Costume Changes

[Twisted Toon]

1 hour ago, Techwright said:

I suspect the "clean lines" look is what sold the judges.  I know from past discussions that some prefer there to be more than 2 colors in a costume, so in that sense I'm surprised, but I've pulled off a couple of 2-color costumes and still get stopped by gawkers.  I think those also appeal due to "clean" lines.

 

 

There's some great feedback on this thread.  Were this still the "live" game, I'd be pointing out the thread to the costume developers saying something like "See?  Take note: Less spandex, more leather, and up-to-date fashions."

Sometimes, I just think "less is more".

[Ironblade]

On 7/24/2020 at 10:06 PM, Techwright said:

No yellow/brown or yellow/blue spandex.

No tight shorts worn over the rest of the costume.

NO Capes!

 

Have these and other costuming decisions brought to the big screen over the past 2 decades dramatically affected your choice of character costuming?

Most of my costume decisions were made long before that.

 

The Champions RPG was published in 1981 and most of my characters didn't have capes because they didn't seem practical.  I had a character who had a cape that let him glide.  I had a character with mental powers who didn't need to move around much in combat, who had a cape.  A cape would obviously create a lot of drag when flying.

 

'The Watchmen' was published in 1986 and we got to hear about Dollar Bill, the masked hero who worked for a major bank.  His costume was designed by the marketing department.  While attempting to foil a robbery, his cape got caught in the revolving door and he was shot to death.

 

We knew capes were bad long before Edna Mode told us.

[Mister Mass]

On 7/29/2020 at 8:31 AM, Ironblade said:

Most of my costume decisions were made long before that.

 

The Champions RPG was published in 1981 and most of my characters didn't have capes because they didn't seem practical.  I had a character who had a cape that let him glide.  I had a character with mental powers who didn't need to move around much in combat, who had a cape.  A cape would obviously create a lot of drag when flying.

 

'The Watchmen' was published in 1986 and we got to hear about Dollar Bill, the masked hero who worked for a major bank.  His costume was designed by the marketing department.  While attempting to foil a robbery, his cape got caught in the revolving door and he was shot to death.

 

We knew capes were bad long before Edna Mode told us.

Right.  It is worth noting that capes were never as ubiquitous in comics as most people think.  When Superman appeared in 1938, his spandex & cape look was inspired by circus strongman costumes & by sci-fi strips like Buck Rogers & Flash Gordon.  When the superhero genre exploded in the next few years, spandex & capes were common given that most supers were inspired by/ripoffs of Superman.

But many popular supers were capeless - Namor, the Human Torch, Captain America, Hawkman, Wonder Woman, Green Arrow, & the Shining Knight, for example - or got new costumes without a cape, like the Sandman & Sandy, the Golden Boy.

 

DC, as the owners of Superman & Batman, who were cape-wearers, tended to stick to that paradigm.  But the Silver Age Flash, Green Lantern, & Atom all lost their capes in their new incarnations.  And as Marvel re-entered the supers game in the 60’s, few of their characters wore capes.  Out of the original Avengers, only Thor & (briefly) the Wasp wore a cape.  Spider-Man & the X-Men also usually were depicted capeless.

 

By the 70’s it was increasingly rare to see a new costume design with a cape, as it was seen as something of a relic.  The 80’s & 90’s followed suit even more strongly, as a new wave of artists looked to depict their characters in new ways.

[Mister Mass]

[The Golden Age Flash was capeless as well.]
 

So by the time CoH launched, capes were hardly a ubiquitous part of the superhero genre.  But due to the almost universal familiarity of players with Superman & Batman, who did wear capes, there was an expectation that the game should offer capes as an option.  So despite the fact that animating capes was a hassle, the devs bowed to public pressure & added the capes (& the cape mission) to the game.  And since earning a cape then became a badge of honor & character advancement, it got enshrined in the game as a goal, which perhaps has led to capes being more common in the game than they are in the modern comics themselves.

Edited July 30, 2020 by Mister Mass
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[gamingglen]

I'm not a fan of capes as it hides my pretty female characters' nice ass. 😄  I have used the fringe cape option as it it short. Also, capes clip with longer hairstyles.  Also, no one ever heard of tear-away capes?

I like spandex. I made an ad about specialized spandex for a screenshot-based comic book (never finished) ...

 

 

Edited July 31, 2020 by gamingglen

[Techwright]

On 7/30/2020 at 1:58 PM, Mister Mass said:

By the 70’s it was increasingly rare to see a new costume design with a cape, as it was seen as something of a relic.  The 80’s & 90’s followed suit even more strongly, as a new wave of artists looked to depict their characters in new ways.

