>>2375
Most of those people probably don't even actually read comics. They're fans of adaptations like movies, shows, and games, and then they read wiki entries as if that's a substitute for reading the actual stories. There are barely any comics fans left. And I don't just mean fans of new comics. There are none of them left. The SJW takeover since 2015 has ensured that nobody, absolutely nobody, actually likes modern comics. But even before then, the market crashed in the mid-late '90s and never really recovered. The comic industry has faced a significant problem since then of their audience literally dying off, because new people aren't replacing the old whales. There was a bit of a bump in the early 2010s when DC did a semi-successful reboot, but that bump was really only noticeable because the market was already so fucked that it took barely any new people to actually be noticed, and all those gains were destroyed post-2015 anyway.
I'm pretty sure I'm the biggest comicsfag on this site. Hell, even on /co/, there are practically no people who actually read comics. And I don't just mean new ones, I mean any. Lots of people like adaptations, and then they read wiki entries, but few have actually read the stories. It's easy to tell because these people are the power level people, because that's something you can glean from a wiki entry. If you read the actual stories you'll see that they're almost never about powering up, they're about using set powers but in clever ways, to outwit the villain. When power levels do fluctuate, it's not like Dragon Ball Z where Goku gets stronger to beat the villain, it's just because the author (or more likely, editors) realized it was fun to have Superman do wacky stuff that he needs to be absurdly powerful to do. Because the whole bit with powerful western superheroes like Superman is that it doesn't matter how strong he is, because his arch-enemies are mad scientists like Lex Luthor and Brainiac, or guys whose power-level is essentially "slightly stronger than Superman," like General Zod or Doomsday.
Honestly I think a lot of the power-level autism you hear in regards to western superheroes is from people who never read the stories but do know Dragon Ball Z. Dragon Ball Z does in fact have stories that are about getting stronger. Western stuff almost never does that. But even then, it's overstated in Dragon Ball Z, by people who never understood the story. It does happen sometimes, like sort of with the fight against Frieza, but other times it's clearly done to show that power levels are stupid, and the characters should learn to be smart. Goku outwits Cell by training Gohan to make Super Saiyan his normal form so that he can then go Super Saiyan twice. The fight against Buu ends with a relatively complicated set of wishes on the Dragon Balls to allow them to beat him with something a bit more than sheer strength.
All that said, y'all niggas have no idea the absolute bullshit power levels that western superheroes have reached, because the stories started getting very high level cosmic in the '80s, and by the 2000s there was a lot of metatextual stuff where characters were really abstract concepts in the real world, aware that the comics world is fiction and therefore able to re-write it like the book that it is. Goku is theoretically very strong since in Super when he fought Beerus, they said that their blows would have destroyed the universe if Beerus wasn't absorbing the energy. And then Goku has gotten many times stronger since then. But by 2008 DC had established that Superman is really more than just an alien, he's really the pure essence of imagination, or in other words, the pure essence of life itself (because if you don't have imagination are you even really alive?). So the only way to really kill Superman for good is to kill everyone in the real world, or since lack of thought/imagination is the same as death, to make everyone in the real world give up on life itself and just let themselves be NPC slaves with no hope or imagination or thoughts of their own. On one level of reality, Superman fights Lex Luthor and Doomsday with his comic book shenanigans, but on another, more real (but still canon) level, he fights the real villains that are despair and all the other forces that would make you give up on your hopes and dreams and just give in to those that try to control you. He fights them by appearing in comic books and their adaptations and thus inspiring hope and imagination (and therefore life) in the readers, and then in the people the readers interact with, and so on.
Also he can bench-press the earth for like a week.
But of course while it's fun to actually point out all the absurdity, it doesn't come across as that silly in the stories themselves (though honestly that meta stuff does still come across as quite silly, clearly partially intentionally), because it's not like Superman and Batman are arguing over who is stronger. The stories aren't about the strength of each character. It's about the characters using what they have to overcome the challenges they're faced with. Superman doesn't fight The Joker, he fights guys that are made to match with Superman. And actually when he does fight The Joker he isn't as well prepared as you'd think because he's not quite as used to the things The Joker faces him with. Batman fights The Joker because they're literally made for each other. It has nothing to do with power levels. Power levels mean very little in the actual stories.
A classic example from an actually good story is The Dark Knight Returns. People like to list this as an example of Batman beating Superman. What happens is Superman gets hit by a nuke, and the nuke's fallout blocks out the sun, the source of his powers. Then he doesn't even actually want to fight Batman, because they're friends, but he has to. Then Batman gets beaten so bad that everyone thinks he was killed. Except Superman. Superman actually knew the whole time. He didn't want to even fight him, after all. Then faking his death makes people say Batman "beat Superman." It's stupid and it's missing the point entirely. Batman achieved his goal, and he's the protagonist of the story, so sure, he "won," but literally because Superman let him achieve his goal, and Batman still lost the actual fight. But it doesn't matter because anyone who thinks The Dark Knight Returns is about power levels is a fucking idiot.
>tl;dr: Comic book fans barely exist anymore. I'm one of the last ones. Those people you see in comments sections of death battles are casuals who like adaptations and then read wikis, not the comics themselves. The actual stories are not about power levels. The absurdity of comics is fun to talk about sometimes, but it's not the point of the actual stories. That said, Superman is infinitely stronger than Goku, and while Goku got closer in Super, people just don't understand how fucking ridiculous comics have gotten since the '80s, because nobody reads them.