I first wrote about imaginary fights in 2003 for Playboy magazine when the films The Incredible Hulk and Terminator 3 were released. My assignment was the stuff of Woodward and Bernstein’s dreams: Find who’d win a battle between the Hulk and the Terminator. No personal speculation allowed, experts were required to provide a definitive answer.

I interviewed three men: Colonel Avery Chenowith, a Marine combat artist and author of Art of War; Dr. Clark Hung, an associate professor of biomedical engineering at Columbia University; and Jim McLauchlin, then a contributing editor at Wizard: The Comics Magazine, now the editor-in-chief of Top Cow Productions.

I wasn’t worried about Captain Comics, but I was concerned the military expert and scientist would immediately dismiss me as frivolous and get back to their wars and atoms. On the contrary, Chenoweth and Hung were positively giddy to discuss the imaginary fight and approached the question with the depth of intelligence and logic they normally reserved for their “serious” concerns. (Recognizing, I like to believe, that nothing is more serious than an imaginary fight.)

McLauchlin, the comics guy, was excited as well but had considered it all before. He, you see, was responsible each month for reading and answering letters from readers who just HAD to know the winners of fights between, say, Batman and Spider-Man, The Flash and Daredevil, the Silver Surfer and the Green Lantern.

Jim McLauchlin is, no kidding, probably the world’s foremost expert on imaginary fights between superheroes. And I can’t imagine many better things to be. Ruler of the Heavens and Earth is good, but it’s taken.

In the end the score was Hulk: 2, Terminator: 1, with the biomedical engineer contending the Hulk “is governed by rage, making him more fallible.”

Source: Amazon