Ten Characters Who Should Return To Their Original Costumes

Fashion is a capricious and fickle beast, especially when it comes to superhero couture.  For every perfect Kid Flash or Booster Gold, we have a Prankster, a 3-D Man or a Polka-Dot Pirate.  Sometimes, though, the evolution of fashion works against our heroes in ways that one has to see to fully understand…  Welcome to Ten Things!

Whooshman-Bicarbonate Films, in conjunction with ‘An Amateur Comics Historian’, and ‘TV’s Tim Gunn’, Presents:

TEN CHARACTERS WHO SHOULD RETURN TO THEIR ORIGINAL COSTUMES!

10) DEADSHOT

With the reveal of Will Smiths’ upcoming movie version of Deadshot, it’s clear that the character is poised to break huge, presuming that the Suicide Squad movie is a hit.  That means even fewer people will remember that, in his first appearance, Floyd Lawton was dressed as a gentleman bandit in a tuxedo, top hat and tails.  And don’t get me wrong, I love the Marshall Rogers-designed featureless mask, red-and-silver-suit Deadshot, but the idea of a villain who dresses as half gunslinger/half Phantom Of The Opera is such a perfect visual to me, that I sort of wish it were one of Floyd’s alternate attires or some such nonsense…

9) GIANT-MAN

Hank Pym is another comic book type who will probably be changed wholesale by an upcoming movie appearance, what with the Ant-Man film taking a very different look at his life and times.  Of the many, MANY uniforms he’s worn in his six or seven different identities, I like this retro take the best.  Perhaps it’s the inexplicable use of antennae to remind us that he’s also Ant-Man, or the spiky boots and gloves, but this Giant-Man looks every inch a superhero, especially at giant sizes…

8)THE THING

Ben Grimm is an anomaly among heroes in many ways, but his long-time costume of “a pair of boxing trunks” is pretty bland, even more so than Bruce Banner’s stretchy purple Toughskins.  Though the full-body uniform and helmet that Sue Richards designed for him (waaaay back in Fantastic Four #3) isn’t the perfect answer, it’s a cool idea, especially for those times when Ben is particularly hateful of his Thing form.  More recently, he has begun wearing long pants, boots and occasionally a singlet, reminding us that even a big rocky man needs to put on trousers once in a while…

7) LOOKER

Pink and black and oh-so-80s, Looker’s original suit is a perfect little retro look, flirty and feminine while being so fashion-backwards that it spins right back around into cool again.  Notably, she wears a big ol’ fluffy bow on one hip, the perfect accent for a woman who spent most of her life feeling like an ignored plain-Jane, and the idea that she CHOOSES to be a larger-the-life human-size Barbie doll (especially in the tales where she’s a freakin’ vampire) is one that helps to differentiate her from a legion of telepathic super-duper redheads…

6) COLOSSAL BOY

Colossal Boy has never had a whit of taste in clothes, with his attire generally involving massive gauntlets, massive belts and harnesses, and weird topless nuns’ wimples, but his best uniform is the original.  It’s a look that I refer to affectionately as the “Bucky Goldstein” look, a future-retro cowboy costume that lacks only a ten-gallon hat to rival Marty McFly’s cowboy duds from ‘Back To The Future II.’  I’ve always felt that applying current fashion trends to the future Legion leads to nothing but heartbreak and Cosmic Boy in a corset, so why not keep a costume that’s distinctive, alien and representative of the weird whims of future fashion?

5) THE SANDMAN

This one’s sort of a gimme, as many interpretations of Wesley Dodds ignore the fact that he ever wore his purple-and-gold tights in the first place, but I love the “business suit and hat” costume archetype dearly, and the addition of the strange gas-mask makes this one stand out among its brethren.  My only caveat is that you need to keep the green, purple, brown, yellow, blue and pink color scheme intact, as it’s meant to be a uniform that Wesley slapped together hastily, although I’d also be satisfied with seeing him throw the mask, cape and hat over whatever suit he happened to be wearing that day…

4) VIXEN

Here’s the one that people will probably hate the most.  While Vixen’s orange/brown color scheme and uniform is excellent (especially when she had her Wolverine-with-beaded-locs hairdo in the 1980s), this blue and gold number is pretty neat.  I like the big cat-ears, even if modern audiences would probably only see Halle Berry’s movie version of Catwoman, and the bicep-high evening gloves are a concept that too few heroes embrace.  In an ideal world, I’d like to see this uniform in a Tigra/Hellcat situation, where Mari McCabe keeps her new attire, but another hero takes up her old suit because it’s just too cool to leave mothballed for so long…

3) MARY MARVEL

Wait, you say…  Doesn’t Mary Marvel wear this anyway?  Well, the honest answer is, I don’t know if Mary Marvel exists any more, but the last time I saw her, DC editorial had switched her over to a white version of the suit (leaving the three main Marvels in a red, white and blue color scheme, which is sort of understandable) which never quite looked as good as the red and gold.  Assuming that Mary ever comes back into vogue, I’d like to see her in red, or at least keep SOME red in with the white and gold accents, because it’s her signature color, dangit!

2) LUKE CAGE

Pirate shirt?  Corsair boots?  Weird headband?  Open to the navel?  Sold!  Sold, sold, sold!  I get that Marvel Comics has been positioning Luke Cage as the hero too cool to have an actual costume for a decade or more now, but frankly, wearing a puffy yellow pirate shirt is cooler than his recent shirtless and/or sleeveless undershirt look.  Recent issues of Mighty Avengers have had Luke and wife Jessica as plainclothes heroes among their more wildly-garbed counterparts, but I’d be perfectly happy to see even part of this uniform make a return in the upcoming rebooted Marvel continuity…

1) SUPERBOY

Now that they’ve given Connor’s t-shirt and dungarees costume to Superman proper, the time is ripe for a return to the spandex-and-leather-jacket Superboy of old.  I was never particularly enamored of his mod 90s haircut, so they can keep whatever he’s been doing in the main continuity (Is Superboy dead again?) but give us this angular, belty costume again.  If the local mall is to be believed, much of the fashion of the early 1990s is back in vogue for the cool teens, why not go whole hog and turn into that skid?  Plus, it helps to differentiate him from the other guys wearing diamond s-shields swanning about…

Feel free to follow along (@MightyKingCobra) for more Ten Things madness on Twitter! As with any set of like items, these aren’t meant to be hard and fast or absolutely complete, what with the nature of super-hero costume changes and opinions.  (The battle between tutone brown Wolverine and blue-and-gold Wolverine is one that has launched more than one near-fist-fight.)  The comments section is Below for just such an emergency, but, as always: Please, no wagering!