Mindless Ones

Look at these. Not strictly a superpant, but the connection hardly needs to be explained.

There has been a few queries about where my favourite favourites have come from – In case you haven’t read the comments in the last post, the answer is in almost all cases H&M – I’d link to their site, only there’s little point – no online shop or even catalogue, except for in a few eurozone teritories that you probably don’t live in. Pants aside, I cannot unreservedly recommend the shop anyway – usually worth a look, but generally full of stock designed to appeal to sixteen year old crackheads, and on the weekends too rammed with said youths to be able to get what you want anyway.

These beauties come from another shop commonly found on the UK high street. Notably, a Japanese superhero wannabe is wearing an almost exactly similar design on his jacket on the first page of Final Crisis #2. Perhaps his superhero name is Top Man. That was a poor attempt at being witty, no doubt, but the interesting point is that the super-otaku is intended to be surfing the bleeding edge of Japanese superfashion in the wild and fantastical DCU. You’d expect such stylees to be pretty way out, wouldn’t you? We live in interesting times when funnybooks’ wildest imagination is conceiving the same sort of clobber for the coolest corners of planet Superman that the local shopping centre is flogging just down the road. And the hipper independent shops are absolutely full of tees of Captain America doing embarrasing grandad scratching moves like his shield is a set of Technics. Do even local teeny girls want to look like refried mashed-up superdandies now?

That’s the real point of pants week – it’s a nasty self-congratulatory exercise, a great big ‘well done’ to you, me, and the whole wide world for having got to this point in the history of pants, because we have made it to the promised land where knicks can be comics.  Blame Sam Raimi, Christopher Nolan, Heath Ledger. They’ve made ours a world where Kirby isn’t a forgotten nobody, dead froma  lifetime of painful toil – soul slowly bled out onto the unforgiving work-for-hire drawing paper – but a living designer of quality trendyhot underskids. We may not be able to fly on laserbikes or have world peace or feed the hungry – but thanks to these pants, Earth is still in some ways like I hoped, as a child, it would be.

Grown men in Hulk pants as a mark of utopia fulfilled. Even Pangloss would sneer.

But what would Flatus say?

To be concluded.