That’s why those “crossover” comics from the 70s didn’t work for me. Superman versus Spiderman? Superman could just kill Spiderman with one punch if he wanted to. He’s TOO powerful, so kind of boring. I generally liked DC comics more than Marvel, because some of the heroes were humans, with powers that came from ingenuity or hard-core training, like Batman or Green Arrow.
Agreed. That’s always been the problem with some of DC’s more powerful characters (like Superman and the Justice League). You have characters so powerful that the only way you can come up with viable adversaries for them is by reallllllyy getting off the reservation (either by creating enemies that are basically gods, or scripting a lot of nonsense even for a comic book, like Lex Luthor being a threat to a being that can see through the earth’s core, hear an ant in Papua New Guinea, and has more powers than your average X-men team). However, where DC really did well is, as you mentioned, in the ‘human’ characters like Bruce Wayne and Green Arrow, who were basically ‘normal’ humans that got where they were by hard work and dedication. Marvel really never did that ...even the characters it has that come closest to ‘normal’ (e.g. Captain America, Black Panther and Dare Devil) are actually super powered (Cap America via super steroids ...erm, I mean a ‘super serum,’ Black Panther by eating some sacred root dedicated to some African panther deity, and Dare Devil by developing a ‘radar sense’ when a chemical accident destroyed his vision as a boy. They could have left Dare Devil as simply a man who develops his other senses to compensate for his blindness, but they had to seep in ‘radar sense’ into the mix. Anyways, the really powerful DC characters are for kids (in much the same way as many of the Marvel characters like the X-men and all the other spandex wearers with funny names), but DC has some interesting works that are quite adult (such as some stuff from Vertigo).