Revisionist Costuming, Done Wrong and Done Right

Before the Silver Age of Comics, few consumers of superhero books considered themselves to participate in an era of comics history. The business would have to change enough that a contrast appeared between the comics of now and then before anyone might give that other period a name. Thus, the Silver Age of Comics had to begin before anyone would notice the end of, and therefore the existence of, the Golden Age of Comics.

The invention of a shared-universe and continuous model of superhero comics, which forced books to relate to each other and to what had appeared before (within the confines of properties owned by a single publisher) might have made inevitable the invention of Golden Age revisionism, which involved post-facto attempts to create stories set in the thirties and forties in a manner that made them seem to fit into that period. War and adventure comics had a long history of attempting to use historical periods as contexts, and World War Two, with its seeming clarity of Good Guys and Bad Guys, provided a well-known, comprehensible, and even beloved playground for comics creators.

When the fledgling Marvel Comics reintroduced Captain America into its properties, we may see the beginnings of revisionist superhero comics. To explain away his absence within a superheroic context, Lee and Kirby invented a tale where said superhero spent 19 years frozen in a block of ice prior to his re-discovery by a newer generation of superheroes. Since continuity had not yet become as important a premise as it ultimately would, it didn't matter that Captain America had fought the good fight into the early 1950s.

Captain America would soon fight World War Two battles in new stories, and eventually other comics would explore the untold tales of superheroes presumed active during the War. Captain America in the 1960s and Wonder Woman in the 1970s would both occasionally explore their roles in a context derived from the history that produced them; and ultimately, pieces like Invaders and All-Star Squadron would deal in altogether new stories about the wartime heroes, plus a few new creations thrown in to provide something not in the original mix. Revisionist comics, and revisionist heroes, then, saw light, mixing the creations of yesteryear with more contemporary talent (albeit occasionally the talent of pros with solid Golden Age credentials, like Joe Kubert) and the advantages of Silver Age and post-Silver Age standards.

However, sometimes things didn't quite fit right. Younger, newer readers, and readers with less of a background in Golden Age material, might not notice obnoxious anachronisms, and many consumers might not actually have cared much about the points where revisionist characters betrayed their after-the-fact origins. Nostalgia, after all, does not require the perfect recreation of its inspiration (and if it did, we would call it "memory"). Nonetheless, sometimes talent just got things wrong, and dubious costumes provided the most readily-caught example of the errors of such material.

Where designers attempt to make forties characters in later eras, the authenticity can vary from "none whatsoever" to "almost right."

Baron Blitzkrieg

For a period in the seventies, Wonder Woman appeared in period-piece stories set in the 1940s, perhaps an attempt to inspire interest in the book from connection to the Wonder Woman television show which began with a forties setting. Such stories provide a place for new, period-thematic heroes and villains to appear, and DC obligingly provided her with a costumed nemesis for the forties, a supervillain named Baron Blitzkrieg.

This character, in concept, combined aspects of two Timely/Marvel characters of the period. Like Baron Zemo and Doctor Doom before him, Baron Blitzkrieg had suffered a disfiguring accident that left him wearing a mask (or, in this case, a helmet). Like Captain America, deliberate modification of his body by the best means available to the scientists of the nation that produced him had turned him into a super-strong man (to the point that he would eventually enjoy a short-lived strength in the class of some version of Superman). Conceptually, Blitzkrieg most strongly suggested Silver Age in his design, since the costumed super-villain mostly dates from the Silver Age (after a Golden Age that tended to feature non-costumed gangsters, mad scientists, and spies as villains, with only the occasional costumed baddie).

Blitzkrieg's problem begins not while thinking about him, though; superhero comics had frequently introduced workable, if slightly anachronistic, villains into the new version of the forties. However, when one lays eyes upon him, the problem becomes clear. His costume doesn't belong in the period.

