Bad Hair in the Comics

Earlier Quarter Bin features - generally under the Profiles heading - deal with the notion of bad costumes, through various ages of comics (here, here, here, here, and just possibly here.) However, a desire not to interrupt the sequence of a series of columns in that section, combined with the subjective nature of what makes for bad hair, makes this discussion an equally likely topic here in Opinions.

To the point: Comics provide a rare refuge for peculiar haircuts, and, had MTV not appeared on the scene, might enjoy a history of having exposed more people to more bizarre and impossible colors, shapes, and varieties than other known media. Even to one essentially numbed by attempts to shock through hair, including things like da-glo green dreadlocks, comics often seem to feature characters whose hair seems uniquely the product of human imagination and not at all anything that nature or science could put together without a great deal of effort. Laws of physics do not constrain what can appear in a comic book, and certainly most laws of aesthetics give a wide berth to most four-color experiments with the foliage that erupts from the human scalp.

Particular trends and forces seem to direct unusual versions of hair in the comics, such that it tends to fall into a generous but finite set of categories which we might consider, always remaining open to the notion that some future work could introduce an entire new ecosystem of absurdist tonsure.

Real Hair and Its Enemies

Some might feel that a truly meaningful approach to comics must draw from real life. However, real life frequently fails to excite or entertain in the particulars and details. For instance, if you travel through a modern city in the western hemisphere, you would, most likely, encounter few different colors of hair (barring those who have artificially tinted their own hair in some color that never appears in nature). Mostly you would tend to run into various (and variously dull) shades of mouse brown, plus a few uniform dark colors. In the real world, hair becomes more interesting and more pleasing to the eye for things such as luster and highlight; comics, however, must somewhat simplify the effect, even given today's advanced approaches to color.

Comics, however, tend to make things more interesting. Exaggerated secondary sexual characteristics, absurd musculatures, bodies that resist gravity and other known laws of physics, and other distortions make the material appearing in the panels more engaging to the eye. However, the tools which the artist and colorist use to portray the dull as the interesting frequently involve departures from strict reality.

This may take the form of simple distortion; but sometimes it can also involve the appropriation of unlikely and aesthetically dubious details to provide variants of hair that do not strike the reader - or the artist - as tedious duplications of the same color, texture, and cut for everyone.

Unlikely Colors

I first noted the phenomenon of bad hair in the comics way back in the 1970s, when asking myself the question Why does Superman have blue hair? At the time, I couldn't come up with much of an answer beyond "Because he has always had blue hair. But it did bring out an observation: Characters in comics frequently have peculiar, rare, or downright impossible colors of hair, and the methods of printing often shape the options one sees expressed in such impossible variants.

Convention and four-color printing technology on a budget both contributed to a problem with hair colors that, somewhat, has lessened over the years. But in comics' heyday during the Silver Age, we can note several hair colors: brown, yellow, orange, and blue. Of these, the brown frequently occurred in nature; the yellow did so rarely; the orange did so more rarely; and the blue, never.

Given the cyan, yellow, magenta, and black color model used in printing, one can see how the yellow and orange came to substitute for the wide and difficult-to-reproduce range of real hair colors that appear on human heads. By the time color became an aspect of the art sometime in the nineties, most characters had already inherited their unlikely hair colors from the earlier technology. Hence Jimmy Olsen and Wally West have the pure-orange one doesn't see as often as auburn and strawberry reds; hence Captain America and Aquaman enjoy the kind of blondness generally dreamed of by demented eugenics fanatics; and hence Jean Grey has a kind of ink-red hair I don't expect ever to see on a human being without the intervention of dyes.

Blue hair, on the other hand, does not appear in nature, but represented an attempt to avoid problems presented by depicting pure black hair in black-and-white ink renderings. Dark hair has highlights, which can take various colors, generally showing as a less-dark version of the hair's color, though sometimes tending to browns. Comics colorists at some very early period decided not to fight the problems with the grays (colors which would not add to the four-color appeal even if they remained truer to nature) and opted to make black hair highlights, phongs, and gleams show up as blue.

For over forty years, then - longer than many people get to live - Superman, Batman, and essentially every black-haired hero had blue hair. However, DC somewhat has engaged in misrepresentation in its Archives line of books, having gone back and recolored the pages of older material in a revisionist fashion so as to undermine the authentic blueness of the hair of Superman, Robin, Bruce Wayne, and most of the blue-haired crowd. Therefore, to find properly blue hair, you generally need to locate a pre-1985 comic book rather than a reprint.

