People hate Superman. That's the message of the recently released trailer for Zack Snyder's Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, in which disembodied voices express their anxieties about the Man of Steel. "We're talking about an alien whose very existence challenges our own sense of priority in the universe," one says, while another shouts, "This is our planet!" And then there's the big finish with Batman whispering, presumably to Superman, "Tell me, do you bleed? You will."

Batman making Superman bleed is familiar territory to comics fans. One of the most iconic battles in superhero comicdom appears in Frank Miller's comic book miniseries The Dark Knight Returns, where Batman thumps the tar out of the supposedly invincible Kryptonian. Superman has super-strength, super-speed, and super-everything else, but, as comics blogger Richard Cook has pointed out, Batman has the greatest power of all: "popularity." (The last Batman film, The Dark Knight Rises, grossed nearly $450 million in the U.S., versus less than $300 million for 2013's Man of Steel.)

So why does everyone love Batman and hate Superman? There's no great mystery about it.

Superman is boring and irritating precisely because he's all-powerful. Miller states this clearly in The Dark Knight Returns. When Batman is punching Superman, he thinks to himself, "still talking … keep talking Clark. You've always known just what to say. 'Yes' … you always say yes … to anyone with a badge … or a flag." Superman is so overwhelming, he's the structure of power itself. As such, all his power ends up symbolizing not virile resistance but servility to the bureaucratic status quo. Superman is a "false god," as the graffito in the Batman v. Superman trailer declares—which is to say, he's false precisely because he's a God.

Everyone loves Batman, meanwhile, because American pop culture's archetypal hero is, in fact, the flawed and gritty antihero—a lone badass fighting the forces of injustice and corruption against impossible odds. Batman is a scourge of the underworld, skulking just outside the law, his fists clenched in anger. But Superman? He's so super that there's nothing exceptional about him. Instead he looks like The Man, the avatar of a staid unjust system.