Sunday, April 10, 2016

Most gratuitous superheroine costumes 2

White Queen

Speaking of villainesses in underpants, Marvel's White Queen always seems like her real costume is in the laundry, and all she's left with is a corset and a cape. Depending on which version of the X-Men you're reading, Emma Frost is always experimenting with ridiculous costumes, but the most ridiculous is probably her New X-Men duds, which are literally made of the negative space surrounding the letter X. It sounds clever until you realize how terribly impractical the whole thing is. When you can read minds, why would you wear something that would generate horrible thoughts?



Shanna the She-Devil
Logic dictates that any exploration of the jungle should normally be undertaken with the maximum amount of coverage possible, but that's rarely the case with jungle heroines, who are apparently only capable of skinning only one tiger ever and making a bikini out of it. In a world devoid of infectious bug bites, thorny plants, and the general unseen, bitey perils of nature, Shanna the She-Devil somehow evades every danger with flawless, overly-exposed skin, instead of being a mass of gnarled scar tissue like any other human who spends every day outside being eaten alive by murder-flies and fang-leeches.


Lady Death
If you want to get into some really insane territory, you have to wander into smaller publishers that were operating in the '90s. They were often remorseless when trying to lure in well-paying young men. Chaos Comics' Lady Death is some kind of goddess who is bone white from hair to toe, with thigh-high leather boots that latch onto her underwear, which somehow serves a function not known to mere mortals. Lady Death was passed around through several failed publishers and given new origins at least once, but she's not much more than a less-successful Spawn, and even her well-proportioned appearance can't seem to keep a publisher afloat.



Vampirella
Vampirella hails from an era where black and white comics were beautifully drawn by virtuoso artists and written by master storytellers, so it's hard to hold these origins against her. The fact that Vampirella's tiny costume was designed by a woman, Trina Robbins, is also a point in her favor, and somehow, being from the planet Drakulon feels like enough of an explanation for the absurd costume. Maybe it's also the association with vampirism that makes this costume strangely appropriate, since post-18th century vampire lore can get kinda sensual.


Witchblade
"Bony carapace" isn't really a sexy phrase, unless you're into some pretty weird stuff, but pointy shards of bone and tendon are all that make up Witchblade's costume, which emerges from a razor-fingered gauntlet on the wearer's hand. There's literally no reason that this deadly weapon also requires all of the user's clothes to fly off in a cloud of shredded fabric, but woe befall any change you had in your pocket, because it belongs to the devil now. Sorry. Again, it was the '90s, so the more revealing the costume, the better.


Dawn
Dawn's appearance is a little tricky because, according to canon, she would appear differently depending on the viewer, and creator Joseph Linsner always maintained that this was because all women are beautiful. Despite this positive message, every Dawn cover depicted the red-headed witch as a buxom babe in translucent clothing rather than one of these "other" Dawns. Because she was created during the '90s by a small publisher, Dawn is also the goddess of something, and her boyfriend is Death, and we stopped paying attention right about there.

No comments:

Post a Comment