Marvel Should Use King In Black To Kill Off The One-Above-All

Warning: contains mild spoilers for King in Black #4!

Marvel’s King in Black continues to pit Earth’s greatest heroes against the primordial void made flesh, and Knull is finally showing the upper limits of his power. Having taken a few nasty wounds when he went up against All-Father Thor, losing his jaw to the thunder god’s power, Knull is now facing the revealed God of Light, Tony Stark’s Celestial armor, and a god-tier Doctor Strange. The King in Black is far from beaten, but the cracks are starting to show, and victory now seems possible, even if it’s likely to cost life and limb. But before the King in Black is defeated, Marvel should use the character to kill off the most powerful being in their comics continuity: the One-Above-All.

Generally only seen in Marvel’s most cosmic, reality-bending adventures, the One-Above-All is Marvel’s supreme power – an omnipotent, omniscient being existing outside any one reality and instead presiding over the Multiverse as a benevolent carer who only intervenes when the stakes are so high they threaten countless realities. Also known as Above-All-Others, the One-Above-All is generally portrayed as a shining humanoid whose body shifts between different genders, ages, and races, communicating its connection to all human life… and Marvel should let Knull kill it.

So why should Marvel ditch this awe-inspiring character? What’s important to understand about the One-Above-All is that it exists outside of any of Marvel’s larger mythologies. Not a god in the sense of Doctor Strange’s multi-dimensional adventures or Thor’s pantheon-spanning Those Who Sit Above in Shadow, the One-Above-All tends to follow traditional concepts of a single, patriarchal creator deity, and its position at the very top of Marvel’s power ladder compresses all the fascinating complexities of the company’s interwoven worlds into a simple, flavorless god figure who draws almost nothing from decades of thrilling stories and iconic art.

An important point of contrast is the Living Tribunal – a golden, three-faced deity who exists outside human reckoning, enforcing larger ideas of equity, necessity, and revenge. The Living Tribunal is a trippy sci-fi being who is all-powerful but can’t necessarily be trusted to share the limited human viewpoint of Marvel’s mortal heroes. Then there’s Eternity, a sparkling starfield in quasi-human form, unfathomable to all but Marvel’s greatest minds. Less powerful, but also visually and conceptually unique, are Galactus and the Celestials – cosmic creators and predators designed by Jack Kirby, and whose eon-spanning morality can result in miracles and horrors which play out in the timeframe of planets, not people.

As power increases in the Marvel Universe, the beings who wield it become more complex and less human. Stories from comic greats have added to these characters for decades, revealing uncanny secrets and exploring sprawling plans that have shaken and reformed the very Multiverse itself. But at the top of that pile in current Marvel canon is a being of ultimate power but entirely human sensibilities – someone who can easily stroll down the beach with Spider-Man and empathize with his struggles. The prize at the end of a maze of enthralling strangeness constructed by visionaries of sci-fi and fantasy is a relatable, basically human consciousness effortlessly sympathetic to traditional notions of good and evil.

In a world which houses competing pantheons of gods, alternate realities, infinite realms of magic, and whole ecosystems of alien civilizations, the One-Above-All is unimaginative and limiting, making it so that while the Marvel Multiverse contains the truly strange, it is ultimately managed by the single, relatable intelligence you could find in any fictional world. As Knull claims to be the embodiment of the void before creation, it’s the perfect opportunity for Marvel to unleash the King in Black on its most powerful, most boring character. King in Black has been all about escalation, but while having Knull kill off the One-Above-All would provide spectacle, this is also an opportunity to perhaps just explore the supreme being through a worthy challenger, revealing new facets that embrace the mystery of the cosmos and resist the urge to simplify a rich fictional world which was always better represented by a plethora of ideas than a single, glowing face in the clouds.

About The Author

Robert Wood
(397 Articles Published)

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Robert Wood is a comics editor for Screen Rant and the author of ‘The False Elephant (and 99 Other Unreasonably Short Stories).’ He received his Master’s in English Literature from Lancaster University, and now happily spends his days applying it to Daredevil and the Hulk.

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