Costume redesigns - what sticks, what doesn't.

http://www.wordsandpictures.org/theflash/images/jay_garrick.jpg
http://accordionguy.blogware.com/Photos/2004/11/current_flash.jpg

metal hat no

Okay, JLI Black Canary costume. Glad that didn't stick. Rather liked the early Birds Of Prey outfit which has not all but vanished (all that's left seems to be the gloves). Goes to show that fishnets are still the way in the martial arts world.

eeeethang - you mean you like bulky grey Iron Man, or the bulky gold Iron Man, or the red/gold pointy mask Iron Man?

http://www.marveldatabase.com/wiki/images/7/7c/Iron_Man_Armor_MK_I_001.png

http://www.geocities.com/avengersmicros/Hembeck-IronMan.gif

Please note the repulsor pods on the hip. Please also note the swirly Hembeck joints.

A simple GIS for Iron Man brings up all sorts of shitty xtreme designs. DESTROY that red/white Obidiah Stane / Armor Wars-era armor, BTW.

Wolverine is a really weird case in that I think both the yellow-and-blue and the brown-and-tan are sort of acceptable definitive costumes without much hoopla surrounding the changes, and then meanwhile the Morrison/movie approach never felt unnatural either. Maybe he's a character that people don't associate with his costume? The claws and the hair are all you need to convincingly broadcast "Wolverine"?

I wonder how much of this has to do, also, with what a character is wearing at a moment when their book gets a bunch of new readers. Thinking here of the X-Men circa the cartoon show, the action figures, and the speculator boom - all those Jim Lee (and maybe Portacio?) costumes seemed to me, coming on board at that time, as just what those characters' costumes were, and it was a long time before you could have convinced me that most readers would have read, say, Storm's white drapey thing as a dubious recent change and not just "Storm's costume." Also, of course, when characters have had more costume redesigns over their history, it decreases the sense that they even have a definitive look. Storm might actually be a good example.

An interesting take on this was Prime, as written by Gerard Jones and Len Strazewski and drawn by Norm Breyfogle, where the character's costume changes are part of an evidently planned two-year mega-plot, and symbolize how the adolescent boy who is secretly behind the Prime bodies (it's a Shazam-type premise) is trying out different identities for himself: generic hero, a "rebel" persona that becomes quickly and appropriately cringe-worthy, etc. Tbh they could have done much more with this, but it's a cool idea.