Category Archives: Bad Super Costumes

For the first time in almost fifty years, Wonder Woman is getting a major makeover courtesy of J. Michael Straczynski:

And of course, it happens on Bad Costume Wednesday. Fate? I think so. Of the rationale behind the new costume, in aninterview with CBR's Kiel Phegley, he explained:

Form follows function. She has to exist a great deal in an urban setting. So I wanted her to have an outfit that she can close up and pass more or less without notice, or open when she's in a fight to reveal her full appearance. I wanted the outfit to express her own situation, in that she lives in two worlds, which is also in a way the trap in which she's found herself.

I also wanted it functional. As so many female fans have said over the years, "How does she fight in that without all her parts popping out? Where does she keep stuff?" She can keep or shed the jacket, there are pockets, it's tough and serious looking while still attractive. It's a Wonder Woman designed for the 21st century. Not to get all "Project Runway" on this, but what woman wears the same outfit for 60 years without at least accessorizing?

They're also retconning her origin, via the time-honored "Gods can do whatever the heck they want, including destroying and rewriting the timeline" hook. They've destroyed Paradise Island, leaving Diana the baby to be smuggled off the island and to gritty urban America to be raised. I suppose the Kents were busy.

I doubt I'll be reading the book since so far I haven't been able to find a comics shop here, but I'm not overwhelmed by this look. I immediately thought "Black Canary" when I saw it, or any one of a dozen X-Men or X-Factor female characters from the Nineties. It's just kind of boring and Madonna-ish for me.

I also don't really see Wonder Woman as a street-level, down-and-dirty, gritty urban fighter. She's like Superman, someone who ought to be in the sky, duking it out with gods and aliens and giant monsters threatening whole cities, not drug pushers and gangbangers.

But hey, he's JMS and he knows what he's doing. Although, he did come up with the whole Spider-Man Mephisto concept allegedly, so ...

Anyway, what do you think?

(Wonder Woman and image ©2010, DC Comics.)

I sympathize with the poor bastard who had to generate a costume design for Kangaroo, but that's not going to stop me from being a jerk about it:

Now that you've seen it for yourself, you have to admit that restraining from jerkitude would be beyond the means of most mortals, even the alliterative ones.

You have to cut the designer some slack, because come on, kangaroo. But I'm pretty sure nothing in the character description said "ginormous codpiece" or "ridiculous ears mandatory", dude has to flat-out own that decision. Plus I can't figure out how the character shoves his presumably human legs into those lower extremities, because folks, calves and feet don't go that way. The perspective's a bit tricky, though, so maybe in real life it all comes off as giant clown feet, I don't know.

Still, I do sympathize with the artist, because it's not easy coming up with a costume for someone who got trounced on by a radioactive kangaroo. Not and keep a straight face, it's not. And I am sure that a lot of this design is intentionally humorous.

But what I can't forgive is what looks to me like a giant diaper tucked in behind that huge codpiece. That's just wrong. To say I don't want to know what's going to come out of that pouch is an understatement of Galactus-like proportions; I just hope they have the patented Sur-Seal leggies, because given the enormous power of his takeoffs and landings, any sort of leakage is going to be real, real grim.

So to this costume and its sadly ridiculous Super-Huggies, I have to say a regretful Kanga-NO.

(Character and image ©Marvel Comics.)

While the animal kingdom contains many fearsome models upon which a super-powered individual can base their identity -- the mighty lion, the speedy leopard, the swift-striking falcon -- you have to be very careful which you actually choose. After all, who wants to go around known as The Slug or The Sloth or ... um, the Porcupine?

Porcupines (motto, "Third largest rodent!") are slow and completely non-aggressive, which isn't ideal for a super villain. On the other hand, they do have sharp pointy bits, which puts them ahead of many other potential candidates. So I'll give him a pass on the inspiration (barely). And they did give him the ability to fire his quills, along with a host of other powered-armor options. So he wasn't a wuss or anything.

However.

