Experience Requiem is quite extreme as it possesses what is called a nullification of action and effect. When something happens that he doesn't want to happen it reverts all those actions back to a state of zero and then replays them to a beneficial effect. Basically it automatically rewinds time and erases the action of whatever caused him harm so that in no longer can affect him. So if you tried to shoot him suddenly for no reason you can think of he just wouldn't be harmed because his stand rewrote that part of reality. So...he's kind of invincible. You would thing that there's really nothing that could be more powerful than that right? You would be wrong.

This man's name is Enrico Pucci. He became very good friends with the oft referenced Dio (very good friends >_>) and rather worshipped Dio as a devine being. Originally without a stand, Dio helped him to gain one as thanks for his kindness and the quite odd and fairly mad priest experimented with stands so that he eventually owned three different types with very different powers. But to make matters short we are going to deal with his final and quite insanely universe-breaking last stand which is called "Stairway to Heaven" (although later renamed "Made in Heaven" to honor Freddie Mercury). Like Giovanna's "Gold Experience Requiem" this stand will kick in automatically whenever he is threatened or perhaps bored with the state of things. Want to know what it does?

Initially it controls the gravitational fields of the entire universe. He can cause these to speed up which in turn causes time itself to greatly accelerate. On a small scale he can make it seem that he can move almost instantly from one point of the world to the next as he is unaffected by the time flow. But taken to the extreme he can keep the speed going faster and faster to the point that no man nor God except for Enrico Pucci himself (who naturally can do whatever he wishes during these episodes) can control or keep up with the flow of the universe. Eventually the universe reaches a breaking point and it implodes and then explodes again as the universe is reborn once again exactly how it was except of course Enrico Pucci can now change and rewrite whatever he wants to have happen no matter how big or how small.

So yeah...he's got that going for him.

So anyhoo, from now on if'n anybody asks you who the most powerful comic book character is you now have your very, very, ridiculous answer -- Enrico Pucci from JoJo's Bizarre Adventure. Did you know he can recreate the universe at will and manipulate it however he wishes and he's just kicking it on Earth you could say?

So...yeah. Knowledge is power.