Another thing to note about blue hair in the comics: When Marvel Comics began introducing Black superheroes in the sixties, these figures originally appeared with brown rather than blue highlights to their hair. Look to the earliest appearances of the Black Panther or the Falcon. This brown highlight seemed more naturalistic, but as time wore on they, too, developed the blue-hair syndrome. Perhaps appearing in comics too long just turned their hair blue.

Hideous Mohawks

Some folks believed that inflicting a mohawk haircut on a character would render that figure instantly cool and relevant. Note that the mohawked characters do not, today, sport any such hairstyle. An extreme hairstyle will not, in the long term, survive unless many people take to it, at which time it will sacrifice the "coolness" aspect - meaning its deliberately exclusive character - for a mainstream appeal.

That the mohawk did not catch on attests to some kind of luck that protects the human race. But simple human preferences may have stopped it dead in its tracks; that romance novels did not begin to feature painted covers with Mister T or Joe Strummer modeling in Byronic garments on the parapet of a castle with their love interest clutched in their arms attests to the turn-off power inherent in the hairstyle.

The mohawk, however, might have enjoyed a short-lived free ride during a certain period of the history of popular culture, since in the years after the passing of the sixties counterculture, aging talent looked to ways to make characters look contemporary. The bizarre affectations of the day, including the never-very-common haircut depicted above, probably provided a spurious parallel to the shaggy, informal, dry-look hairstyles of the sixties. Yet whereas male long hair comes and goes, the mohawk stepped in for a moment, found no real friends, and vanished over the horizon. While human beings can frequently sacrifice good taste for stylishness, this knows some limits, and the mohawk apparently belonged on the wrong side of these.

Odd Patterns of Graying

To approximate the graying pattern displayed by Reed Richards' hair (or, for that matter, Doctor Strange's), one might do well to begin with a head of completely white hair, then begin to dye downwards from the crown, remembering to begin with not quite enough hair dye so that a darker circle of the supposedly original color gives out, suddenly, to whiteness at some point between the eyebrows and earlobes.

To the credit of artists who have worked in such patterns of graying - particularly Kirby and Ditko, who designed the examples from the previous paragraph - the high-water line of grayness represents a simplification of a kind of graying pattern that besets the beard, including the sideburn, first.

Other examples seem somewhat random, but not so random that nature has prohibited the development. Dark hair, for instance, sometimes travels in the company of light-colored streaks, either of genuine graying or simply of patches with a blondish hue produced by patches of scalp less given to generous production of melanin. Where such patterns too strongly resemble something a designer might contrive, one probably has; the conveniently-organized white streaks in the hair of Elsa Manchester in "Bride of Frankenstein," for instance, show the craft of a wigmaker and not something we could anticipate happening on any particular human head.

In other cases, the patch of white, weather brought on by age or not, seem designed to create a kind of polecat stripe effect. Possibly in comics these trace an ancestry back to Walt Kelly's Mam'selle Hepzibah from the strip "Pogo."

Godawful Bowl Cuts

Moe Howard picked a certain hair cut for his films, one might speculate, not for the dignity and bon air it gave him, but because it provided one of a ludicrous threesome of male coifs. His partner, Larry Fine, combined baldness and a frizz-perm look that would tend to become most common among the "grotesque" type of American circus clown; his brother, "Curly" Howard, sported what he described as the "dirty tennis ball" look. All three opted for individual looks that would stick in the mind even as they rendered them as ineligible, perhaps eternally, to grace the cover of GQ magazine.

As yet, I have encountered no particularly convincing explanation of how DC Comics came to decide to inflict upon Green Lantern understudy Guy Gardner this particular atrocious misuse of the barber's art. A character inclined to arrogance might show a bit more aesthetic judgment in his manifestations of vanity, even where no great evidence of taste normally defined his decisions in matters of clothing or ornamentation.

This haircut, furthermore, could represent considerable danger to a superhero. How many super-villains, bearing only a small remnant of human pride, would admit to suffering defeat at the hands of someone with a haircut like that?

On the other hand, the haircut might represent a perfectly compatible piece of the most well-remembered version of Guy Gardner. He essentially erred wherever called upon to use his judgment. He erred in evaluating his peers; he erred in gauging danger and the appropriate application of violence; he erred whenever called upon to make decisions about wardrobe; and, obviously, he erred when returning to the same barber who messed up his hair so badly the first time.

