First of all, there are capes that are less ostentatious than a standard superhero cape. There are capelets that fall only to the waist. There are shawls, and there are ponchos. But my favorite super-cape options are the ones that push past the obvious, such as a cardigan tied over your shoulders or a long scarf. The scarf idea is my absolute favorite, because scarves come in all colors and can be worn with absolutely everything. You can make any outfit at all a nod to superheroes with the addition of a long red scarf.
5. Life behind a mask. Masks are equally important to the superhero milieu. After all, a superhero identity is a secret. Even when a hero’s identity is public, the mask exists to hide it because the hero isn’t functioning as that person (e.g. Tony Stark), but as the superhero (Iron Man). Masks are integral to a superhero’s costume, but they are frowned upon, and often unlawful, in real life. No matter how huge a fan you are, you can’t wear a realistic superhero mask to work or school or the mall. So here are some options...
A hoodie is an obvious choice. There even are hoodies that are made to look like Batman, Spider-Man, and Captain America’s costumes, cowl included. And customizing a hoodie is pretty simple; just use iron-on or sew-on patches available at fabric, craft, and even party stores. The same goes for knit hats.
Sunglasses are an accessory you can get away with most places, and there are plenty of frames that resemble various superhero masks – for instance, Spider-Man’s bug eyes or Catwoman’s slanted mask. A headband or other hair accessory can hint at a superhero’s headgear; barrettes can emulate Thor’s helmet, feathers can stand in for Hawkgirl’s headdress. And though I might hold it back for special occasions, an actual mask worn up on the head – holding back hair maybe – is a pretty cute fashion statement.
6. Shoes are awesome. Whenever anyone asks me for fashion advice, the very first thing I say is: Spend money on shoes. Now, I don’t mean only buy expensive shoes, or buy so many shoes, you need a separate room for them. I mean that you should pay attention to what you wear on your feet, and use your shoes to your advantage. I mean that any outfit can instantly become more interesting by wearing interesting shoes. (And the reverse is true as well, shoes can take away from an outfit just as easily. Wearing flip flops anywhere but the beach – why would you do that?!) Wear shoes that make the statement you want, and don’t be afraid to mix it up. Wear combat boots with a sundress, and Converse sneakers with a suit. Just do it.
Superhero footwear, by and large, is silly. Many superheroes wear what amount to booties that may or may not be attached to their leggings. Then there are the brightly colored go-go boots and the stripper heels. As fun as these are, I don’t really recommend wearing exact replicas of most superheroes’ shoes. But you can use your shoes to show support for a favorite hero.
If you are a young boy or – like me – are lucky enough to fit into a young boy’s shoe size, there are sneakers, boots, crocs and even the occasional buster brown shoe that feature heroes like Superman, Batman, Spider-Man and Thor (basically, anyone who headlines a movie). But if you can’t fit into those, or like a more minor character, there is still a shoe for you out there. You just have to look.
For example, say you like a hero who wears red boots – which seems like half of them, easy – there are red boots. There are also red sneakers, red baby dolls, red china flats. I happen to personally love red shoes, and can tell you that they come in all shapes and sizes.
Black Canary is one of my favorite characters to see cosplayed. Her fashion look is biker-chick-superheroine, and that is both incredibly cool and incredibly hot. A lot of it is that she wears the kind of boots that look like they could hurt someone. When I wear boots like that, I instantly feel more dangerous and more powerful. I feel like I could hurt someone.
7. Don’t ignore streetwear! I love superhero costumes, obviously. But I love a comic book superhero in street clothes almost as much. I firmly believe that what we choose to wear says a lot about who we are, how we see ourselves, and how we present ourselves to the world. Most superheroes designed their supersuits, but – as I said while discussing masks – the superhero and the hero inside are separate entities. And I am the kind of fan who calls my favorite superheroes by their “real” names.
