Asphyxiation is a brutal death, but Superman's too much of a dick to just kill Lois quickly.
"Superman is a dick."
Comic Books can be very, very strange sometimes. They can feature the hero acting like a jerk for no reason, endless sexual innuendo, extremely racist propaganda, monkeys, and stuff that's just plain weird.
Superdickery.com
was a website dedicated to tracking down and documenting as many of these weird and wonderful comics as possible, often presenting them completely out of context, solely for the purposes of humor.
These comics were mostly from The Silver Age of Comic Books (although there are quite a few from more recent eras) and mainly from DC Comics, due to the many, many instances of Superman acting like a complete dick.
These were split into several categories:
- Examples Of Superdickery: Home of the phrase that started it all, "Superman is a dick." Witness an ever growing selection of examples of Superman acting like... well, a dick.
- Confounding Covers: Comic book covers that are so out there, so random, and so bizarre that you'll be wondering how on earth they ever got published in the first place.
- Frames and Pages: This section contains scans of individual panels and frames from the interiors of comic books, completely devoid of context.
- Everything's Better With Monkeys: Gorillas provided a guaranteed boosts to circulation with every cover appearance. Do not argue with the mesmerizing powers of gorillas. And yes, I know gorillas aren't monkeys.
- Seduction of the Innocent: Covers and frames from a more innocent time, a time ignorant of how friggin' hilarious these would be to future audiences. If it's inappropriate sexual innuendo, it's in here. Most of the frames and panels are from Batman comics, depicting Batman as a closet pedophile who sexually abuses his young ward, Robin.
- Weird Science: Gadgets and gizmos and doodads, oh my! A section devoted to everything from the Helmet of Hate to the Man with the Electronic Brain.
- Suffering Sappho!: "Hi, you've reached Wonder Woman. I'm sorry I can't come to the phone right now - I'm all tied up." You'd think she'd leave that rope at home, seeing how often she gets tied up with it...
- Propaganda Extravaganza: Home of the most astoundingly politically incorrect covers you've ever seen (the vast majority being from the Golden Age, during World War Two), plus some more modern day examples of propaganda.
- Stupor Powers: Witness the demonstration of superpowers you've never even dreamed of, such as SUPER-WEAVING! Yes. Super-Weaving.
- Questionable Fan Art Theater: Exactly What It Says on the Tin.
The website is defunct and can only be accessed through archives; its last update was on April 2019.
Had nothing to do with The Super Dictionary, although it did popularize the And That's Terrible meme.
For the trope page named after the website, see Superdickery.
This work provides examples of:
- Accidental Innuendo: The main attraction of the Seduction of the Innocent section.
- Adolf Hitlarious: Comes up regularly. WWII-era comics were constantly having their protagonists defeat or humiliate Hitler (and/or Mussolini and Hirohito), and for a variety of reasons most of these covers are now 100% Narm.
- Alternative Character Interpretation: Played for Laughs, since the characters doing terrible and/or bizarre things without context makes it easy to interpret them as much worse people than they really are.
- The site (jokingly) regards Superman as a villain of the highest order, to the astonishing amount of times he has apparently:
- Supergirl is a really dim, petty, murderous bitch who competes with Superman for the "Biggest Dick" title. She also enslaves and tortures men even though she's into horses and her cousin.
- Also, Batman is a dangerously repressed closet pedophile who sexually abuses Robin. The funny thing is that in spite of how blatantly homoerotic many of the images with Batman are, the caption-writer keeps making very lame attempts at denying that whatever makes Batman gay.
- And Wonder Woman is a BDSM-obsessed sex freak who's way, way, way Too Kinky to Torture. Given the creator,
this is probably true. DC is lucky he didn't include polygamy as one of Wonder Woman's traits, though, given Paradise Island, you never know... - Jimmy Olsen, given how many times he's tried to kill Superman, sell his secret or otherwise ruin his life, earns every bit of the torture Supes metes upon him.
- A Million Is a Statistic: Discussed, in a cover where Superman slams planet Earth.
- Ascended Meme: The premiere of Batman: The Brave and the Bold's third season was a tribute to the website. It recreates some of the more famous Superman comic covers featured on the site, sees the Man of Steel behave in a dickish manner due to red kryptonite, and references Lois and Jimmy's attempts to marry Superman or learn his secret identity, respectively. The site's name even gets a Shout-Out:Jimmy: "Superman's turned into a real di-"
Lois: "-fferent person." - Attractive Bent-Gender: "The worst part about this is that Jimmy makes a pretty hot woman."
