Gen X and Millennial men love watching fights. MMA, boxing, wrestling and whatever the fuck slap fighting is supposed to be. Hell, the fights don’t even have to be real. In fact, sometimes it’s better that way because most of the time you can’t be wrong or lose a bet when the fighters are Batman and Captain America – they don’t exist and it all depends on the writer anyway, but that doesn’t stop power scalers from arguing for hours or even days about this shit.

I joined a bunch of ‘comic book brawl’ style groups to see what was going on in the world of superhero power scalers, and it’s pretty spectacular. Basically, you have DC fans and Marvel fans. DC fans think Marvel characters are dumb and vice versa, and they’re both right. There are many layers to this sad lopsided cake. Here are a few of them:

• They designate each hero by whether they are a street-tier, global, universal, or multiversal threat. Street tier is someone like Wolverine, multiversal is like, who fucking cares, it’s boring.
• There are some characters that are so broken (ie: overpowered), they know they’re in a comic book and thus can alter their reality to win any fight. Superboy Prime is one example. He can even punch holes in space-time for some reason!
• If you dare say anyone can beat Superman, the nerds will come for you like John Wick came for that kid who killed his dog.
• There are 347 different versions of the Hulk and you better know which one you’re talking about or the nerds will come for you like Liam Neeson came for the guy who kidnapped his daughter.

Here’s some random bullshit I pulled out of Facebook’s magic nerd fedora:

Unkindness Raven is……equal to the Presence. She literally creates plot. CAS (Cosmic Armor Superman) is slightly behind her because he can alter the plot. TOBA Hulk never existed, and is featless. He only appears in a vision of What Could Be, were Hulk to allow TOBA to inhabit his body. RKT (Rune King Thor) is pointless on here. He’s Universal. Thats all.

I’m embarrassed that I understood at least 50% of that.

On the other hand, actual give and take between these mammoth American comics companies is much more charming than the furious masturbating of their fans; ie: once in a while, one publisher will let the others’ characters win in their own books. Batman and Captain America are evenly matched, Superman beats Thor, but Storm beats Wonder Woman. That’s pretty cool when you think about it, because most of these writers of harmless sequential fiction probably never think about the massive amount of verbal diarrhea they’ve inspired from 45 year old teenagers who are debating the logistics of super strength vs. telekinesis while their Hot Pockets are warming up. The writers are just having fun, and I guess they hope their readers are too, and not sending each other death threats because someone told them Leonardo from the Ninja Turtles would neg-diff Nightwing.

But it’s not over yet. Sometimes the discussion turns to anime and manga, and if you know anything about anime and manga nerds, they don’t need a reason to come for you. They simply have no social awareness. If you don’t know who Goku is, he’s Japan’s answer to Superman, with spikier hair and he can destroy planets by throwing energy balls at them. That’s right, he charged an attack for 30 seconds and destroyed earth. Considering how things are going on earth right now, I wouldn’t blame him.

The Japanese manga market is responsible for 90% of comics sales in the US, while Marvel and DC scramble to find synonyms for “ultimate” or pick a cryptid of the week to pit their heroes against in order to desperately hold on to the measly remaining 10%. So basically, if you were power scaling American comics vs. manga, DC and Marvel would be Howard the Duck and Japan would be Galactus. I can’t think of a more fitting analogy.

But until the last issue of Spider-Man hits the stands, there will always be a virgin screaming louder about power levels than Vegeta could ever dream of. And he broke his scouter!

Exo