Bad Costumes of the Seventies

As the Silver Age started running out of steam, it showed in a few places. The slide would generally take things down from "excellent" to "very good" or from "good" to "fair," but readers could see that things didn't quite have the zing they had enjoyed in the vehement comics of the 1960s. One could begin to detect the deadening of the old vitality in some of the costumes that came out of this period.

Go-Faster Stripes

Artists and writers in the 1970s sometimes tired of the outfits that Marvel's superheroes had worn for ten years and longer. If an outfit represented the acme of design in 1963, it might seem equally representative of a dated and quaint theory of costuming by 1971. This probably inclined the talents behind Avengers to redo Hawkeye's costume, an outfit that has returned to its original form more than once. However, this particular take - the skirt/shirt and headband - didn't do anything for the character. Hawkeye wore this outfit for less than a year, a period still longer than it deserved (if you squint, you can just make Hawkeye out on the bottom right, drawing a bead on the Sentinel).

Bizarre Experiments

At some point, probably in the 1960s, superhero designers may have used up all the basic and likely forms for costumes. Yet comics continued to create new superheroes. This forced costume designers to rehash overused themes, perhaps distinguishing these pieces with minute detail or changes in colors. When these strategies didn't work, designers might resort to odd-looking experiments. This unflattering bare-middriff look, worn by Ms. Marvel in the early issues of her own book, did not show one of the high points of superhero design.

Idiosyncracies sometimes plague the manifold costume and character designs to emanate from the promiscuous pencil of David Cockrum. Cockrum liked epaulets, hip-boots, and sashes; and he occasionally dabbled in a few truly bizarre kinds of ornamentation that only he could get away with. Except for the color scheme, I have no problem with this Polaris costume, but one need not represent it as any less bizarre than it appears. We have here an ornate piece that screams Cockrum's name.

Raciness that Failed

If I mention Moondragon again in a column about bad costumes of the seventies after having brought her up as a type of the worst outfits of the nineties, this reflects the place she has earned as a perennial offender of costumes. Before her outfit became a simple strand of green yarn carefully draped around key portions of her anatomy, it already attempted to sell cheesecake in a way inconsistent with a being of (theoretically) advanced evolution. The combination of shaved head, three inch spike heels, and deeply cutout one-piece swimsuit, worn under a big green cape, fails at both lurid appeal and general smartness.

That Timeless Go-Go Look

Supergirl went through about four separate, sometimes bizarre outfits as part of an attempt to make her seem less a part of DC's dowdy Silver Age. Two of these outfits remain in memory, but neither appears on this page. Instead, note this piece with the opera gloves, high boots, and hip-hugger belt, a costume suggested by the depowered Wonder Woman in her days as a depowered, karate-chopping, dress-selling something-or-other.

This look does not torment with ugliness, but it does push the envelope of datedness. If Supergirl (original or revised) chose to appear in the next Austin Powers movie, we could assume with fair confidence that she would choose this outfit in order to fit in with the fashion themes that such a piece would evoke. Perhaps it borders on the crude to ask if a flying woman would really want to risk wearing a mini-skirt? In comics, however, artists can impose a modesty that the callous laws of physics might choose to ignore.

At Least One Point of Light

If the superhero costumes of the 1970s did occasionally suggest exhausted inspiration in the aftermath of the heady days of the Silver Age of comics, many such designs would nonetheless demonstrate considerable vitality and enduring appeal. Consider, for instance, the Dave Cockrum pieces that remade the look of the Legion of Super-Heroes and Uncanny X-Men. While the seventies definitely did reveal the occasional symptom of creative fatigue here, such inventive exhaustion did not necessarily indict the entire decade. For instance, the costumes of the 1970s would not consistently dabble in redundant excesses in the fashion of the frequently hackneyed superhero costumes of the 1990s (discussed here).