The set of concepts and ideas that we all accept today as constituting our idea of a "superhero" could not be more asinine. You could walk up to a mental patient, hand them a glass of chicken bones, and tell them to use it to create an exciting adventure story fraught with magic and danger and once you cleaned the blood and drool off of the finished product you'd probably get something that makes just about as much sense as your average "Superman" comic.

In your average superhero origin story, the protagonist will ride his skateboard into some radioactive slime barrel in a science lab just as he gets struck by lightning. This will, instead of giving him cancer for a split second before his eyeballs squirt out of his head, will give him the ability to fly, read minds, and blow stuff up with energy bolts fired from his hands. Then he ignores the obvious applications of his powers, like learning to play power chords and kicking every band in the world's ass by being the only lead guitarist who can motherfucking fly and shoot lightning at the audience. I mean, think about that for a second, do you think there would even BE other bands right now if Ozzy Osbourne could fly and shoot lightning at people?

Every time, though, the guy who gets the powers always decides to fight street crime on a grass roots level. He takes his ability to fly faster than light, level a city block with his bare hands, and know what you're thinking before you do and focuses it against guys in alleys wielding butterfly knives. Now, I know that a superhero's right to do what they want with their powers on their own time is protected by the constitution, but aren't the police more than capable of handling guys with knives? Plus, in most cases a superhero can only be in one place at one time, meaning they can only take out one or two knife guys at a time, thus lowering the crime rate by maybe .0001 percent. That's like eliminating your ant problem by going out into your backyard with a pair of scissors, picking up the ants individually and cutting them in half.

It would almost make sense if superheroes just started out with street crime and worked their way up to super villains and evil organizations like COBRA and Wal-Mart, but they never seem to be that ambitious. Go and read the start of any superhero story and see what the superhero is doing when he first appears. I'll guarantee you that no matter what superhero it is, it'll start off with him saving the life of some dumbass tourist who decided that "Beaten, Robbed, Stabbed, Violated with a Broom Handle, and Left for Dead Alley" was just a name. It's only after they dilute the gene pool by rescuing that guy from his own stupidity that they'll accidentally stumble over the super villain's insidious plan to attack the earth with giant mechanized drill sperm.