Ignoring, for the moment, the sheer ugliness of this outfit (Hourman could have justified beating him on such grounds alone), one notes the opera-gloves, a detailing feature generally absent from male superhero costumes before Dave Cockrum's Legion of Super-Heroes makeovers. The picture to the right also deviates from Blitzkrieg's first costume (the interior of the book evidently didn't, though) by giving him riding-length boots instead of the dubious thigh-length boots so suggestive of bondage wear. Nothing in the color scheme truly suggests a Nazi flag, although the eagle and Iron Cross depicted on his chest derive from Weimar and Nazi regalia; in fact, although occasional characters in the comics of the forties might have worn the orange and yellow from his costume, the grotesque magenta of his cape seems a surrender to the fact that superhero comics occasionally uses up its costume concepts and has to invent new pieces using schemes and components that hurt the eye simply because nothing else remains, outside of redundant design. Hideous color, non-period detailing of glove and boot length, and avoidance of appropriate but overused color themes (such as Per Degaton's near-perfect match of likely Nazi color schemes) all work together to make this piece not just ugly but also wrong.

Baron Blood

In the world of revisionist characters, sometimes the concept bears closer scrutiny than the final product. We may consider Baron Blood a case in point. The essential concept - a Nazi vampire of authentic World War II vintage - actually has considerable promise, a potential that keeps him and his descendant characters appearing in stories with heroes connected to the war in Europe (such as Nick Fury and Captain America). However, his early appearances clearly date him as something spawned in the comics of a different day.

Note several ways that Baron Blood's ensemble places him outside of possible forties costumes. In the illustration above, probably only the large collar belongs appropriately to Golden Age comics (the original Vision wore such a collar on his cape, and the Vision of the sixties would borrow heavily from his visual concept). Other elements, while not necessarily unpleasant, betray the later origins of this costume. The choice of colors does not fit into the available primaries of bare-bones four-color printing; instead, the scheme includes two variants of a mix of two primaries, to include two shades of purple that might not have seen print in a comic book until the days of EC Comics and its characteristic use of heavier, deeper, and more complex coloring. Even ignoring the color, however, the layout of the costume strongly attests to post-Silver Age origins. The color division that gives body and sleeve two separate areas really belongs, again, to an era of comics that had absorbed the costume designs of visual stylists like David Cockrum.

Here, therefore, we can object not so much on aesthetic grounds (as conscience requires us to for Blood's peer, Baron Blitzkrieg, above) as on the basis of conspicuous anachronism. Color and styling simply do not suggest any time before the 1970s.

Steel

Probably only a finite number of ways to combine the colors red, white, and blue exist. Thus, if the occasional attempted patriotic color scheme fails to compel, this may implicate the mathematics of the problem more than the limitations of the talents of designers.

Steel, meaning here the Gerry Conway superhero of the seventies and eighties (rather than the Louise Simonson superhero of the 1990s and beyond), didn't quite work as far as forties-era costumes went. Particular elements worked, but various approaches to ornamentation clearly marked the costume as the creation of a later age.

For instance, note the way the eagle on the chest expands outward into stripes that adorn the shoulders. This strongly suggests the influence of various Giant-Man/Goliath costumes of the 1960s. Furthermore, the stylization of the gloves, albeit premised upon the notion of Steel's mechanical parts, doesn't fit into a forties design model very well. Robotman, after all, who appears in the image fighting our revisionist stalwart, appeared drawn with completely fleshy features of face and body festooned here and there with seams and the like, plus coloring, to suggest his mechanical nature. This suggests that comics of the forties did not attempt photo-realistic approaches to mechanical parts and would not have necessarily concerned themselves with the enlarged joints of Steel's mechanical wrists. A standard blue gauntlet would have fit the spirit of the era better.

Other details almost pass muster. Other characters appeared with the finned mask or headpiece (see the original Starman or the Fin), as well as the covered ears. The white stripe surrounding the fin on the crown of Steel's head suggests the ornamentation of Silver Age costume design, but perhaps - perhaps - some forties character might have sported similar markings.

