Every Superman story is like this. Superman can literally do anything he wants, anything in the world, and due to his altruistic nature, instead of inverting the heads of anyone who looks at him sideways he wants to help people. How does he go about it? How has he done it for fifty freakin' years now? He flies around Metropolis and stops muggers. And hey, if a super villain with a dimensional cyclotron concealed in his trenchcoat just happens to wander into Metropolis and start some shit, Superman will be all over his ass. If not, well fuck him, he's outside of the city limits and Batman can take care of him, Superman probably has something important like a convenience store robbery to foil.

So I guess my point is that superhero comics are pretty stupid and, like most stupid things, they're also very popular, and thanks to science we know that when something is stupid and popular for a long enough period of time, a movie will inevitably be made out of it. So, it was only a matter of time before superheroes and movies came together in a cataclysm of retardedness.

Hollywood, of course, had to set up some ground rules before they brought super fucking anything to the local multiplex. Hollywood has a reputation to uphold. Hollywood is the pinky finger holding onto the ledge and keeps our society from plummeting into the bottomless pit of debauchery and poor taste. Superheroes were going to have to shape up if they were going to be considered on the same level as such sense-making classics as The Fast and the Furious and Glitter.

Strangely enough when the time came around to make a superhero movie the only thing that Hollywood seemed to have a problem with was the superhero costumes. You know, the very thing that makes superheroes freakin' superheroes. There's a good reason that superheroes wear costumes that your average everyday Joe schmuck doesn't wear. It's the same reason why football teams don't come out onto the field in Capri pants and trapeze artists at the circus don't defy certain death in their sweatpants and T-shirts. The costume delineates the person you're supposed to be watching from the hordes of people that you shouldn't be giving a crap about. Observant readers will notice that in the first six paragraphs where I was riffing on how retarded the idea of superheroes was, I never once mentioned that they wear costumes. There is enough stupid shit surrounding the superhero genre that you can go on about it for a page and a half and never even get to the fact that they all wear spandex tights and masks. I'll admit that the tights and masks thing is stupid, but considering that everything else to do with superheroes is so monumentally crack-headed anyway, when you look at it all at once, the tights are just a tiny goofy-assed drop in a giant deranged bucket.

And it's not like Hollywood producers have a problem with tights in general: Watch any finished product from the Hollywood dream factory and you're bound to see at least one or two spandex-coated asses here and there. Hell, I think they worked some lycra-fueled rumpshaking into that "Mona Lisa Whatever" movie that that shark- faced mutant Julia Roberts was in. You couldn't pay me enough to go and find out, however, on the off chance that it's her mutant shark ass doing the shaking. I only go so far for science.

You also can't say that the tinsel town candy-coated dream injector had some theoretical aversion to the male anatomy as portrayed through stretch pants, seeing as they have a seemingly insatiable appetite for the same thing completely naked. It seems like every other time I go to the movies I'm getting guys bare asses crammed into my face. There's every chance that I'm exaggerating, but I'm pretty sure that at least ninety five percent of movies made after 1989 have consisted of nothing but parades of men's hairy, objectionable asses. Between his work on "Saturday Night Live" and the film "Old School" every square millimeter of Will Ferrell's swimsuit region has been more well documented than if he had devoted his ass to science and science had decided to make an Imax film about it and then projected it on every available flat surface on earth. Between that and "Jackass: The Movie" a few men's rears covered in even a thin sheath of gauze or aluminum foil would be a welcome break.