Last night, viewers of The Flash were blindsided by what was possibly the greatest cameo in superhero TV history. A giant shark man appeared out of nowhere and nearly bit the show's hero in half, only to be subdued moments later, just before a hard cut to the credits.

That's fun enough regardless of whether it was the appearance of an actual DC Comics character. But I imagine there were quite a few viewers who were shocked to wade into social media waters afterward and find that comics readers were in a feeding frenzy over this shark man. This shark man was a canonical character. This shark man is known as King Shark.

Let me explain why I'm excited to explain King Shark to you

I know you're thinking there's probably some backstory here, if people are so excited. Maybe there's some pathos to this character, like how Killer Croc has a weakness for the underdog because of how he's been mistreated based on his appearance, or how Man-Bat is always seeking a cure for his tragic condition over in Gotham. Maybe he's a weird but strangely enduring major Flash villain like Gorilla Grodd. But what you need to understand is this: In a genre notorious for convoluted continuity, gritty reboots and decades of history...

There is no explanation for King Shark.

King Shark is just a big, dumb, hungry shark man.

He's just a goddamn Street Shark who exists in the DC Universe without any firm reasoning behind it. When introduced in the Superboy comic in 1994, local superstition indicated that King Shark might be the child of the King of All Sharks and a human woman, a story dismissed by authorities and certainly never brought up again by King Shark himself.

King Shark doesn't care about why he is what he is, because what he is is a shark. That's a level of self-confidence that we should all be so lucky to reach.

Embrace this shark man

And I think it's that mix of an inexplicable concept with nothing to back it up that has kept him in DC continuity while other one-off characters are forgotten. King Shark wasn't left out of the New 52: He debuted in its first month as a member of the Suicide Squad. If you're a comics reader with a fondness for the guy, it's probably because you read Gail Simone's Secret Six, in which a clear personality shines through his handful of appearances.

King Shark can regenerate whole limbs but doesn't like it if you call his little growing chicken wing of a new appendage "dainty." King Shark thinks all meat is delicious and he likes to fight and kill things made of meat and eat them. King Shark wants everyone to know that he is a shark and he loves being a shark. In one story arc, it is established that the most effective torment Hell could cook up for him would be to trap him in a vegetarian restaurant for all eternity.

Word of god from Gail Simone has established that King Shark sings this to the tune of the Map Song from Dora the Explorer

King Shark is a pure distillation of the joy of the superhero genre

The superhero genre asks its readers for a certain amount of suspension of belief, on the promise that the reader will be rewarded with compelling characters and storylines that are only possible because of their willingness to embrace the fantastic. It is not alone in this.

But King Shark takes that bargain to its most escapist extreme. After all, even Street Sharks, a cartoon based on a toy line about four anthropomorphic shark men named Jab, Streex, Ripster and — I cannot stress this enough — Slammu, came up with a backstory for its characters. King Shark has appeared multiple times since his introduction, in Secret Six, in Suicide Squad and even in a brief stint as Aquaman's sidekick. But he's never been given a backstory that stuck.

King Shark doesn't care about why he is what he is, because what he is is a shark

And I think that's because if you're a person who's interested in putting a giant, dumb shark man in your story as a recurring character, you already understand that there's no way to make that idea cooler by coming up with an explanation for him. A giant, dumb shark man is already inexplicable.

"Embrace this shark man," the story says. "He will never move you to tears, and the fact that he's a shark will not enter into some meta-narrative. But if you but embrace this shark man, I promise that we'll have some fun together."

Reader, if you can believe a man can fly, you can believe a man can be a shark.

And King Shark is a shark.