Design 101

May 19th, 2005

Filed under: Comics

From the very beginning, super-hero comics have had their share of poorly designed costumes (has their ever been a more color-challenged costume than the original Green Lantern?). Here’s a look at the top 10 fashion design disasters since I’ve been reading comics, and 10 ideas that shouldn’t work, but somehow do. Some of these are ugly costumes, but most are stupid designs and re-designs that should never have been done in the first place.


Fashion Design Ideas that Simply Don’t Work
1. Superman with a long hair. This never worked for me; even worse was the flip-side: Clark Kent had his hair pulled back in that poseur ponytail
2. About half of Infinity Inc. (Fury, Silver Scarab, Star-Spangled Kid/Skyman, Dr. Midnight, Hourman II).
3. Armor (not counting Iron Man and other characters whose schtick is armor).
4. The Olive Newton John-esque headband-wearing Supergirl of the 1980s.
5. The bare-midriff Huntress.
6. The Beast’s Osh Kosh B’Gosh outfit. He’s never really had a good costume. His original X-Men costume was ugly, but this latest Whedon/Cassaday design looks like a pair of farmer’s overalls gone bad.
7. Dazzler. Even in the Disco era this was overkill…and this was after the Disco era!
8. The new “metrosexual” Riddler.
9. Aquaman’s blue costume
10. The Image re-design of Marvel’s core characters (most blatant in Portacio’s Iron Man and Hulk and Liefeld’s Captain America)

Design Ideas that Shouldn’t work, but Somehow Do
1. Deathstroke (Orange and blue? But he makes it work.)
2. Kitty Pryde’s homemade costume in X-Men #149. Sure it’s horribly ugly, but it’s just the sort of costume a 14 year-old girl would design.
3. Big-Hair Wolverine (from Wolverine/Havok: Meltdown)
4. Jade. The green skin should make her look like a Star Trek reject, but she pulls it off.
5. Warlord.
6. Kraven. What is that on his chest? Is it a lion? A horse?
7. Mr. Bones. A skeleton, wearing a skull and crossbones and a big cape? Yet it works.
8. Dr. Strange. Orange spotted gloves? Big cape? Baroque amulet?
9. Man-Bat. He’s a bat! He’s a man! He’s both!
10. Zatanna. Her fishent and top hat original costume is great. Her black, white and red JLA costume and the horrible outfit from her Special count as “Bad Ideas”.

14 Responses to “ Design 101 ”

  1. David Oakes
    May 19th, 2005 at 5:57 pm

    Worst Costume Ever: No matter how color challenged the GA Green Lantern, the GA Sandman wins hands down. Nearly as many colors, *plus* herringbone.

    Infinity, Inc: Silver Scarab was cool even if it was armor. SSK was the height of cool – when you are ten – and Skyman was an acceptable evelution of the look. (Though I always wanted to see him fight Major Victory…) Fury gets a pass for the symmetry/asymmetry. Dr Mid-Nite II, Hourman II, well, she was blind and he was high on Miraclo. I can’t hold them responsible. But Nuklon did it to himself. Nuclear. Mohawk. No one who wasn’t there can truly understand the horror. (And I own every issue.) Unlike Jade, Obsidian is one of those “Costumes that look really cool, but aren’t when you think about it.” (More so than any superhero, I mean.) One panel of him in costume, but with normal skin tones, and I went gay all of a sudden.

    Dazzler – There is no such thing as overkill in Disco. Facepaint is good enough for Grendel, it’s good enough for me. And skates rule!

    Deathstroke – Orange, blue, *and* black. The man looks like the bastard child of Michael Myers and Jason Voorhees. And yet he still pulls it off. George Perez is a genius.

    Big-Hair Wolverine – You have been sniffing the hair gel again, haven’t you? His hair was pointier than his claws. He looked like the Tammy Faye of Mutants.

    Man-Bat – Man. Bat. There will never be anything better. Ever. Neal Adams is not only a genius, he is smart enough to get out of comics and make a living with his talents. The bastard.

    No, really, Big-Hair Wolverine is a crime against nature. And in a world where a winged playboy and a blue-furred man-ape are the norm, that is saying something.

  2. Rick Jones, really
    May 19th, 2005 at 7:28 pm

    Gotta say, Doc, you’re way off in your beat down on Aquaman’s blue costume. When the limited series, written by, I think, Neal Ponzer, (It’s been a long time.), came out, I loved the new costume. Still do. It’s a great idea for fitting into the ocean and not standing out. Much better than the orange and green. Still only my opinion, though.

