Superman always wears red overpants.

Living in the Berenstain Universe, where everything sucks, you may have noticed that contemporary "Superman" depictions have no red overpants. This is one of the many, many, many, many, many reasons I stopped reading comics, and since the depantsing continued into the motion picture maladaptation The Man of Steel, I have considered dropping movies too.

Note that no-pants Superman is technically Bizarro.

Back when comics were good, a run called Superman: Red Son was released which posited the question: what if Superman's rocket had landed in the Soviet Union instead of Kansas? Of course the Ferrous Gentleman was raised as a communist and grew up to become a totalitarian dictator. This Superman did not wear red overpants. His overpants, where he had any, were grey - symbolic of the grim, conformist Hellscape communism wrought.

Contemporary Superman is a communist. This is because he is being written in the Berenstain Universe. Superman's overpants represent his conscience - their colour suppressed in Red Son as under a stifling ideology, and totally absent in the degenerate and nihilistic culture of today. Red Son was a warning about misguided ideals which we have failed to heed.

In 2013, forehead can crushing champion Zack Snyder gave us a movie in which Superman, stripped of the overpants of truth, justice and the American way, fucking murders General Zod by snapping his neck. Batman in The Dark Knight Returns didn't even kill the Joker, who was way more evil than General Zod, a military professional whose only crime in The Man of Steel was to attempt a necessary coup to save his world from destruction.

Some argue that Zack Snyder did this because he is a simpleton who doesn't understand things like character, character arcs, or that slow motion isn't new, or that making everything look visually dark doesn't create dark atmosphere, or that Superman without his red overpants is horribly aesthetically unbalanced, or that the field of design is best left to professionals, or that chopping up the chronology of a movie for no reason doesn't make it better, or that JJ Abrams style lens flare was stupid in Star Trek and is stupid in Superman, or that you can't level a city and expect people to feel like there was a happy ending in your movie, or that Ben Affleck already had a role in Mallrats which was stylised in the opening credits as "Buttman", or that no one likes Zack Snyder.

The Superman cape has a yellow S-shield on the back of it as well. If it doesn't have that it's not Superman. It's another design thing. You can't just take stuff out of a design and add a bunch of lines on it. It doesn't work that way.