Unidentifiable Winged Thinguses

In the sixties, a number of characters sprouted odd-looking hairstyles that sought to provide more interesting hair without strictly violating canons about how far hair might approach the collar. Thus, we have Quicksilver, Tyrannus, and others bearing odd peaks of hair outwards from the face. When the Beast became gray (and then blue) and furry, he also began sporting one of these odd hair sculptures.

By the seventies, a new offender showed up to push this attribute to ridiculous levels. Wolverine, once he finally removed his mask, showed a hairstyle perhaps intended to give him a more bestial feel. It would prove one of the haircuts more amenable to abuse by artists, who sometimes took the peaking portions and made a veritable peacock's fan out of them. Veteran John Buscema did particularly unfortunate things with this 'do.

The term "winged thingus" perhaps fails to satisfy, but other names do not come to mind which suffice to describe the odd pointiness of this family of hairstyles. We might, for brevity, simply call the style the "horn," in the sense of a shampoo horn without the shampoo.

Utterly Pointless Permanents

One of the earliest characters I can recall offending by way of obnoxious permanents appeared in Jim Starlin's remarkable Warlock stories of the seventies. Indeed, none other than the anti-messianic Magus, Warlock's evil future self, showed up to menace the galaxy in a poofy clown permanent that should have reduced the sentient beings of the Milky Way not to panic but to hysterics.

Granted, Starlin intended no such humorous angle to the Magus' hair. He faced the problem of depicting Adam Warlock in a younger, less evil version, and an older and clearly gone-over-to-the-dark-side version, and needed to do so in a way that readers could clearly distinguish the two. He hit this distinction on three levels. He gave them different costumes; he gave them different color schemes; and he gave them different haircuts.

Noting that some types of hair which occur in nature tended not to appear in comics, furthermore, Starlin sometimes sought to rectify the balance. Here, however, where a straight-haired hero becomes, in later life, a curly-haired villain, one can infer the Dreaded Permanent. In context, the Magus' hair looks very like the permanents that started showing up on male cast members in the last years of "The Brady Bunch." It seems more likely to belong on the head of a co-investor in Studio 54 (and, therefore, to need to travel in the company of open shirts with pointy collars and chests adorned with disco medallions) than on an uber-villain. Warlock resisted, as any rational being must, a future which left him wearing that hair. And, to his credit, he won that particular battle, even though the Magus would later return; the Magus of nineties crossover events had dispensed with the Toni Home Permanent altogether, going for the ponytailed-hero look in which superheroes such as Nightwing and the Sub-Mariner had experimented occasionally.

Similarly, the dreaded pointless permanent afflicted Silver Age veteran Element Lad, who had to endure the sixties dressed in a pink-and-white costume that suggested he had suffered a tarring and feathering with Pepto-Bismol and marshmallows substituted for the tar and feathers. The unfortunate Giffen-era Element Lad, when he developed his own curly locks, looked less like the owner of a natural curl and more like a frequent visitor to a 30th-century hair salon.Sadly, my research could turn up no picture worth reproducing. You might simulate the effect by looking at the picture of the Magus, above, and giving it a more normal skin color, bringing in the fro just a bit, and letting the hair take the lemon yellow hue typical of blond comics characters and certain hazier eugenics experiments.

Inexplicable Effects of Shape and Texture

Artists may attempt, with a few deft strokes of pencil or pen, to approximate some condition typical of natural hair. These stylized strokes, thereupon, may continue to evolve, becoming more natural for the hand to render, but ultimately less realistic in the sense of attempting to reproduce something that appears in the real world on paper. Such explanations, after the fact, might leave one wanting somewhat, but how else can one explain the likes of Norman Osborne's hair, or, for that matter, Archie Andrews'?

We can also find something to jar the nerves and disturb the well-being in the hair of superheroes who have some miraculous ability to make a mask run under, rather than over, their sideburns. Does this happen because a) the mask exactly meets the hairline at all points or b) the hair grows through the mask? Or, perhaps a case c) applies: The artist just drew the head normally, hair and all, without a mask, and added it as an afterthought.

A wigmaker would fret at a request to duplicate any of the hair effects in the illustrations above. However, one might do better to experiment not in hair but in Bondo, clay, Plasticine, or spackle; a sculptor's tools, finished with primer and spray paint, might produce some real-world analog of the hairstyles in the scanned strip of coiffures.