  3. Laura Gjovaag
    May 19th, 2005 at 9:33 pm

    Sorry, I loved the blue Aquaman costume. It was really daring at the time, and I think the tribute to it in Tempest’s new costume is fantastic. Apparently, at the time the series came out, DC got a lot of positive response about the blue costume as well… but it was hard to draw so it wasn’t kept by the next team to take on Aquaman.

  4. John Nowak
    May 20th, 2005 at 1:11 am

    I think that Deathstroke’s costume works because it actually looks like something someone might choose to wear to a fight — full face mask, scale mail armor, gadget pouches, and so on. For a super … hero/villain/whatever costume, it works amazingly well.

    Always wondered if the idea behind Deathstroke was “Captain America Gone Wrong.” Military background, human performance improvement experiments, costume looks like scale mail at times, sword instead of a shield…

  5. Mike Loughlin
    May 20th, 2005 at 12:20 pm

    Yeah, Deathstroke looks implausibly great, but George Perez is probably the worst costume-designer-who-is-actually-a-good-artist in comics (and I’m a big Perez fan). How could you forget…

    1. Wonder Man’s first redesigned costume (by George Perez).
    2. Justice’s Perez-redesigned costume.
    3. Nightwing’s original costume.
    4. Jericho (super-hero or extra in a Shakespeare production?).
    5. Red Tornado’s ’70s redesign (which I *think* was by Perez).

    I may have been the only one who read Crimson Plague, but the various extras from the super-hero scene were hideous.

    Not to mention non-Perez offenders:

    Black Widow’s original costume.
    Cable and all variations (see: Image Comics circa 1994).
    The Whizzer (he’s YELLOW!).
    Many minor Kirby creations, but especially Black Racer and the original costumes of Scarlet Witch (what kind of head-dress goes around the perimeter of the face?) & Quicksilver (pale green?!?).
    Daredevil’s yellow costume.

  6. Scott
    May 20th, 2005 at 1:03 pm
    Official Comment

    I’d add Troia’s costume to the list of Perez badness.

    The others I considered, but thankfully they were long gone before I started reading comics (except for Cable, that is)

  7. Juho Salo
    May 20th, 2005 at 4:20 pm

    Hah, I agree. Thought I must say that I liked the Daredevil’s 90’s costume (thought didnt actually ever read any issues where DD had it), and I thought it looked really neat. Didnt ever consider it armour, though.

    And Wolverine’s hair must have weighted two kilos at least.

  8. David Campbell
    May 20th, 2005 at 4:42 pm

    I’m with Laura on the blue Aquaman costume. It rules.

    I’d like to present the Blue Electric Superman costume for consideration. Truly, it is awful.

  9. Chris Galdieri
    May 21st, 2005 at 1:10 pm

    It’s not surprising that the orange and blue on Deathstroke’s costume work together; orange and blue are complementary colors, at opposite ends of the color wheel.

    I must confess to loving the headband Supergirl design. I just can’t help it. It’s a decided improvement over the new Supergirl’s outfit, at least as rendered by the likes of Michael Turner and Ian Churchill…

  10. Jim Kosmicki
    May 21st, 2005 at 2:55 pm

    if you consider the blue hairy look a costume, then the Beast had one good costume. The original grey did not work well, but when it turned blue, it worked nicely. it especially played off of the “looking like a beast, but with a super-scientific brain” aspect of Hank.

  11. Brian Cronin
    May 21st, 2005 at 9:19 pm

    Never did Clark Kent look more like the yuppy that people accused Byrne of making him into then when he had the ponytail.

    Good lord, did the man look like a dork!

  12. Chris Galdieri
    May 22nd, 2005 at 1:08 pm

    Perhaps the worst thing about the Supermullet days was that no two artists drew it anything close to alike — Bogdanove drew flowing tresses coming down to Supes’ butt, Kitson drew slightly shaggy helmet-hair, Jurgens drew it differently from panel to panel, and Grummett drew helmet-hair that wasn’t shaggy so much as shellacked into place. It was just awful to look at.

  13. Brian Cronin
    May 22nd, 2005 at 5:50 pm

    Yeah, Chris, Bogdanove really was the worst offender, as his Superman looked like a tripped out Hippy while his Clark looked like the kind of dude you’d just want to yell “WHAT ARE YOU DOING?!!? YOU’RE WEARING A BAGGY SWEATER AS A SHIRT!!! THIS MAKES NO SENSE!!”

    I think the mullet was Jurgens fault.

    They were going to cut it off when he returned, but Jurgens decided to leave it in when he drew Superman #82.

    Say…wasn’t there something significant involved in Supergirl making Superman’s costume out of that black regeneration outfit? I can’t remember exactly, but I seem to recall that being a plot point later on somehow…

  14. dr pepper
    December 11th, 2009 at 2:12 am

    The Creeper was pretty bad with a shag rug for a cape.

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