Author: Zoran Bekric (---.com.au)
Date: 06-22-2000 03:56
Storn Cook wrote:
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Superman wears red, white, blue and yellow (the yellow is an accent, leaving a color scheme identical to the United States' flag).
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I'm sorry, but where's the white in Superman's costume? I admit I haven't been reading the book lately, so this may have changed, but the basic costume I'm familiar with has red boots, blue leggings, red trunks, a yellow belt, blue shirt and sleaves with a red 'S' on yellow symbol and a red cape with a red or yellow 'S' symbol on it. No white.
And earlier Storn Cook wrote:
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The origin of the skintight costume is rooted in a very practical matter; artists had to meet "tight" deadlines. Daily strips or 22 page monthly comics demand an incredible amount of time from these overworked and unsung storytellers of yesteryear. The skintight costume eliminated the time AND difficulty of drawing folds and textures of clothes.
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This sounds reasonable, but fails to allow for the fact that the vast majority of comic books produced over the past 60-odd years were Westerns, Romances, Adventure Stories, Comedies and Satires, etc. All of these featured characters who wore various types of regular clothing, complete with folds, textures and wrinkles. In fact, the way that most super hero costumes were drawn in the Gold and Silver Ages suggested that they had folds and, occasionally, even textures. The costumes seemed to be tight, but they weren't quite the naked-figure-wearing-body-paint look that evolved in the late sixties and into the seventies.
There were always exceptions, of course -- Gil Kane's Green Lantern and Atom, for example, always seemed to have costumes that showed every muscle, but I think that reflected Gil Kane's interest in drawing the human figure in action more than anything else. Jack Kirby's costumes for the Fantastic Four, the original X-Men, Captain America, Ant Man and so on, by contrast, always seemed to have wrinkles and folds. And when you get to a costume like Thor's, even the advantages you posit for skin-tight outfits disappear, since that costume had various elements that had to be added to the basic human shape, so it wouldn't seem to have been any quicker to draw than a character wearing a three-piece-suit.
Steve Dikto's work on Spider-Man had so many sequences featuring Peter Parker at school or at the Daily Bugle with everyone wearing regular clothing that I don't think having Spider-Man wear a skin-tight costume saved him any time at all -- especially with all that elaborate webbing all over the costume. It must have taken him ages to get the webbing right -- in fact I think I recall him "complaining" about having to do all the webbing in one of the humorous "How We Create Spider-Man" features that showed up in the early annuals.
Regards,
Zoran
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