A prime example of this: I don’t love Ms. Marvel, but I love Carol Danvers. I want to be Carol Danvers... who happens to be Ms. Marvel. And so I pay just as much attention to what Carol wears when she’s in her civilian identity. And what she wears – T-shirts emblazoned with NASA or Property of the Avengers, fitted baseball shirts and tight jeans, and the occasional red or black minidress – tells me that Carol, like me, wears clothes that (sometimes literally) say who she is: a tomboy who cares what she looks like, who wants to be perceived as tough, accomplished and attractive.
So why stop at Ready-to-Wear Spider-Man when Ready-to-Wear Peter Parker is just as fun? Because, let’s be real, Peter Parker is the original hipster. He was a hipster before “hipster” was a thing (see what I did there?). Peter is an outsider – he’s never been one of the cool kids, no matter how many people accept him or how popular Spider-Man becomes. He’s so uncool... it’s cool. He shops secondhand, he wears skinny jeans, he supports bands no one’s ever heard of. He’s accidentally fashionable, but he is, at the moment, entirely on trend.
Wanda Maximoff is a Bohemian. Nearly all the X-Men are preps. Tony Stark wears David August. There are so many possibilities.
8. Dress the why. Whatever superhero you want to dress in the style of, there is a reason why they have that style. Zatanna practices true magic, but she is also a traditional stage magician. Her costume reflects that showstopper side to her. Her top hat and tails have a reason.
In any good character or costume design, style is meant to say something to the audience. There are great characters with awful costumes, and awful characters with great costumes, but more often the characters we love have costumes we love because they are meaningful to that character. And maybe, just maybe, figuring out the “why” behind a favorite character’s costume you don’t like will change your opinion of it.
Also pay attention to why you chose this superhero. What is it about him or her that attracted you in the first place?
9. Be creative and have fun. This is the second thing I tell people when they ask me for fashion advice: You already know everything you need to know. You know what you like and what you want to show off. In fashion, more than in any other realm I have dabbled in, rules are made to be broken. Play!
10. Be yourself. Just like Batman isn’t really Batman in a tracksuit, it’s important to know your own character design. For example, about five years ago, I bought a knit hat in the shape of a monkey’s face, complete with ears, at a country fair. I’ve worn it daily every fall/winter for that last five years. And now that knit animal hats are absolutely everywhere, I’ve moved on to a cloche. I don’t bring this up to boast that I am a trendsetter, but to give concrete examples of how I build my own character design and let it evolve. Once when I went to Starbucks, the barista wrote “Monkey Hat” on the cup instead of my real name. I took a picture of this that I will keep forever, because it was a “fashion defines me” moment.
I wear leg warmers and arm warmers regularly. I am always willing to reference Alice in Wonderland. I like heels because I am little. I love Spider-Man and frequent the Boys’ clothing section to get T-shirts and shoes. I identify with My Little Pony Pinkie Pie, and try to work something pink into every outfit. Layers are my friend. My favorite styles reflect the Roaring Twenties and the subsequent Depression Era gloom. I love clothes.
What about you? What do you wear and how does it reflect who you are? Decide what you would say when I asked for your character design. Decide if you like it, and either enhance it or change it. Fashion is as easy – and as difficult – as that. It requires, most of all, bravery. But any comic book fan worth his or her salt knows that inside every one of us is a superhero. Stand with me and be that superhero. Don’t be afraid to show it off wi
th your own fashion – cosplay, undercover cosplay, Ready-to-Wear Superhero, heroine chic or something altogether different and personal.
Show it off. It’s you. And you are super.
An Interview with Louise Simonson
Louise Simonson has written and edited comic books for many years, including works in the superhero, science fiction, horror, and fantasy genres. Her Marvel work includes the award-winning Power Pack series; lengthy runs on X-Factor and New Mutants; Wolverine: Meltdown, co-written with her husband, Walter Simonson; and Web of Spider-Man. Her DC Comics work includes Superman: Man of Steel, which featured the “Death and Return of Superman” storyarc; Steel; and World of Warcraft, based on the multi-million-player Internet game, for DC’s WildStorm imprint. She has also written 23 books for kids and adults, many featuring DC Comics characters. She is currently writing a Young Adult dark urban fantasy novel and a Rocketeer story for IDW.
