You know? I’ve never thought about Darth’s crotch. Ever.
Thanks, Mousie. 
Enjoy!
My question about codpieces is why they exist at all and why were they so pupular back in the 1500s? Those were puritan times, after all, and the codpiece exaggerates the size of a very naughty bit indeed.
For the record: Darth’s Dong
Here is an explanation. I guess the more conservative types opted out of this fashion.
Here’s a little evidence supporting your stance on the Silver Surfer…enjoy!
as the Wiki article Mouse cites explains, codpieces originated as a sort of “modesty panel” to cover the men’s bits when shirts and tunics got shorter. Doublets were sort of like stockings, not pantyhose, and only came to the top of the leg. The codpiece was meant simply to cover, not to emphasize, the penis and testicles. See this engraving of “Peasant Dance” by Piter Breughel the Elder:
After pants were in fashion, the codpiece obviously wasn’t needed, and was free to evolve along lines of sexual selection rather than natural selection.
Shakespeare used to make jokes about them. See “The Two Gentlemen of Verona”, for instance. The production I saw had prominent codpieces (worn by female characters, who were played by boys back then, but by women in the production I saw. How’s that for gender confusion?)
I vote that silver stuff is Surfer’s skin.
I actually have that issue of Doom Patrol. I also have an issue of What The? in which Galactus says to the Surfer
“I have a question for you, o Norin Radd. Where do you keep your private parts?”
No, that’s exactly what “sci-fi” is. What is isn’t is science fiction.
That Wikipedia article is misleading; I’ll have to either correct it or have one of my more knowledgeable friends do it. Here’s a quick rundown:
1100’s through C. 1390’s AD
Throughout Europe, men wear hose (usually wool) and linen drawers. These are separate hose, one for each leg, held up by being laced to either the waistband of the drawers or to their tunic (which was usually knee-length or longer). (It’s debatable about whether women were wearing similar drawers, or just lettin’ the breeze in; probably depends on the time and place.)
Around 1400, in Italy, fashionable tunics were getting shorter. Somebody had the bright idea of sewing a pair of hose together into what we would call tights; this allowed tunics so short they showed off your shapely young Italian ass without the world looking at your drawers. I’m not sure when exactly the proto-codpiece emerges, but my experience indicates that it’s tricky sewing a proper crotch into tights, and easier to just leave it open in that area, or with some overlap of cloth, and have an additional triangular piece covering it, held in place by laces or buttons. This also means that if you need to piss, you can just unbutton or unlace the codpiece instead of wrestling the tights down. Later, of course, they fetishized what was originally just a practical feature.
Why somebody didn’t make the same arrangement for the drawers in the first place, centuries earlier, I don’t know. Don’t apply too much logic to fashion. Why the hell does anybody still wear a necktie?
Look where it points.
Doublets are nothing like stockings.
The 1500s weren’t Puritan. In England, it was the Renaissance, and as Baldwin notes, the codpiece appeared in Italy about a hundred years before that.