It’s the little things that rankle. I’m willing to buy any number of impossible opening premises. The jolly, fat guy who spends his year building toys and his Christmas Eve zipping about on a flying sleigh drawn by twelve hovering reindeer: check. The guy who’s clean-shaven twenty-nine days out of the month who just happens to sprout hair and whiskers on the night of the full moon: check. The suave, debonair superspy who somehow manages to find and defeat the evil masterminds while carefully introducing himself, by his real name, to just about everybody he meets: check. The ugly one-eyed sailor so in love with the most unappealing woman on land that he regularly defends her honor using super-strength he derives from canned spinach: check.

These premises are all unlikely to the point of impossibility, and yet we’re more than willing to provide them with provisional acceptance, because we like where the resulting stories take us.

Similarly, we are more than willing to accept the existence of an alien visitor, seemingly indistinguishable from other human beings, who upon landing on our pathetic little globe gains the capacity to repel bullets, see through walls, fly at the speed of light and spend his days fighting for truth, justice and the American way. We accept these impossibilities wholeheartedly, while making fun of the many other unlikelihoods that we must accept at the same time: among them, the contrivances that provide him with a steady stream of worthwhile foes, or the one that allows  …