Q. How did you come into the comics industry?
A. I was working in advertising-promotion for a magazine publisher, and I had a friend who worked at Warren Publishing. They published black and white comics magazines – it was genre stuff, horror, fantasy, and science fiction. My friend told me there was an opening in their production department, and the job paid more than my job. I had read the Warren comics back when Archie Goodwin was the editor and really liked them – they had great stories and art. So I applied for the job and got it. It was as simple as that.
A couple of months later, they created an assistant editor position, and slotted me into it. I was much better at editorial than at production! Then, when Bill DuBay – the senior, and only, editor – left, I talked James Warren, the company founder, into giving me that position. I edited there for four years, I think, until I moved over to Marvel in 1980.
Q. What were the challenges of being an editor at Warren Publishing, and in what ways were the challenges different when you moved to Marvel?
A. I loved working at Warren. It was a small company and, if they wanted, the people who worked there could fulfill lots of roles. I got made an assistant editor because I enthusiastically wrote ad copy for James Warren’s Captain Company and letters pages and did whatever else needed doing, in addition to my production work. I’m a visual learner, so, for me, watching and doing are my best ways to learn.
When DuBay left a few years later, James was looking for an editor and I had to talk him into giving me the position. His first comment was “Girls can’t edit horror comics” – which was so wrong on so many levels. I don’t think he honestly believed this, by the way. I think that he wanted me to fight for the position. He was pushing my buttons, to see which way I’d jump. So I said to him, “Look, give me the job for six months. I’ll do it for my present salary, without an assistant, and I’ll get the books on schedule. If I do it, you make me editor of the whole line.”
James wasn’t stupid. I mean, he was getting an editor for an assistant’s salary and saving an assistant’s salary on top of it. Of course he gave me a chance. I did what I said, and got the sales up as well. So he made me senior editor. Later, he made me a vice president. I was a big fish in a very small pond.
Another great thing about working at Warren – I don’t know if you’d call it a challenge, exactly – was that during the summer months, James would mostly disappear to his beach house on Long Island, leaving us alone to carry on. I loved working without supervision, even though that was the time of year we put out annuals on top of our regular magazines, so we worked twice as hard.
Then, in the middle of summer, James would return for a few days, and yell about how everything we’d done was wrong, and explain – at the top of his lungs – how it would have been so much better had he been standing over us. I call this the Dominant Gorilla Syndrome. In the jungle, the greyback will wander off and do his thing for a while. When he returns to his troop, he knocks the lesser gorillas around, just to prove he’s still dominant. That was James in summer, then he’d go away again for a few months.
In the fall, he’d return and create a problem – such as insisting that there wasn’t enough contrast between the logo and the cover, for instance. He’d yell about it for a while, then he’d solve it. He’d say, “See how much better yellow works than red?”, and I’d say, “Wow! You’re right!”, and then he’d say, “Why didn’t you think of that?” And we’d both go back, happily, to our daily routines. It was kind of funny, once I recognized the pattern.
Two things grew out of this. One was that I told James I didn’t like being yelled at, and he wasn’t to do it. He was allowed to yell all he wanted about stuff, but he wasn’t allowed to yell at me. And he didn’t. Second, once I recognized the gorilla pattern, I learned to say: “Yes, oh great greyback!”, but not in those words. It was like a ceremony of acknowledgement that he was the boss that we had to go through each fall.
And he did have really good instincts, including a terrific eye for spotting talent. I learned a lot from him. And he was the boss. He was Warren Publishing. He was king.
Beyond that, I could do pretty much anything I wanted. Theme issues, contests, and different experiments on the readers to see what they’d do and what they wanted. There was a predominance of Spanish artists when I took over – wonderful, brilliant artists from the Selecciones Illustradas agency in Spain. But, I fought to be allowed to include more of the young American and South American artists, as well. And I had some great writers – Bruce Jones, Jim Stenstrum, and others. I loved working at Warren.
But then I accepted Jim Shooter’s offer to work at Marvel, beginning in 1980. Shooter had a reputation for being a tough editor-in-chief to work under, but, after the time I had spent dealing with James and mostly enjoying it, working under Jim was fine.