- Beware the Superman: Given the number of times he's accidentally or purposefully destroyed buildings/cities/nations/planets...
- Boobs-and-Butt Pose: The impossible neck!
- Butt-Monkey: A good amount of Superman's Superdickery involves screwing around with Jimmy Olsen.
- Captain Obvious: Any time the evilness of Superman is note on a comic book cover, the bottom note regards it as this trope.
- Casual Kink: Peter Parker has some... interesting ideas for how to use his webbing with Mary Jane.
- Comically Missing the Point: The captions sometimes do this, pointing out some random detail in the pictures.
- Complaining About Shows You Don't Watch: The site often (jokingly) mentions that they don't even read comics.
- Covers Always Lie: The deliberately misleading covers depicting Superman as a terrible person are a great source of superdickery moments.
- Cringe Comedy: Saying everyone hates their parents when they're 18? Hyperbolic, but ring of truth. Saying it to Batman? Awkward.
- Crosses the Line Twice: "It’s okay to laugh at a cripple being pushed down a flight of stairs. This is a safe place. No one will judge."
- Deal with the Devil: This image provides a possible explanation for all of Superman's dickery.
- Disproportionate Retribution: The page image. Since you can't really read what Lois is saying there, look at the same image, in a bigger size, here. Not the only example, by the way.
- Drinking Game: Every time you see Jimmy Olsen with superpowers, take a shot. If you get reminded to take a shot and you forgot you were playing the game, that's a penalty shot.
- Be careful, one of the covers is a four shot winner.
- To say nothing, of course, of the cover featuring the Planet of a Thousand Jimmy Olsens.
- Be careful, one of the covers is a four shot winner.
- Ensemble Dark Horse: In-Universe. Superman's Pope Hat and the Time Traveling Popemobile Go-Kart.
- Furry Confusion: This panel features Minnie Mouse freaking out over a regular mouse.
- Grand Finale: "You know, if there were ever to be a permanent end to Superdickery, I think this image would be absolutely perfect as the final image."
- Groin Attack: "...does [the man on the right] have an action figure with exploding-testicle action?"
- Have I Mentioned I Am Heterosexual Today?: Closer to "Have I Mentioned Batman Is Heterosexual Today"
- I Just Shot Marvin in the Face: One panel has some guy in a costume say that the pistol isn't loaded, until Lois provides commentary where he shot himself accidentaly.
- Implausible Deniability: What the Running Gag of "Batman's not gay!" comes across as.
- In the Blood:
- One cover gives insight into Superman's behavior: Jor-El is a dick.
- Some covers even imply Supergirl to be one, mostly towards her cousin.
- Queen Hyppolita is just as much into bondage as her daughter.
- It Makes Sense in Context:
- The creator of the site acknowledges that most of the examples likely make sense in context, but it's simply funnier this way.
- For example, that panel showing Superman with Super-Weaving? That's actually Van-Zee, a Krytonian from Kandor who happens to have an Uncanny Family Resemblance to Superman. The story deliberately plays with the reader's expectations by not having anything from characters to the narration refer to him or Silvia Dewitt — an Identical Stranger of Lois Lane — by their actual names until The Reveal (even skipping over certain scenes that easily give away the surprise, then showing them once the twist is executed). So technically, Superman himself doesn't actually have Super-Weaving powers that we know of.
- Batman reacting to Robin's hanging corpse with Oh, No... Not Again!? A villain had put dummies of Robin dead in a variety of ways all around the building that Batman was in, and he'd just run into another one. The real Robin was fine.
- There was a similar case when Superboy threatened to rape Wonder Girl: it was an ugly alien disguising itself as him. That's about it. Still a threat of rape.
- The panel where Superman hits a woman after proclaiming "I'd never hit a lady"? It's from The Man of Steel, and the woman was in league with her "kidnappers" and hiding a bomb under her coat.
- The panel the site has as the Ur-Example of Superdickery, which is from Action Comics #1 and has Superman leave a woman tied up under a tree? She's a murderess who Supes is taking to justice, and he's leaving her while he convinces the governor to call off the execution of the innocent woman convicted for the crime. That, and Superman was a bit more morally ambiguous back in the Golden Age.