If you're going to base yourself on a barely-qualified animal, it's imperative that you not walk around looking as if your outfit were woven from wicker.

I've owned wicker furniture. I have sat upon wicker furniture. And I have seen wicker furniture utterly destroyed at the paws of a ravenous puppy. Not a big puppy either, but a tiny little furball.

And if you do slip up and find yourself in a costume that resembles wicker, based on an animal that's more or less a highly irritated ground sloth, by all that's holy please do not -- repeat, do NOT -- also weave yourself a wicker hairpiece that looks like a refugee from a bad "Little Lord Fauntleroy" production.

On the other hand, from the page in question he appears to be a flatulent wicker-woven prickly ground sloth, which I admit is pretty intriguing.

(Image and character ©Marvel Entertainment Group, Inc.)

The First Commandment of Super Hero Costuming has been violated by one of the characters in this classic Marvel cover, see if you can spot it:

That's right, the Invisible Woman is wearing white after Easter. For shame.

Of course I am actually talking about "The Asbestos Man", who breaks the First Commandment of "Thou Shalt Not Make Thy Costume From Materials Which Will Kill Thee". Also the slightly less well-known Twelfth Commandment of "Thy Mask Shalt Not Look Like Thou Hast Been Smited By a Sledgehammer" and the Eighty-Sixth "Thou Shalt Not Grab Thy Crotch In Combat Even If It Is Hidden By a Shield".

See how many other violations you can spot!

(Image and characters © Marvel Entertainment Group.)

A bad costume is always more satisfying when it adorns an equally bad character, which is why I am so thankful we have Captain V, who apparently ran out of creative juices after coming up with "Captain" and then the letter "V". Or maybe he couldn't spell "Victory". That seems pretty likely when you consider his origin:

That's right, our intrepid hero is a ... puppeteer. Who gets his powers by playing the piano. Which he has in a dedicated room that he calls -- and I am not making this up, it's right there in the caption -- "The Organ Cellar". As if among his old "Popular Science" issues and the furnace he keeps a stash of kidneys and spleens. Clearly, naming things is not this guy's forté.

So we know he's bad with names and has a fondness for playing with his organ, but what else -- oh, and puppets, you mustn't forget he's a ferocious puppeteer -- what else can he do? Let's find out!

Take a moment to read that again, and see if it makes more sense the second time around. I bet it doesn't, because I'm on read-through number twelve and I still can't make head or tails of it. "A family of cunning twisted thoughts"? Wha-hunh? "Quietly now, not a word to meet for the first time, Stogie." If this were a decade later, I'd think this was a Japanese paragraph translated -- poorly -- by some barely literate kid at the comics office for an American audience. In any event, you can see why I think they just couldn't spell Victory given their obviously tenuous grasp of English in the first place.

But even worse than the dialog is the outfit. I bet they had to put the "V" on his chest that big because he couldn't remember it otherwise. "Hark, evildoers, it is I, Captain ... um ... dammit, why is my name only on the label in the back?!" I wonder, if enough of these "Big Letters On My Chest" guys got together, could they spell something, like fans at a football game?

If they do, Captain V will be able to host the tailgate party thanks to his big striped cape, freshly unwrapped from the nearest barber shop pole and ready to serve as a makeshift tablecloth, if they end up eating Italian. Talk about saving the day!

Finally, I'd be arrested if I left this entry without mentioning his briefs. Which, let's be honest, look like a diaper. A full diaper. A full, sagging, patriotic diaper. Along with his broken left hand, the left foot which has been surgically grafted to his right leg, his half-sized cranium, huge shoulders, and awkward proportions, I have to think that at some point we will discover that Captain V is, in fact, a marionette himself.

Which will be when we start hunting for forks to stick in our eyes, sadly a few issues too late as we will never, ever get the image of a red, white, and blue saggy pantload on a twisted puppet out of our minds, no matter how hard we scrub our eyeballs with soap.

You're welcome.

