Hulk vs Juggernaut vs The Thing:
While Marvel is known to pit one powerhouse against another, there have been so many fights with so many different conclusions that even the fans do not know whom to root for. Some say it’s the Hulk – which looks like the more obvious choice from a distance. But that would be a rookie mistake. Choosing the Hulk over Juggernaut or the Thing based on what the Hulk can do is basically saying a train is faster than a jet plane because you have never ridden the former. All three of them have had varying levels of strength but their base level of power is enough to scare any Marvel Heavy Hitter away. So who takes the cake on this one?
It will be an easy answer to decide in the future since Marvel is already ensuring the Juggernaut and the Immortal Hulk trade fists in the upcoming issues of a specific X-Man. The Immortal Hulk is about to go on a rampage across Krakoa and the X-Men are not happy about it. They have employed their greatest brawn and muscle – Juggernaut, to help them stop the Hulk. Juggernaut #2 will see the titular character duke it out with the Jade Giant. Fabien Nicieza and Ron Garney are going to give us the storyline we all need and deserve. Charles Xavier’s Step Brother is about to fight the Immortal Hulk in a grand deathmatch that will shake the very core of the Earth wits its incoming shockwaves.
On the other hand, we have the Thing. The Thing’s real name is Ben Grimm and he has had violent encounters with the Hulk. Many times, the writers at Marvel would playfully insert a fight between Bruce Banner’s greenish alter ego and the Thing. The results would be spectacular. Sometimes the Thing would win and sometimes the Hulk would beat the living daylights out of our rock hard pal (sorry that came out very wrong). The Thing and the Juggernaut have seldom crossed paths with each other in the comics so depicting the outcome of a match between the two will be hard. So we will have to fall back on historical quantifiable data to do so.
In a fight between the Thing, the Hulk, and the Juggernaut, the outcomes might be very unpredictable if you notice at all the little details you would miss if not for us. We will try and make it easier for you. We will classify the entire article now based on the core competency of each character based on what makes them truly unique as a Marvel Power House.
The Thing’s Unpredictability
We all know that the Thing aka Ben Grimm is the heavy hitter of the Fantastic Four. His strength has steadily increased since he first appeared as a Fantastic Four member. Earlier his strength could only help him lift about 5 tons or exactly 5000 Kilograms. But that has increased steadily over time. As the years passed, the Thing revealed that his strength had evolved and he had enough in his muscles to lift more than 85 tons. With proper weight training and an augmented workout schedule, the Thing managed to increase his strength level to more than 100 tons. That means he has a power class almost the same as the Juggernaut, if not the Hulk.
Why we call the Thing truly unpredictable is because he has managed to pull impossible feats off on his own. When the Hulk and the Thing once got into a fight and everybody was rooting for an angry Hulk to beat the sh*t out of Ben Grimm, the Thing did the unthinkable and knocked out Bruce Banner’s Jade Giant form in literally one punch. After some further physical mutation that enhanced his strength even further, Ben Grimm was able to show something truly unique to the fans.
When a falling building was about to kill thousands of innocent lives, the Thing stepped in to stop it from crashing into the ground. The multi-story building weighed at least 30,000 tons or more. While the Thing did not hold it in place but pushed it to the side (which requires significantly less energy), the feat put the Thing’s power levels at least 12,000 tons with the bench press strength of a minimum of 8,000 tons.
There is also the obvious fact about his durability. Unlike the Hulk or Juggernaut, the Thing has both his outside and his insides made of extremely durable material. When you manage to punch through the Hulk or Juggernaut, you find easily attackable soft tissue. But the Thing has even his organs made out of stone. This has proved surprisingly more useful than one could imagine. His agility and quickness are also more enhanced than what one would expect from a being of his size.
Hulk’s Strength
The Hulk has near limitless power as long as he keeps getting angrier and angrier. We have seen it in action many times. Once the Hulk loses his cool, no matter what villain stands in his way, they almost always end up being beaten to an inch of their life. During the World War Hulk storyline, the Hulk was so enraged that he remained in his Hulk form, termed as the World Breaker Hulk, one of the strongest versions of the Hulk ever known.
The Hulk was so strong it was said that he could break the planet in two if he punched the ground. Every superhero starting from the Sentry to the Ghost Rider had to chew nuts of steel to even manage to land a punch on him. The very energy he radiated during that time was enough to harm anybody and everybody around the Jade Giant.
The Hulk is also more durable than Juggernaut in some aspects. Sometimes, because of the unstoppable momentum, the Juggernaut is able to attain, it gets very difficult to stop him. So the x-Men have used a time-tested method do halt him in his tracks and that is psychic attacks. The Hulk, on the other hand, is literally immune to all forms of telepathic intervention. The psyche of Bruce Banner is so fractured that there are tons of personalities within his mind. Even if a telepath manages to take control of the Hulk, another persona within Banner will take over the body. This makes the Hulk’s mind a labyrinth of sorts from which there is no escape for the psychics who dare to enter it.
Juggernaut’s Unstoppable-Ness
The Juggernaut has the strength to rival that of the Hulk’s. He can throw punches that can shift the tectonic plates and create massive earthquakes. The only downside Juggernaut has is that he is pretty susceptible to psychic attacks. But in a fight between The Thing, the Hulk and Juggernaut, there are no psychics to aid anyone so we can throw that part of the equation out of the window.
What makes Juggernaut truly a force to be reckoned with is that is not actually a mutant. What Juggernaut represents is a cosmic deity. The stepbrother of Charles Xavier is actually the human avatar of Cyttorak, a Powerful God of Pure Magic. As a God, Cyttorak holds near-limitless cosmic energy within his grasp.
If Juggernaut demands more power from the Cyttorak and Cyttorak agrees to lend it to him, Juggernaut can have access to a reservoir of cosmic strength the Hulk and the Thing could only dream of. Even without requesting power from a God, the Juggernaut’s base strength almost killed Thor in the 1997 Thor #17. That is a true testament to Juggernaut’s actual strength.
But that is not all – what makes Juggernaut even deadlier is his unstop-ability. Once the Juggernaut builds enough momentum, no force on the face of this Earth, not even the Hulk or the Thing can stop him.
Final Verdict
All three of them represent the pinnacle of the Brawn. But since we can only have on victor – after careful observation, we have to give this piece of cake to Juggernaut. With an ability to build up a near-unstoppable momentum, access to limitless strength via Cyttorak, and the fact that none of the other competitors have the ability to exploit his one weakness which is psychic attacks, the Juggernaut takes this one fair and square.