Yeah, pockets/pouches and straps seemed to be the costume element of choice in the 1990s when I was collecting.  I would note two things:  1) new characters were still being created with capes, some of them prominent:  Spawn, Spiderman 2099, Fabian Cortez and the Alcolytes, villain Phantasm (in an animated Batman movie. more of a cloak there).  Lesser known characters like Malibu Comics' Prime also sported capes.  Reduced cape creation, but not an all-out effort to abandon the item.  2)  "New ways" often included using another costuming item as a pseudo-cape, and were drawn that way.  Gambit's duster coat, Jubilee's overcoat, and that of NOW Comics' version of the Green Hornet are all examples of this.   But so were shorter items like jackets worn by Rogue, Superboy, Static, etc.  These sometimes had a flow drawn in them that resembled short capes.  Then there are ponchos, like one that Cable sometimes wore pushed back over the shoulders, the hooded poncho of the X-Cutioner, or even the security poncho of David Dunn in the movie "Unbreakable".  There were also the very curious streamer costume elements in the 1990's which flowed off characters like extremely skinny capes.  Sometimes they were attached to the back, sometimes to places where they flowed down the back, cape-like. And lastly, there were sometimes when even a body or form might be drawn cape-like, usually from some fluid or shape changing creature.  These were, admittedly, rarer, but I think the various Venom symbiotes were drawn this way at times.  The point is, despite looking for new looks for characters, the artists seemed often drawn back to the elements of the cape, if not a true cape itself.

[Mister Mass]

Absolutely agree with the commentary above about how comic artists used other articles of clothing & the like to generate cape-like effects.  To a lot of younger artists, the cape itself may have seemed passé, but the sense of movement, mood, or mystery that a cape could engender remained key elements in comic book art - so finding other means to achieve those ends were found.

 

Raincoats, dusters, jackets, ponchos - all could be used to evoke the same qualities of a cape, but seem new & original.

 

And I never wanted to imply that the classic cape ever died.  In fact, in the 70’s, as new cape-clad heroes were a rarity, Batman artists were turning Batman’s cape practically into a character of its own.  They kept exploring ways to use the cape to evoke mood & to imply that the Batman was both wrapped in darkness & using the darkness as a weapon in his war on crime.

 

So even if we saw fewer cape-clad heroes in the Modern Age of Comics, we saw new designs that carried on the heritage of the cape - & many of the caped heroes found the cape even more imbedded in their whole style.

[Coyotedancer]

I absolutely use capes... Sort of.

 

A lot of my Ornabagan characters are using that one, very scarf-like, "tattered" option as part of their armored outfits, just because it adds some visual interest and marks them as something other than "just another (ie: NPC) Circle Mage/Thorn Caster/Thorn Wielder". I'm also a fan of the Arcane cloak with some of the crew.  I like the weight it seems to have and the way it moves. The classic scarf option, likewise. 

 

That said... My characters tend to dress like this...

 

 

 

 

 

...rather than going for anything like the traditional Superman/Flash/XMen-style outfits. 

 

I think Narada may be the only character I have who uses spandex-proper. And even then, her "Avatar of the Goddess" costume isn't exactly a 'classic comic book' affair...

 

 

Although Semnai totally does the "black leather cat-suit" thing, which may as well be skin-tight spandex. And a few (Like Ajda, the girl in black and gold, bashing the clockworks up above-) use the Imperial Dynasty bits, which are also similar.

 

 

So, maybe spandex and capes are a matter of degree? Is a tattered scarf really a cape? Is a vintage Emma Peel style cat-suit on par with one of those spandex-a-paloozas from the 70's? 

 

 

Edited August 1, 2020 by Coyotedancer

[srmalloy]

On 7/31/2020 at 10:36 AM, gamingglen said:

I'm not a fan of capes as it hides my pretty female characters' nice ass.

There are some things that are more important than capes. From PvP Online's strips about CoH shortly after launch:

[Greycat]

On 7/27/2020 at 8:14 PM, Twisted Toon said:

Sometimes, I just think "less is more".

There's no nudity in game. Though some costumes come awfully close.

[Twisted Toon]

2 hours ago, Greycat said:

There's no nudity in game. Though some costumes come awfully close.

I said less, not none.

 

Although, I did have a character dressed very much like Sister Psyche. Green lingerie and all.

That one was "showing" the most skin.

[XoxPrincessJadexoX]

To answer the OP, I choose costumes that fit the game, and it's not at all based on movies or comics from the last 20 years.  CoH is a world that has a feel of its own, and what some here may consider to be "silly spandex" outfits have just as much place in the game as some advanced armor suit.  It all depends on the character you create.  I've been playing since 2004 and I've made plenty of caped crusaders, gadgety types, martial artists, high tech humans and aliens, etc etc.  That's what I love about the game is it's not restrictive about what you can create.