The One Above All is the most powerful being in the Marvel multiverse. He is at once God and the living concept of the author given form. He is the one who created everything within Marvel, and watches over it, guiding it along the path it has to go. His only weapon is love, and the mystery of how people live and choose kindness intrigues him. He also has another face, the One Below All, who is the darkness and hatred of the universe, the One Above All’s Hulk. Ever since his introduction in Fantastic Four #511, he has been the pinnacle of everything in Marvel, and yet twenty years later, that might have just changed.
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Incredible Hulk (2023) #29 saw the Hulk venture deep into the heart of the Mother of Horror’s dead city, and uncover a terrifying and confounding truth; she was not created by the One Above All, and she has made him bleed. Her history and initial encounter with the One Above All completely rewrites the power structure of the Marvel Universe, for better or worse. It all started way back when the Earth was young, and the birth of gamma.
A Darkness Born In Light’s Shadow
As Hulk traversed the city full of dead monsters, his guide, impersonating Betty, told him to ask the dead beasts for the history of the Mother of Horrors. Hulk did, and saw visions of the Earth when it was still young, inhabited only by the first gods. According to the history of the dead monster, it was peaceful, serene, with no death or destruction. Then, from nowhere but her own power, the Mother of Horrors arose. She corrupted the gods, drove them to devour and slaughter each other, drawing the attention of the One Above All. He created beings to destroy the corrupted monsters, but after he’d done that, the Mother of Horrors dragged him into the dark too.
The Mother of Horror was unable to actually kill the One Above All, barely even scratching him, but she did corrupt him. She created his dark half, the One Below All, the drop of blood from the One Below All becoming gamma energy. The One Below All eradicated all of the Mother of Horror’s children, then locked her away behind a door only he could open. Now, the Mother of Horrors and the Eldest need the Hulk to free her, as his connection to gamma will let him force the door open. Eldest took on the form of Abomination to finally destroy the Hulk and steal his flesh, but while that fight is about to start, we need to talk about the one that happened all the way back at the onset of creation.
Greater Than, But Not Above Anymore
Before this comic, no being has ever been able to hurt the One Above All. The only instance of something like this came when Thanos acquired the Astral Regulator in Thanos: The Infinity Conflict, but that has since been retconed, and even then Thanos wasn’t strong enough to hurt the One Above All, just abusing rules to lock him in an unwinnable situation. But this comic directly states that the Mother of Horrors hurt the One Above All, and even removes his omnipotence and omnipresence, as if he were either of those things he would have known about the Mother of Horrors. Even if she was only able to slightly wound him, like the remembrance in his issue’s final page directly states, that automatically makes the Mother of Horrors the strongest villain to ever appear in Marvel to date.
Now, this should also be taken with a grain of salt. After all, the one telling this story is a monster who is implied to have been fiercely loyal to the Mother of Horrors, and could easily be an unreliable narrator in this instance. Still, if there’s any truth to these claims and the Mother of Horrors is unleashed, she could easily wreak havoc the likes of which Marvel has never seen. The real question is not what she is capable of, as if she can corrupt and injure the One Above All there is little she cannot do, but if her being around is even a good thing for Marvel. After all, long-running series tend to have a massive powercreep problem, and if you powercreep literal God and the author, then at a certain point power just stops mattering.
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