FYI.

This story is over 5 years old.

Vice Blog

NEW YORK - FUCK SUPERMAN

Those of you who read Gawker already know that these guys put together a decently albeit extremely nerdy list of all the reasons Superman sucks, but they left out the biggest one of all: that everybody into Superman is invariably a pathetic, socially-retarded dickhead. Now just so we're on the same page here, I'm not saying your mom is pathetic cause she thought Christopher Reeves was "handsome." But anybody past the age of, oh, let's be generous and say seven, who has bought a Superman comic, watched a cartoon in which he was the main superhero, gone as him for Halloween, compared themselves or anything to him, or given a shit about him in any substantive way is and shall be a loser for life.

It should be said I'm a pretty big nerd myself and would not be at all surprised to discover that a member of my immediate circle of friends spoke dragon, but I have never met anyone with any degree of interest in the "Man of Steel" who did not plainly exhibit all of the following qualities: extreme over-confidence, dumb hair (generally curly), an almost comical level of ineptness with members of the opposite sex (even total non-candidates like grandmas and little kids), cargo shorts, a secret wish to be seen as "sensitive," crying, a heightened sense of "justice" coupled with a complete inability to do anything in a fight*, and those fucking carabiners everybody started carrying their keys around on like they were working a summer job at the Westville Lake Club boathouse. Also, remember how embarrassing it was any time Jerry Seinfeld would crook his narrow little horse face on that show and say some line about Superman in a fake-deep voice? Every time he did that I had to fight the urge to scream "YOU ARE A GROWN MAN!" at the TV as if I was trying to keep down a barf.

Then there was that shitty point in the early 90s when every self-conscious dork would wear t-shirt with the S-logo, which for some reason always brings the Spin Doctors to mind. Maybe the singer with the AIDS beard wore one of them a lot? Actually, I just wikipedia'd them to see if there was a picture and turns out I was probably thinking of that album Pocketful of Kryptonite. God, what was everybody back then, five?
JAMES JANNON

*The worst example was this time we were at a bar and some drunk middle-aged guy accidentally bumped our female friend a little hard on his way out the door. Our friend shrugged it off and we were on the fence about trying to follow the guy and do something. But then this fuckface we had just met and who had been talking about how bad it was that "the kids don't know about Superman anymore" was like "Are you guys going to let that happen to a LADY?!" So three of us get ramped up and run outside and end up getting into a fight with the guy, who's right at the door having a cigarette, the whole while fuckface is circling us and alternating between yelling "Apologize to her!" and (no joke) "Why are you fighting?!"