costume design

Fantastic Five: Worst Superman Costumes
Fantastic Five: Worst Superman Costumes
Fantastic Five: Worst Superman Costumes
If there’s one thing we’ve learned from our years on the Internet, it’s that there’s no aspect of comics that can’t be broken down and quantified in a single definitive list, preferably in amounts of five or ten. And since there’s no more definitive authority than ComicsAlliance, we’re taking it upon ourselves to compile Top Five lists of everything you could ever want to know about comics. Superman is responsible for laying the foundation for what we would come to know as the "superhero costume", so it stands to reason that every time anything about his changes; it makes headlines and gets people talking. But for a character that’s been around as long as Superman, it’d be silly not to expect him to mix it up every now and then and try on a new outfit. But they can’t all compete with his classic look. In fact, most of them can’t. The red, yellow, and blue has stood the test of time for a reason, so this week we’re looking at a few of Superman’s less successful wardrobe choices.
Love It Or Hate It? Cumberbatch's 'Doctor Strange' Threads
Love It Or Hate It? Cumberbatch's 'Doctor Strange' Threads
Love It Or Hate It? Cumberbatch's 'Doctor Strange' Threads
A bunch of photos of Benedict Cumberbatch and pals filming Doctor Strange on the streets of New York arrived online this past weekend, offering us our first glimpse of some of the characters, including Chiwetel Ejiofor as Baron Mordo and Mads Mikkelsen as an unnamed villain. The photos also offered our clearest look at Cumberbatch in his full Strange regalia, and while it's not a perfect reproduction of his famous Steve Ditko costume or any of its established variations, it's perhaps more faithfully comic-booky than most of us expected. So what do we think of Cumberstrange? Do we love it, or do we hate it?
Drama And Allure: Kevin Wada On Redesigning The Scarlet Witch
Drama And Allure: Kevin Wada On Redesigning The Scarlet Witch
Drama And Allure: Kevin Wada On Redesigning The Scarlet Witch
Scarlet Witch has been a growing force in the Marvel Universe of late. Not only has she been a fixture of Uncanny Avengers, but she’s made appearances in the all new Doctor Strange, and The Vision, and of course she made her big screen debut in Avengers: Age of Ultron, played by Elizabeth Olsen. And now she's the star of her own ongoing series, from writer James Robinson and a roster of star artists, including issue #1's Vanesa R. Del Rey. The series sees Wanda dig in to the nature of witchcraft in the Marvel Universe, and the book has received particular buzz for its new costume designs; created by the always stylish Kevin Wada. ComicsAlliance spoke to Wada about the redesign, its cues from modern fashion, and how modernization plays into Wanda’s new direction.
Thumbnail: The Mystical World of Marvel's Crazy Headdresses
Thumbnail: The Mystical World of Marvel's Crazy Headdresses
Thumbnail: The Mystical World of Marvel's Crazy Headdresses
Womenswear in superhero costumes hasn’t always been about skintight, sexy unitards. In the early Silver Age of comics, readers saw the inception of the mystically-inspired heroine; one imbued with passive or non-contact abilities such as invisibility, telepathy, or magic. Especially common at Marvel, these mystic or faux-mystic heroines offered a contrast to the superhero brute force of their male colleagues, but they also had something else in common; the headdress.
Capes and The Divine in Jack Kirby's Costume Designs
Capes and The Divine in Jack Kirby's Costume Designs
Capes and The Divine in Jack Kirby's Costume Designs
One of the noticeable differences between DC and Marvel is the number of prominent superheroes that wear capes. Compare any group shot of any number of Marvel superheroes to any group shot of DC superheroes and chances are good that there will be more capes on the DC side. There's a litany of reasons why this could have taken root in the intrinsic creative works of both companies, but one of the strongest is the role of one artist and creator in the building and evolution of both publishers into what we know of them today: Jack Kirby.
The Great Super-Costume Poll: Supergals
The Great Super-Costume Poll: Supergals
The Great Super-Costume Poll: Supergals
Costume design is one of the great strengths of the superhero genre, a way to establish distinctive visual shorthand for a character and reveal key details about concept, purpose, and personality. But which is the best superhero costume of all time? This month, we’re asking you to decide, by voting up your favorites and voting down the rest. When we have your votes, we’ll compile a list of the greatest super-costumes of all time. For the penultimate day of polls, we're offering up a selection of some of the standout female superhero costumes from the past sixty years, designed by George Perez, Jim Lee, Al Plastino and more. From Rogue's jacket to Supergirl's mini skirt, these are some famous looks --- but are they classics, or embarrassments?
The Great Super-Costume Poll: The 2000s Called...
The Great Super-Costume Poll: The 2000s Called...
The Great Super-Costume Poll: The 2000s Called...
This week we’ve been looking at some quintessential costume designs decade-by-decade --- so inevitably we're finishing out the week with the 2000s. Today's polls may feature five relatively recent designs, but many of them pay tribute to characters and costumes that came before, from Superman to Martian Manhunter. So do these looks mark the pinnacle of costume design, or contemporary fashion faux pas?
The Great Super-Costume Poll: The 1990s Called...
The Great Super-Costume Poll: The 1990s Called...
The Great Super-Costume Poll: The 1990s Called...
Costume design is one of the great strengths of the superhero genre, a way to establish distinctive visual shorthand for a character and reveal key details about concept, purpose, and personality. But which is the best superhero costume of all time? This month, we're asking you to decide, by voting up your favorites and voting down the rest. When we have your votes, we'll compile a list of the greatest super-costumes of all time. This week we're looking at some quintessential costume designs decade-by-decade. Today it's five costumes from the 1990s, the era of the Image artist, the bad girl, big knives, big guns, big shoulder pads, leather jackets and lots and lots of pockets. We've picked out just a few costumes to represent some of these trends.
The Great Super-Costume Poll: The 1980s Called...
The Great Super-Costume Poll: The 1980s Called...
The Great Super-Costume Poll: The 1980s Called...
Costume design is one of the great strengths of the superhero genre, a way to establish distinctive visual shorthand for a character and reveal key details about concept, purpose, and personality. But which is the best superhero costume of all time? This month, we're asking you to decide, by voting up your favorites and voting down the rest. When we have your votes, we'll compile a list of the greatest super-costumes of all time. This week we're looking at some quintessential costume designs decade-by-decade. Today it's five costumes from the 1980s, the decade that style forgot. But it wasn't all disco collars all the time; the era produced some great costumes as well. And maybe some of them even had disco collars. Right? Right?
The 'Vocal Minority' And Artistic Integrity In Comics
The 'Vocal Minority' And Artistic Integrity In Comics
The 'Vocal Minority' And Artistic Integrity In Comics
Things got interesting over the past few days for comics folks who keep their ear to online skirmishes over how welcoming comics is or isn't --- and how welcoming comics should be in the first place. Between the new Killing Joke-inspired and tonally jarring cover to Batgirl #41 (which was just pulled at artist Rafael Albuquerque's request, and in line with the creative team's wishes) and Erik Larsen going on a Twitter rant about comics pandering to a "vocal minority" that in his mind wanted superheroines covered up, it would be easy for readers interested in the new world order of "comics for everyone" to feel discouraged. After all, if some of the decision-makers at DC and one of the owners of Image Comics don't get it, how can we expect everyone else to get it? The answer is easy: we move on without them.

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