(All images from "All Top Comics" number 1, 1944. Note that after this, they seem to have gone with cartoon animals in that book, which I think we can all agree was a great editorial decision.)

We've wondered before at how Dr. Spectro got his powers (my favorite is still "Bitten by a radioactive Christmas tree"), but did you know that he actually had an earlier incarnation as a foe of the Charlton hero Captain Atom? Don't worry though, the original outfit was almost as bad:

You may note that this particular comic bears the "Approved by the Comics Code Authority" seal, which I frankly find astounding. If old white men running around in black leotard tops with rainbow spandex stockings and black socks isn't against the Code, then what good was it? Surely that would be more scarring to a child than zombies or axe murderers. I have to wonder if the fashion horror of the 1970's isn't directly attributable to this appalling lack of oversight by the people responsible for protecting our children.

Luckily the outfit is saved by the combination of skin-tight skull mask and flaring epaulets and ... wow, I couldn't even get through that sentence with a straight face. Or straight fingers. Whatever, look, we're not here to parse metaphors, people, we're here to make fun of old guys in black socks!

It's no wonder he's billed as "Master of Moods" because let's be honest, if you had to go out looking like that you'd be one moody bastard, too.

Stand witness, friends, as I commit a major act of sacrilege by declaring that one of the Holy Trinity in the DC Universe has a bad costume:

On one level, obviously, this is a perfectly fine costume, as it has helped elevate Wonder Woman to the upper echelon of recognizable and bankable heroes. It's not ridiculous like Calendar Man or hideous like Lightstar or in an obnoxious color like Paladin. It's in primary colors, it shows a lot of skin, and it has a consistent identity, so it satisfies the bare minimum standards for a competent outfit.

But what jumps out at you when you look at Wonder Woman (and don't go with the reflex schoolboy answer)? For me, it's this overwhelming sense of the United States. Red, white, and blue, white stars on a blue field, hints of an eagle in the chest piece (depending on the era). It screams "American Flag".

What's missing is any sense of this person as an Amazon, as a warrior from another culture, as someone who is, fundamentally, not American. I get that she was developed during a time when being pro-Americas was a prerequisite for any character, and that her buddy Superman pretty much cornered the market on that angle. But Superman's costume isn't so blatantly American as Wonder Woman's, which frankly would not look out of place on a female Captain America.

Its badness, therefore, is of a higher order. I would argue that it fails because it says nothing whatsoever about the person wearing it. Furthermore, I think this is a great example of a failure arising not so much from the costume designer as of the character herself. Wonder Woman doesn't have any real reason for existing on her own as anything but a female Superman analogue. And yet grafted onto that is this patriotic shell that makes no sense from the character's perspective.

Setting aside the "meta" aspect of character influencing costume, though, the specifics of her outfit are also strange. The top is usually drawn as metallic, yet (as usual with fantasy females), such armor would be useless in an actual battle, leaving most of her body completely exposed. And if she's invulnerable, as the modern incarnation seems to be, what's the use of metal armor in the first place?

Star spangled underwear always struck me as a bit absurd. Which, given the fact that they're wearing their underwear on the outside in the first place, is quite the trick. You can see in the live-action version just how ridiculous it plays out in real life, however -- it just looks like she rolled out of bed in a seventh grade slumber party.

The basic concept of the bustier is fine, and I actually like the way it translates in the live version, but in the comics I always wonder just how that works. They draw it (as here) sucked onto her breasts like wet plaster, but no metal would work like that. Or if it did, there's no way she'd be able to shove those things in there.

I just think the design misses the mark badly, forced to borrow a patriotic identity out of fear of giving the character herself any real heft or weight. I'd love to see her in something that brought out her Greek origins, or reflected more of a warrior princess motif, or really anything that wasn't warmed over Captain America.

I look forward to your evisceration of my feeble thought process in the comments!

