Doctor Who Comics Prove Cybermen Are More Dangerous Than Daleks
Doctor Who comics prove that despite the Dalek's reputations as the Doctor's number 1 villains, the Cybermen are actually more dangerous. Let's face it, Doctor Who fans are as prone as anyone else to speculating about how different enemies would fare against one another. Thankfully, so are the writers of the Doctor Who comics.
Take the example of Titan Comics' 2016 event Supremacy of the Cybermen. Set during the Peter Capaldi era, this revealed the Cybermen had endured until the very end of the universe - and struck a deal with the fugitive Time Lord Rassilon, who had been banished from Gallifrey by the Doctor. They used Rassilon's knowledge of time travel to rewrite history, creating an alternate timeline in which they had dominated the universe. Even more incredible, they sought to use the regenerative energy of the Time Lords to survive the Big Crunch and become rulers of the next universe. The scale of their ambition was breathtaking, and they came closer to dominating two universes than the Daleks ever have.
Another classic example is seen in IDW's tremendous Assimilation² event, which saw the TARDIS materialize on the Holodeck of the USS Enterprise. The Doctor discovered the Cybermen had learned how to travel between dimensions, and had forged an alliance with the Borg. Again, though, the Cybermen had an agenda of their own; to hack into the Borg Collective and learn how to shut it down, so they could absorb all the knowledge and science of the Collective into their own Cyberiad. They came terrifyingly close to succeeding, with the Doctor and his Star Trek allies barely preventing them wiping out the Borg and going on to conquer Starfleet's reality.
There's a simple reason the Cybermen are so dangerous; it's because their goal is expansionary in nature. The Daleks are motivated purely by extreme xenophobia, what the Second Doctor called "a dislike of the unlike." Their only goal is to destroy. What's more, because the Daleks believe themselves the supreme beings of their universe, they almost never learn from their enemies. In contrast, the Cybermen have the most basic agenda in all creation; reproduction. They are always expanding, forever seeking new worlds and civilizations to upgrade, pushing relentlessly at the boundaries of creation itself. They absorb the knowledge of the races they upgrade, meaning their technology is always progressing, and every generation of Cyberman is more dangerous than the one before.
One Dalek may be enough to conquer a planet, but their power doesn't scale like that of the Cybermen, who use their greater numbers not just to crush their enemies, but to radically redefine their own goals and aspirations. For this reason, a single Dalek may be deadlier than a single Cyberman, but only one race is a threat that surpasses time itself, making them the most dangerous antagonist in Doctor Who.