The most feared DC villain, Darkseid having wielded the Infinity Stones from Marvel Cinematic Universe is the stuff that comic fans can only dream of, but a story from the early 2000s actually made it happen, and the moment was very anti-climatic honestly. In The Avengers/LA crossover, Darkseid ended up with the Infinity Gauntlet but threw it and the Infinity Stones aside because of their one weakness: they don’t work in the DC Universe at all.
Avengers/LA was Marvel Comics and DC Comics’ last official crossover. The story was extremely ambitious, bringing together both universes’ most powerful heroes-and villains-as they battled one another to save their respective realities. The series saw some amazing moments come to the comic’s pages, including Superman wielding Mjolnir, and many heroes including Thor, Captain America, and Iron Man, fighting similar heroes to their own like Batman, Wonder Woman, and Green Lantern. Both heroes from the Marvel and DC Universe were tasked with finding twelve powerful items that were scattered across each other’s realities, with the winner’s universe not being destroyed. And it’s already obvious neither universe went up in flames.
In Avengers/La #2 by Kurt Busiek, Geroge Perez, Tom Smith, and Comicraft, a handful of Marvel and DC heroes find themselves on Apokolips and are greeted by an Infinity Gauntlet. Hawkeye even notes that he looks worse than Thanos, and could reorder time, reality, and space whenever he wishes. As the heroes question how they are going to take down Darkseid, he tells them that while he feels the “matrices of power” within the Infinity Stones, they don’t do anything for him.
In this shocking scene, Darkseid slips off the Infinity Gauntlet, which has all six Infinity Stones attached to it and tosses it to the heroes, calling the object a waste of his time. Quicksilver caught the Gauntlet before it can fall into the fiery pits of Apokolips and as Thanos is about to attack, the heroes teleport to Marvel‘s Savage Land just in time.
Darkseid did in fact wield the Infinity Gauntlet in the DC Universe, but it was basically completely useless considering it did not come with the powers it would have if he had it in Marvel’s reality. Both the Marvel and DC heroes on the New Gods’ planet were lucky it had no effect because otherwise, Darkseid would have both the powers of the Infinity Stone and his own abilities such as his Omega Beams. It would have been game over for the rest of the DC Universe, and that’s without even factoring if he ultimately acquired the Anti-Life Equation. Still, to see Darkseid toss the Infinity Stones like they were complete trash was a shocking moment for us all.