A bad super hero costume redesign in isolation is a sad and tragic thing, but let the disease spread to multiple hosts on one team and the results take on a kind of epic, balletic splendor of suck. Witness, this ill-fated revamp of the WW2 ace flying group "The Blackhawks" that tried to turn them into costumed super adventurers:

It's hard to imagine a more ridiculous crew outside the pages of "Teen Beat", although I have to admit I would probably pay good hard American cash for a cage match between the phallo-centric "The Leaper (Olaf)" and Marvel's Batroc the Leaper.

In fact the names these guys were given serve as an accelerate for the runaway fashion disaster DC tried to foist on an unsuspecting nation. Can you imagine being threatened by a guy dressed in blue jammies with pink ears on it? Maybe if the bizarre outfit was some sort of Viet Nam era testament to taking the ears of his fallen enemies as trophies, but this guy's just called "The Listener". Maybe after he gives his opponents a sound listening-to, he follows it up with a warm cuddle and some cookies.

I'm not going anywhere near "Dr. Hands", the sterotypically-rendered Chop-Chop. All I'm going to say is, that's what we used to call the male nurse in high school who took his duties to give the guys physicals to qualify for P.E. very seriously. And thoroughly. And enthusiastically. Plus, who's going to go to a doctor actually named "Chop Chop"? Not me. Although there is a urologist in the Austin area named Dick Chop. I kid you not.

However, in light of the recent release of "Iron Man 2", follow-up to what may be the best super-hero movie of all time featuring one of the great all-time super-hero costumes, I have to reserve most of my concern for "The Golden Centurion".

First of all, if you're wearing a high-powered super suit, you shouldn't go around stealing kites from children to use as a "shield". That's just rude.

Second, invest in some accouterments, for goodness' sake! That's the most boring suit of armor I've ever seen. Plus the boots look floppy, as if they used to be traditional Blackhawk jack boots that just got spray-painted with gold.

In fact, I bet that's exactly what happened. They got word at Blackhawk HQ that the government was shutting their program down due to lack of funding (and an enemy), so the boys took it on themselves to raid the supply closet for home made "super hero" costumes. I can imagine Stan setting that mighty cleft chin, leaning on his knee with his stout forearms, and telling his subordinates with a steely grin, "Boys, I've seen the future, and it's primary-color spandex. Now get out there and make yourselves look ridiculous."

To which all I can say is, "Mission Accomplished, sir."

(Thanks again to ReaderKate for finding this gem.)

Even as a kid, I remember getting this issue of "Daredevil" and thinking, "That's one of the worst costumes I've ever seen":

Years later, the judgment stands. I have a long-standing anti-purple prejudice when it comes to super-hero costumes (Hulk's pants excluded), and I think this guy is the reason why. Seriously, who's intimidated by a dude running around in a purple Micheline Man outfit? Not me. Frankly, anyone who feels the need to put padded foam on his head, as if in expectation of ramming it into things, better either be a Bulletman sidekick or just escaped from the Loony Bin. Wait, I think we have an answer:

Escapee it is. If he were a Bulletman sidekick, he'd at least hit whatever he was flinging his head at.

Grant Morrison has many wonderful accomplishments in his comics career, but desecrating the memory of Bulletgirl threatens to send that legacy spiraling down into a howling suckhole of wrongitude:

Why would someone feel the need for eye protection from flying debris -- caused, remember, by flinging yourself through objects by the head -- but leave their entire upper body exposed like that? For that matter, I'd put the over-under on how many times she can fly through something without tearing that halter top off at 1.

The whole design is just so adolescent school boy I can't stand it. One of the best things about the old Bulletman comics was what a strong character Bulletgirl was in her own right, a true partner instead of just a sidekick. And part of that allure was that she wore basically the same costume, because she wasn't there to turn on the bystandards, but to fight crime. And to fight crime, you need to put on your ass-kicking clothes, not your ass-shaking faux-stripper outfit.

Don't even get me started on the exaggerated phallic symbol helmet she's got on here. Just, no.

(Many thanks to reader PCFDPGrey for sending this one in.)