Re: AVENGERS - movie Discussion, News, Interviews, Pics till release 2
Exactly - there was no more attempt to design Cap's original outfit with any contemporary sense of either fashion or function that there was to design Superman's tights as suitable attire for a Manhattan dinner party. The current movie design does look a great deal more like it fits the 1940s time frame than Kirby's red-white-and-blue chain mail with the silly little white head wings did.
Yeah. Shame that Cap's costume was so silly-looking that comic readers of the day made the character such a massive flop that 70 years later, he's nearly forgotten.
Really, the eagerness of comic fans to dump on basic conventions of the superhero genre boggle my mind. Why do you read the things if you think the characters look so ridiculous?
Answer number one: if I'd picked up my first superhero comic at the age of thirty rather than the age of five, I might well not have found it worthy of my time.
Answer number two: I don't expect different media to treat subject matter in an identical fashion. That is one reason and one respect in which different media are, you know, different. As I posted in reference to an exchange about colors in the
Green Lantern thread, one
Dick Tracy movie, once in a very great while, is more than sufficient.
Funny thing - Stan Lee and his artists thought superhero outfits looked pretty dorky, when they first began creating the Marvel characters. That's how the Fantastic Four wound up at first in jumpsuits that bloused and wrinkled, Iron Man clomped around in a bulky suit of armor and the introduction to the very first Spider-Man story referred mockingly to such characters as "long underwear characters." That they eventually yielded to artistic convention doesn't diminish the fact that the initial aesthetic response of the people creating many of the most successful superheros in comics history was very much like that of the folks you're criticizing now.
If you don't think Cap's costume looks ridiculous - well, good for you. I think a literal translation of it would be stupid as hell and would be mocked by anyone who isn't already a fan (and, you know, if a whole lot more people worldwide don't go to see these movies than have ever
read the comic books, the studio is screwed) and I'm sure glad they have the good sense to ignore purists. That's what the Batman folks have successfully done - Superman just barely gets away with his outfit, probably because unlike Captain America he actually is a figure who has been recognized visually the world over for decades.