Though fine points betray the anachronism of the character, the costume doesn't really fall down on gross elements like those of the Barons Blitzkrieg or Blood. One need have read a few more comic books of various decades in order to catch the errors with Steel's ensemble. Also, the costume slightly echoes that of the Simon / Kirby hero Fighting American, and in so doing points back to a small army of authentically forties superheroes, including the seminal one, Captain America.

General Glory

Caricatures frequently betray more true information about their prototypes than respectful homages. Thus, of all the revisionist costumes discussed here, that of General Glory, a World War Two themed spear carrier from Giffen / De Matteis era Justice League books, seems the least outside the boundaries of plausibility.

Do not take this to mean I consider this a good forties-styled costume. Elements of it simply offend the eye in a way that no amount of euphemism can completely conceal. For instance, the vertical stripes on the leggings never did much for superheroes who wore them. The Red Tornado of the seventies also sported such ornamentation, and it did little to commend him visually, although part of the problem might have lain in the concept of a costume mostly composed of racing stripes and arrows.

With General Glory, however, one gets the idea that designers - and I suspect Keith Giffen as the specific designer - intended some small degree of caricature to invest itself in the costume as elements of parody attached to the overall concept (think about the silly spoken oath to activate the powers, the constant reminiscing about period trivia that probably would have bored folks in the days to which it pays homage, and the fact that General Glory, like Foghorn Leghorn, never seemed to run out of wind). That one can suspect caricature at least implies that someone bothered to look at the period materials for inspiration, something that probably never happened in the case of Baron Blitzkrieg or Baron Blood.

The Rocketeer

Lest someone suspect that all my criticism contains only complaints about the dedicated efforts of professionals with decades of experience and buckets of talent forever denied to amateur comics historians of my ilk, I feel it fit to include here a sample of a comics character that faithfully captures the feel of the material he echoes: Dave Stevens' Rocketeer. Though the character's overtones include pulp and movie serial elements, Stevens manages to pull off a design that remains consistent with pulp, movie, and comic all in a period that bordered the end of the pulp hero and the beginnings of the superhero.

Since Stevens produced his Rocketeer pieces outside the constraints of the "Big Two" publishers, we can speculate that his design and execution sprung from his own forehead and sturdy hands rather than from the corporate committee design that may have affected the previously-mentioned items in this study. Acting as a single man with a vision, rather than a hired hand attempting to placate contentious internal factions in a major publishing concern, Stevens could look mostly to his imagination and source materials, pulling in the forties elements that most charmed him (including his occasional studies of Bettie Paige in his excellent infusions of cheesecake into his works).

Stevens proved that a revisionist character can ring true, and therefore undermined any excuses that might have defended atrocious conceptions like Baron Blitzkrieg's hopeless costume or Baron Blood's clearly out-of-period outfit.

Conclusions

Comic books entertain, and compelling them to observe uncompromising laws of historical accuracy can undermine this intent. After all, adding to the period fiction of another day doesn't really require the same kind of tests of truth as a valid historical treatise; how does one separate "real" and "unreal" elements from a completely fictional product?

However, art - however elite or popular - trades in effect that its content seeks to elicit from observers. Forties-era comics purport to evoke the feel of the comics of an earlier day; such an effect belongs in a repertoire of respectable artistic goals. A western comic book that contained characters who all spoke in affected hip-hop jargon would not have the effect of creating a vision of the legendary west of the gunfighter epic; instead, it would create a surrealistic vision of its own.

Setting comics in another period implicates the notion of creating a vision of authenticity. The artist has set the ground rules by setting the material in the forties in the first place. Therefore, to abandon the same period feel the artists sought to evoke in the first place involves moving goalposts set by the creators themselves. We need see nothing unfair in pointing out the artistic conventions artists chose themselves to observe.

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