For one thing, Jim and I had similar ideas about what each issue needed to have: clarity; good characters; conflict and resolution on more than one level; and beginnings, middles, and ends – all within the context of the larger continuing Marvel sagas. Jim may sometimes have carried these ideas a bit to extremes, but his heart was in the right place, so mostly we got along. And for the most part, if he was mad at me about something, I had earned his wrath.
I was given the licensed properties – Conan; The Savage Sword of Conan, which was similar to the Warren books; King Conan; Battlestar Galactica; Micronauts; and eventually Star Wars and Indiana Jones; as well as Chris Claremont’s books, Uncanny X-Men and Man-Thing. Chris had a reputation for being difficult, but I thought he was great and loved working with him every chance I got. He’s so smart about story and has so many ideas. He had a way of making his stories feel important.
There were a few others – movie titles, like Xanadu. We added Ka-Zar. Later, Uncanny X-Men became its own franchise, with the spinoff title New Mutants and several mini-series and graphic novels.
My first challenge at Marvel was dealing with “The Dark Phoenix Saga” storyline. I was put on that one half way though, after there was a dispute between its editor, Jim Salicrup, and Shooter about one of Phoenix’s acts of destruction – she destroyed a planet with people on it, killing them all – and whether Shooter had okayed it or not, and what the results of that destruction would be on the character’s future. With Chris’s reluctant okay, it was decided that Phoenix would die. Oddly enough, that probably helped cement the popularity of X-Men as a fan-fave book. After that, X-Men fans knew they couldn’t look away for a minute, or they would miss something really vital.
In addition to everything else that was going on at the time, Chris and John Byrne were engaged in a creator conflict. John really wanted a book he could totally control, and I wouldn’t let that be Uncanny X-Men – I just liked Chris’s writing and ideas too much. So John quit and went off to write and draw the Fantastic Four! It was the best move for him. I was worried I’d killed the X-Men franchise with John’s departure, but it survived and prospered.
While I was an editor at Marvel, there were a lot of changes with major impacts on the medium – to name just a
few, comics as graphic novels began to come into vogue, comics began to be sold through the direct market, and creators began to get royalties. It was an interesting time to be in comics, and I was very lucky to have been part of it.
Q. What editorial works are you most proud of, and why?
A. At Warren, it would be bringing more American artists into the company, although Bill DuBay had started that trend; hiring Bruce Jones as a Warren regular, ‘cause his work was just so good; and some of the fun experiments I ran.
At Marvel, there’s quite a few worth mentioning. There was “The Dark Phoenix Saga” and “Days of Future Past” (here I came to realize that death sold, big time!), hiring Paul Smith to be the ongoing Uncanny X-Men artist, because his work was wonderful; hiring John Romita Jr. after him – both Paul and John worked well with Chris – and Frank Miller and Chris’s Wolverine mini-series. Heck, our whole X-Men run.
I’m also really pleased to have created the Ka-Zar book with Bruce Jones and Brent Anderson; of the work we did on the God Loves, Man Kills graphic novel (again with Brent Anderson and Chris); of having created New Mutants (with Chris again!); of our Star Wars run with David Michelinie, Walter [Simonson], and Tom Palmer; and the X-Men-Teen Titans crossover with DC, which had Chris and Walter again, and Terry Austin. It was also satisfying to help raise the sales on everything – because publishers are in the business of selling books! – and the way that we doubled the sales on the black and white Conan magazine.
I’m sure I’ve forgotten lots of stuff.
Q. How did you transition from editor to writer?
A. Shooter had wanted us editors to freelance in addition to our editorial duties, I think so we’d know what it was like to be freelancers. It was a good idea, but I was reluctant since I had a job, and thought anything I did would take food from some freelancer’s mouth. I thought it wouldn’t be fair. Then Shooter hired a batch of new editors, so our workloads were cut in half. Since I could do my work easily, I began to have time on my hands. So I revisited the “freelancer” idea. I figured if I created something, it wouldn’t be taking anything away from anyone.
Chicks Dig Comics: A Celebration of Comic Books by the Women Who Love Them Page 20