Bad Costumes of the Sixties

The Silver Age of comics produced some truly, truly bad costumes, particularly among the newish genre of superpowered villains that began to infest the pages of Marvel's, and eventually DC's, books. The desire to experiment and to offer something new often forced designers into corners, led away from good taste by the redundancy most designs could expect relative to the many, many superhero costumes that covered the backs of the heroes and heroines of the Golden Age of Comics. Sometimes providing something new and something different precludes providing something good.

Here, as we might not see in the previous bad costume columns, time and judgment generally did retire the offending costumes. In the vitality of the heyday of superhero comics, people could, indeed, learn. However, some of the trial and error that came before the industry giants invented and imposed some standards left pieces that make judging the books where they appeared difficult. With costumes this bad, why go to the effort of finding fault with the art or story?

Experiments in Amalgamation

Many, many years before DC and Marvel produced the DC versus Marvel miniseries that led to the Amalgam books by both companies, DC Comics did attempt to amalgamate two of its characters, at least in the sense of costume design. In the pages of Justice League of America, the DC superheroes of the Golden Age had become increasingly frequent guest visitors, and writers began to suspect that time might, after some twenty to thirty years, affect some characters. Thus, a story explored the notion that DC's other Robin (from the since-discarded "Earth-Two") had become an adult. Someone must have thought about this. First, previous stories had suggested that Batman had trained Robin someday to replace him. Second, someone - perhaps even the same one - considered that an adult Robin or adult anyone might eventually choose to discard Robin's original costume for something with more dignity and more cloth. Neither idea seems absurd, but we need little credit the ungainly result of attempting to Batmanize Robin by way of this costume. The addition of a yellow pleated cape with a huge disco collar to an essentially Batmanlike costume suggests that the weirdness of the sixties could even afflict the white-shirt-wearing crowd that predominated at DC in those days. We may note with some satisfaction that DC scrapped this costume by the mid-seventies, leaving Robin-Two with roughtly half his comics career in the red, yellow and green outfit purportedly designed by Neal Adams to raise the aesthetic tone of the character.

The Legion of Super-Heroes

Sometimes DC's Legion of Super-Heroes seemed to represent a Legion of Bad Costumes. David Cockrum must have realized this when he chose to discard as many of the original costumes as he had time to redesign in his short but significant run as the official Legion artist. Lone Wolf here demonstrates a number of features that repeatedly failed to work in original Legion costumes. For instance, note the odd epaulets, the strange stripes on the shoulders between epaulet and collar, and the attempt to force lavender and orange to coexist in a single costume.

The Legion of this period also enjoyed other costumes of similar feel. The odd, early-sixties epaulet also appeared on Chameleon Boy's costume (a version that reappears every other Legion reboot or so). In addition, Chameleon boy seemed to wear the thirtieth-century equivalent of a western shirt beneath those epaulets, graced by scaly shoulder inset and an overall color scheme that tried, but failed, to make orange and navy blue work together.

Other costumes did attempt related experiments in design that do not serve well in the absence of art geared to letting the various characters get away with their outfits. For instance, Matter-Eater Lad (to the right, behind Lone Wolf) bore the burden of a truly hostile color scheme, and Sun Boy tried to make do with a collar that threatened to lift him airborne when the wind shifted. However, some of the worst offenses had vanished after the first two or three Legion stories had appeared at the end of the 1950s. For instance, Saturn Girl originally wore an outfit color-coordinated to match Matter-Eater Lad's headache-inducing ensemble.

Marvel and Villain Design

Something about Marvel's period of dual-hero titles brought out the worst in terms of costume design. Consider here these Iron Man villains, beginning with the Living Laser. Here, and in later Avengers appearances, the Living Laser would demonstrate the unfortunate results of printing technology's limitation of available color schemes in the comics of yesteryear. The inappropriate cape, the donuts on the limbs, and the pleated poofy sleeves all point more to an inclination to opera than to any overreaching villainous design. One has to suspect that the Living Laser's choice of outfits may have helped push an already awkward situation into the violent scenario depicted here.

The Melter also must join this particular menagerie. We can understand if the Melter chose to assault Iron Man's outfit on purely aesthetic grounds here, but what he wore on this cover suggests that blunted sensibilities actually prevented him noticing the questionable taste of the tin-can look Iron Man sported in his earliest appearances. Note a wealth of wrongness about the Melter's outfit here. Dingy blue-gray attempts to come to terms with Robin Hood green and olive drab even as a red chest lamp skews the mix. Even without the unmixable assortment of colors, other aspects of the detailing attest to something greatly wrong with either the Melter, or his tailor, or both. Can you imagine a purpose for the wedge-things on his ears? To what end would anyone affix those pleated whatchamacallits on his hips? The puffiness of his multipiece trunks suggest diapers or adult incontinence garments more than the fear-inducing garments of a canny master criminal, and the elf-boots imply some earlier career painting wooden trains for Santa Claus at the North Pole.

Repeat offender the Unicorn - mentioned earlier in the admittedly out-of-sequence Bad Costumes of the Seventies column (here) - hit the ground running in the bad costume exhibition with this particular outfit. Note again the attempt to force orange and green to work together. Since Iron Man's armor has much improved since the earlier image with the Melter, we can suspect simple jealousy might have motivated this particular attack. One can almost tolerate the harness/vest on this piece, particularly if one considers that the Unicorn did manage to escape wearing the Melter's incontinence garment. However, the Unicorn's helmet offends in several ways. The jutting nosepiece does nothing to make him the envy of supervillain debs; the buggy eyepieces suggest hymenoptera or diptera more than the imaginary creature that gave Unicorn his name. Also, the horn on the top gives a poor shape to the head overall, if the power horn and not the skull beneath has given this helmet its unfortunate shape.

As the feature on bad costumes from the seventies indicated, the Unicorn did eventually replace this costume, but the subsequent outfit replaced one set of offenses with another while retaining the pumpkinlike color scheme.

By 1970, Marvel's Silver Age villain the Grim Reaper would become a central figure in the history of the Avengers, owing to his pathological relationships with his brother Simon Williams (Wonder Man) and the artificial being the Vision. To increase his importance in the Avengers canon, however, Marvel had to lose this costume first. Even given a treatment by John Buscema at the height of his art, back when that penciling stalwart could somehow borrow from both Kirby and Michaelangelo and create something unmistakeably his own, this costume implicates the Grim Reaper in an aesthetic villainy that suggests the ruthlessness he would demonstrate in the comics for the generation that followed. Plum, lime green, and cherry red, as mixed in this outfit, might seem friendly in the context of a bag of Skittles, but don't do much to make an onlooker respect the wearer. The flared boot and glove cuffs fail to make this piece festive (if the Grim Reaper actually sought such an effect); and the scales on the green portions, not actually visible in this image, seemed more fitting for one of the less satisfying Legion of Super-Hero uniforms.

An Age Full of This Stuff

By no means has this treatment exhausted the bad costumes of the sixties. The very nature of the experimentation which defined the early Silver Age almost guaranteed that bad costumes would crop up now and again; perhaps destiny ordained that "now and again" would become "again and again and again and again...."

Nonetheless, some personal favorites from the bad costume canon did not make this treatment. Time and availability kept out Boomerang's costumes from the first Hulk pieces Gil Kane drew back when Marvel's green-skinned pariah had to share a book with the Sub-Mariner. Comics old-timers doubtless have one or two (or a dozen) items to add here.