- There are a couple of cases where the site's creator is familiar with the context, but says it doesn't make sense anyway.
- Japanese Ranguage: The trope naming image is here.
- Jerkass: Superman, but (less frequently) Batman, Jimmy, Lois... pretty much everybody.
- Jerkass Has a Point: Occasionally, Superman will have a bit of a point, but that doesn't mean he isn't a dick about it.
- Kick the Dog: Superman just won't let Jimmy Olsen have a nice day, will he?
- Killer Gorilla: The "Everything's Better With Monkeys" index focuses on gratuitous gorillas, most belonging to the killer variety.
- Kissing Cousins: When Superman and Lois’s daughter was going to marry Jimmy and Lucy’s son.
- Let's You and Him Fight: A rare example of heroes doing this to villains.
- Monstrous Germs: Mocked in this panel, where Mike points out that real bacteria don't look like insectoid monsters.
- MST: The uploaders provide various witty comments and snark on the pictures uploaded adding to the hilarity of it all. They're also the origin of the site's various running gags, in-jokes, and alternative interpretations.
- Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot: Comics that involve combinations of existing characters frequently get called out, since they invariably look really, really stupid. This trend eventually reached a truly remarkable apex.
- Nonindicative Name: For some reason, Jimmy Olsen has a "fountain pen gun" that the narrator explicitly says is neither a fountain pen nor a gun. It shoots compressed air instead of bullets (however that works) and merely looks like a pen.
- Noodle Implements: What I need now is a dime -- some red nail polish -- and a little talk with the island gossip!
- "Not Making This Up" Disclaimer: Mike often feels the need to clarify that he's not joking about some of the stranger things he mentions in captions.
- Not That There's Anything Wrong with That: Said word for word here.
- Papa Wolf: God, Jor-El, and Krypto. Meta-Example, Mike himself if the caption in the last link is anything to go by.
- Poe's Law: "Yes, it's a spoof on Golden Age comic conventions, but it nails them so totally that if I hadn't been told it was a spoof, I might not have been able to tell..."
- Poke the Poodle: "Joker Steals Some Kid's Report Card. Seriously."
- Rule of Funny: We all know that (most) of these covers and panels make sense in context. It's simply far more funny to take them all at face value
- Running Gag: Several types of covers crop up a statistically alarming number of times. There's a few in the commentary as well, particularly, "
Batman's not gay!" - Smug Snake: See: Jerkass.
- Superpower Silly Putty: See also Drinking Game, above.
- Too Dumb to Live: Superboy is a colossal dumbass; so much that even the narration gives up on defending or justifying him.
- Tonto Talk: Mocked here, where it's pointed out that having a Native American character speak broken English in a more modern setting makes very little sense.
- Transparent Closet: A running gag is that Batman constantly denies being gay despite the massive pile of evidence saying he is.
- Twenty Four Hour Superpower: Take a shot.
- Ur-Example: The very first superdickery, straight from Action Comics 1. The woman is a murderess, and Superman had kidnapped her to keep an innocent person from being convicted for her crimes.
- Values Dissonance: Most of the wartime propaganda featured is astonishingly racist.
- There's a good amount of misogyny flying around too.
- This questionnaire asks the readers about their likes and dislikes. Some of the options are groups of people, including Baptists, Catholics, Indians, Jews, "Negroes"...
- Very Special Episode: Mocked in the infamous Green Lantern / Green Arrow crossover, which shows Green Arrow's apprentice, Speedy, caught shooting up heroin:"You nicknamed him Speedy. What did you expect?!"
- Villain Protagonist: Superman is interpreted as this.
- What Kind of Lame Power Is Heart, Anyway?: Many of the Stupor Powers are of this variety.
- With Friends Like These...: Jimmy Olsen is supposedly 'Superman's Pal', and Lois Lane is 'Superman's Girlfriend'. However, Jimmy has betrayed Superman, exposed his secret identity, Lois has gone to some incredible and dickish lengths to either expose Superman's identity or force him to marry her, and Superman in turn makes them the target of most of his dickery.
- Would Hit a Girl: It's even contemplated by Superman before he plays it straight.
- Writers Cannot Do Math: You're off by a factor of ten there, Supes...
- X Called; They Want Their Y Back: Bucky, Wonder Woman called. She wants her cover back.
