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.

A tedious analysis of the Bat Man Versus Super Man trailer

Batman Vs Superman: Yawn of Justice recently received a brand new trailer which is every bit as lame as the previous one. Beer helmet enthusiast Zack Snyder once again takes the lead as we're subjected to Mark Zuckerberg as Lex Luthor and Ben Affleck as Ben Affleck in a cheap-looking Batman costume. But there's so much more shit.

This is what the movie logo actually looks like. Lens flare by Pkisme.

Let's break it down like a small intestine.

The trailer revolves around Henry Cavill's Clark Kent being introduced to Ben Affleck's Bruce Wayne. Kent asks who Wayne is, making himself look like the dumbest reporter ever, which makes no sense. Clark didn't arrive on Earth last week, he grew up there. This dialogue is so dumb I want to go back in time and stomp on our ancestors as they crawl out of the sea.

They talk interminably about whether Batman being a vigilante is any worse than Superman saving cats from trees. It is, but they're talking about versions of the characters we know from pop culture. Like how in The Man of Steel General Zod's girlfriend wanted to take Lois Lane hostage because she's Superman's girlfriend in some comics that she read. GOD DAMNIT THESE MOVIES FEEL LIKE THEY WERE WRITTEN BY AN EIGHT YEAR OLD.

You might be thinking it's unusual for a blockbuster movie trailer to revolve around a conversation, but it's important for this movie to do a lot of explaining straight off the bat, if you see what I did there. Firstly, the writers have to explain how Batman is the dark one when Superman just murdered a guy by snapping his neck in the last movie. That kind of throws off the dynamic between the two, don't you think? Or wouldn't a competent screenwriter have thought?

(Sighs internally)

The other big reveals of the new trailer are a derpy looking Doomsday who looks exactly like the cave troll out of Lord of the Rings, and Wonder Woman, who shows up at the end of the trailer just as she showed up at the end of the creative process because you've got to do something with Wonder Woman. This means that the movie will also have to explain why she sat on her ass and did nothing while Earth was invaded and nearly destroyed by Michael Shannon from the underrated movie Bug.

Because Zack Snyder is a douche, all the characters in this movie come across as assholes. He has also put lens flares in everything, like fellow douche JJ Abrams. Lens flare is now the official Hollywood seal of quality: it means you are in for a humongous turd. Only an asshole would think it looks cool, as evidenced by the two people who do.

Is there hope for a DC Comics cinematic universe?

There is presently no hope for a DC Comics cinematic universe. The Man of Steel, despite all the advantages of perfect casting, a big budget and Chris Nolan showing up to the set once, fucked the pooch without lube and now everything is ruined for at least another generation. "Cinematic universes" are another stupid trend to disguise the fact that Hollywood does not produce original content. When studios promise cinematic universes for properties like Ghost Busters, you realise that they don't understand their IPs, or the nature or purpose of storytelling in our culture. They know seven hundred ways to sell you seven hundred shades of shit, but in the end, it's just shit.