I'm sure many of you are wondering how this all got started, right?  I mean, where does someone get a crazy idea like this?  A tournament, really?

I got into comics at a young age, and was always particularly fond of Spider-Man.  Maybe it was the Superman/Spider-Man comic I got when I was a kid, which I read over and over again...the one with Doctor Doom, in case you're familiar and wondering.  I figured out pretty much immediately that Spidey was the cool one between the two of them, even if he was portrayed as being vastly less powerful.  He was the one who made jokes and has more interesting powers.

Years went by, and every now and then I'd pick up a comic here and a comic there, always either Spider-Man or those weird, not like the cartoon at all Ninja Turtles comics (which, it turns out, started first).  In 1994 I finally started reading Spider-Man on a consistent basis.  The Clone Saga had just started, and it was the single most controversial storyline Marvel ever told.  And I LOVED it.

But this post is not about the Clone Saga, as much as I enjoy talking about it.

I got into fights in comic books, and the logistics therein.  I would go to the comic book store and see "X vs. Y" comics populating the shelves and think "I've gotta read it!" even if I didn't know who the two characters were, or particularly care about them.  There was The Hulk vs. Pitt, Teknophage vs. Zeerus, Marvel vs. DC...they were all the rage in the 90's.

I found electricferret.com sometime in my high school years (for those of you curious about my age, I graduated in 2000.  I think I was a sophomore when I discovered the site, and it was the most amazing thing ever in my teenage mind.  Votes on fights that the purveyor of the site chose and narrated via a pair of commentators.  The site still exists, but that's neither here nor there.  The point is, there was a forum, and everyone got into debates there over who would win in certain fights of their choosing.  I was the guy who stood against everyone with the epic "Venom vs. Doomsday" thread.  If you don't know about it, don't feel bad.  I'm sure it's long gone and those who remember it are few and far between.

In an effort to prove something (and to have fun!) I started a vote-based tournament.  I figured tournament-style was the way to go.  It would break people up into smaller and smaller categories, and really prove who was better than who.  The first tournament was strictly pen-and-paper, with votes taken at school and then summer camp, and then school again, and it lasted a couple years among my college friends.

This first tournament was awkward, though, because it was more like a popularity contest, and because I used composites of characters instead of specific versions.  So, for example, James Bond was an amalgamation of every James Bond there's ever been.  Mario is the cartoon, the game and every other media as one entity.  This tournament saw Blade: Vampire Hunter advance six rounds without losing, triumphing over such characters as Predator, Gambit, The Crow, Spawn...and there were only going to be nine rounds!

I abandoned that tournament and its wacky rules and conditions.  I started a new one, opening it up to new possibilities.  Now we could have (just like this current tournament) the Enterprise with nine or ten different sets of crew as separate entries, each James Bond as a different entry, each of Iron Man's armors as a separate entry, Lateveria and Doctor Doom as separate entries...you get the idea.  This one lasted a while, and then a Jedi defeated a universe, and certain voters in my circle were being openly apathetic and voting without consideration...

So that tournament, too, is over.  Now you see the product of many years of planning and waiting and excitement.  I've been an enthusiast for a long time.  Now it's time to take the reins and create some results!

So now we're learning a little more about gods.  That is to say, what it means to be a god and what it means to fight one.  See, every world has its own definitions and standards for what a "god" is.  That is why I'm being very specific here, bothering to point out which version of each character I'm using.  The television version of Ares from the mid-90's is not the same as, say, the version of Ares from Marvel Comics, who is pretty much an idiot...except when it comes to combat...and he might as well be the antihero version of Thor for the way his powers seem to work, while Thor might as well be the Norse version of Superman.  So you can see and understand that there are, at least, stylistic differences between those two versions of Ares.
As we advance deeper into the tournament, you will discover that there are varying degrees of "omnipotence", including characters who seem omnipotent because they might as well be considering the people they're dealing with.  One way or another we'll learn to distinguish.  After all, when they fight each other, only one or the other can win!

Since we have a combatant in the tournament already who is capable of time-travel, I thought it best to provide some brief discourse on what can and cannot be done with it.  Some of you probably think it's the ultimate trump card.  Go back and kill someone before they were born, and you win, simple as that.

WRONG.  Let me explain.  The idea here is twofold.  First of all, no outside interference is permitted.  If you go back to kill someone before they were born, this means you have to fight their mother at the very least, and quite possibly the doctor and staff, the father...you get the point.  Second, the location might be off-limits.  The question is, in 51 out of 100 places, who wins in a fight?  That means they won't always--if at all--fight in either of their birthplaces.  In fact, the odds are very strongly against it.  Furthermore, imagine they're fighting in exact duplicates of places they know.

The rules become fuzzy when dealing with something like a country.  If Ares were to fight Latveria, for example, the idea is that he's only fighting present-day Latveria.  So imagine the entire country has been teleported to another world...he would not be able to go back and erase its history.

Ares' advantage in being able to time-travel is that if he's fighting a mortal, he can just travel forward in time to a point where they've died of old age and get an easy win.  He can also go back multiple times and have more than one of himself on the battlfield...but if the earliest version of himself dies, all of them cease to exist.

Hopefully this clears some things up for next week!

So I've just posted two fights for the week for the first time, as opposed to the usual one.  I figure I'll run one fight per week from every round that's currently in progress, and I'm predicting a total of 13 rounds.  Think how many contenders that means there will be!  Yeah, it's a LOT.  Do the math.

Speaking of math, and you might wonder how this relates at first...I'm sure you've all noticed that the two current matches--Ares vs. Jefferson and Thanos vs. Chewbacca--seem more than a little bit lopsided.  Well guess what?  They ARE.  If you disagree, by all means vote for the underdog.  I'll be shocked if the underdog ends up winning, but chances are they won't.  So why am I taking votes on these?  It all relates to an idea imposed upon mathematicians-in-training by their teachers known as showing one's work.  If any of us wants to claim that the ultimate victor in this tournament can beat all the other contenders, we need to be able to see how their victory was determined.  If we discover that Spider-Man and Batman are perfectly even when matched against each other based on their wins and losses and what order those all occurred in, we can't just make up who they won and lost to.  No, we have to be fair.  We have to give them a chance and see how it all plays out.

So this week may seem like a waste of time to some of you.  To others, it's a good example of how this tournament is ultimately meant to work.  Stick it out for the long haul and you will see results.  There's a rea

So we're on the second fight that this site has done thus far, and I have to say, it's been a slow start.  I really need to acquire more voters, but I'm afraid that the only way to do that will be to introduce more combatants that people are interested in.  I've been to numerous facebook and myspace groups and numerous forums all over the web, trying to recruit people.  I've gotten a few votes here and there, probably all from my friends...so what will keep everyone else coming back?The forum.  If I can get people talking in the forum, I'll have regular visitors.  There's a link from the forum to here, also, so it should be a piece of cake once we get some interesting discussions started.In the meantime, on Sunday people will get a better idea of just how this tournament's intended to be run.  Thanos won the first fight, and it looks like Chewbacca's going to win the second one.  If he does, then the first round 2 match will be between Thanos and Chewie.  The second will be Latveria vs. Tarantula.  Both should be curbstomps, but it's all part of following procedure in order to come up with results.I figure I'll run one fight from each round that can be fought each week.  So the number of fights per week should increase gradually, steadily, over the course of the next few years.  Yes, I'm well aware that I'll be at this forever if I intend to come to some kind of conclusion.In the coming weeks, we'll see everything from actors to revolutionaries to groups of people in vans to gods of war enter the competition.  Get ready for some craziness as only I can provide!