Darkseid Is the Winner in Epic Thanos Battle Fan Art

After a day where “Darkseid” was trending on Twitter for several hours — not tied to Ava DuVernay’s New Gods or Justice League‘s Snyder Cut, but launched when somebody asked whether he or Thanos would win in a fight — a user who goes by “Ziggy” brought a popular piece of fan art to the table that throws down the — ahem — gauntlet. The image, which shows Darkseid pounding the snot out of an Infinity Gauntlet-wielding Thanos, got fans riled all over again, but it’s indisputably a nice piece of art.

The question of Darkseid vs. Thanos has certainly been picked apart in the past, but this new Twitter debate has sparked some pretty creative takes.

Ziggy did not originate the piece, and after about half an hour online, we cannot ascertain the name of the artist in question. Using a Google Image search on the image, it is verifiably at least three years old, and instances of it appear on websites as old as 2011 (although those are in user-generated comments, which may have been posted later). The image also appears as the thumbnail for several YouTube videos that deal with the question of who would win.

The popular consensus tends to be that Darkseid would take the fight, if only because DC in general has a universe less grounded in the real world and more “mythological,” meaning that you have beings like Superman and Wonder Woman, who can literally move planets or are the direct descendents of actual gods. Darkseid, of course, is himself a god by birth — and while fans will point out that Thanos achieved godhood himself by harnessing the Gauntlet, his godhood was arguably short-lived and he was taken down by the superheroes. Darkseid tends to take losses in a pragmatic way, exiling his opponents from the world he rules before they can do lasting damage. The few times he has been really messed up, it was by beings who themselves are such massively powerful threats that it would be difficult to imagine them not mangling a huge chunk of the Marvel Universe, too (that would be Doomsday and the Anti-Monitor).