Comic #4688: the-real-supervillain

Description

Here’s a transcription of the comic text:

Panel 1: Superman: "Superman, are you familiar with 'the hygiene hypothesis'?" Man: "Hm?"

Panel 2: Man: "The idea is you have an immune system that normally fights diseases. But, you live in such a clean environment, there are no diseases for it to attack."

Panel 3: Man: "So, it starts attacking healthy cells instead." Superman: "One idea is that you might actually give people certain safe 'decoy' diseases in order to calm an overactive immune response."

Panel 4: Superman: "What's your point?"

Panel 5: Man: "Imagine you had a person who fought crime so effectively, there was none left."

Panel 6: Man: "But that person was still around. Still needing to battle. Still relentless. And very powerful."

Panel 7: Man: "What you might do is create new 'criminals' for him to target."

Panel 8: Man: "Because you're afraid he'll take it badly and attack you, so instead of coming right out and saying it, you slowly increase the ridiculousness of the fake criminals."

Panel 9: Man: "First, it’s a smart guy who’s bad. Then, it’s mole people. At some point it’s an alien from a planet called 'Apokolips.'"

Panel 10: Superman: "Like, what does that even mean? Aliens have English phonemes and their planet is called Apocalypse but they spell it weird?"

Panel 11: Superman: "I’m moving to Mars to live alone and write bad poetry."

Panel 12: Man: "Purposelessness is the only real supervillain."

Panel 13: Man: "Damn, Luthor is good."

Panel 14: Luthor: "…"

Panel 15: Luthor: "…"

Panel 16: Luthor: "…"

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