The Eternal Mullet

For a few months, the author of this column wore a kind of haircut now popularly and derisively described as a "mullet." And, over the years, the wisdom of having a barber hack it away from my scalp within a few months seems more and more evident. Perhaps ten years will ultimately separate me from a kinship with mullet offenders like Simon LeBon and most of the Grammy Awards winners in the country music division over the last decade. Note the image at the end of the sequence - the distortion comes from a twelve-times magnification rather than a perfectly justifiable desire to conceal my identity. Two surviving photographs recall the particular offense of style depicted here.

To my eye, the mullet falls into definitely ugly and semi-tolerable versions, but the critical eye of history makes no such distinctions. So, although comics characters frequently steered clear of the worst excesses - such as one truly hideous work of hair sculpture sported by Mel Gibson in one of the "Lethal Weapon" movies - we can identify a number of characters who chose to sport hair that people who put holes in their faces to stick things through dare to mock.

What served Fabio, perhaps, did not serve so well on superheroes like Superman and Nightwing, both onetime offenders in the Interplanetary Brotherhood of Mullet-Heads.

Cheesy Little Goatees

Once again, Fair Disclosure in Amateur Comics Journalism on the Web rules compel me to admit to wearing Cheesy Little Goatees for years, right up until the point that I noticed other people wearing them. So I admit here, as in the case of the mullet, to a knowing regret rather than an affected and self-serving imposture of innocence. My own experience with the particularly intractable whisker provided to me by five billion years of evolution suggest that, in nature, two types really exist: the uncontrollable (and thus uncontrollably ugly) and the disreputably sparse (and thus mangy-looking), which neatly cover the options of both short and long facial hair. Only a few very gifted souls, like the dreadful Ruhollah Khomeini, can grow beards of a substance that justifies them as more than a kind of camouflage for a chin that has receded to infinity.

It took a few decades for the momentum of the Cheesy Little Goatee to gain enough momentum to become annoying, but circa 2001, with half the males under 30 wearing them these days, the cumulative effect ultimately pushes the option over the line into the territory of the truly annoying. Thus, in the images above, Tony Stark, Green Arrow, an alternate-future Element Lad, and Superboy seem now to belong to a kind of marginally-bewhiskered conspiracy.

Superboy, new to the Reverent Order of the Cheesily Goateed, argues more strongly than the others against the style, since, as with moustaches, the three-hairs-struggling-for-survival-on-an-otherwise-barren-chin look tends to give a pathetic aspect to beard-growing. The attempted moustache and attempted beard enjoy a cheesiness above and beyond the call of duty.

The Professor X Solution

Legends surrounding Alexander the Great include an episode at Gordium. The rulers of the city claimed, as I recall it, that no man could take the city unless he first untangled a rope woven into an impossible cluster of tangles, loops, and knots. Alexander, rather than waste his time on a kind of first-millennium-BC Rubik's Cube, took his sword and cut the rope, dispensing with the knot problem altogether.

In such a light, and in the context of the explosive nimbuses of improbable, impossible, and downright unsightly hair - in colors derived from a Sunday supplement model of combinations of cyan, yellow, magenta, and black, - we can, perhaps, see a certain wisdom in the Charles Xavier approach to hair. No impossible colors appear on his head; nor bizarre textures; nor flowery permanents; nor atrocious experiments in hair sculpture typical of young people keen on shocking their parents. In fact, aside from a pair of eyebrows inclined to take on improbable shapes, this pedagogue of variant humanity has dispensed with the ugly business of hair at all, but for the occasional flashback to his youth.

Through the bare scalp, the bald head bypasses problems of unsightly pattern baldness (say, the Larry Fine look). Furthermore, it conveys a Benito Mussolini-like confidence, combined, perhaps, with a Gandhi-like serenity. However, the scope of such a Charles Xavier Solution to the quandary of bizarre hair in the comics would point out why hair became so weird to begin with. Imagine, if you will, a shared universe full of a multitude of characters, all as hairless upstairs as the venerated founder of the X-men pictured above. At a distance, such a scenario would resemble a forest of pink and brown cue balls. Up close, readers would have difficulty distinguishing characters, except, perhaps by clothing; or, possibly, artists would begin to enhance other facial features to create identity, resulting in odd combinations of enormous noses, buck teeth, and Leonid Brezhnev eyebrows to distinguish faces. Hair, even absurd hair, at least leaves the face free of aesthetic menaces in unlikely treatments that sacrifice reality (and sometimes good taste) in order to more uniquely identify comics characters at first glance.

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Column 257. Completed 03-JUN-2001.