If your super power involves running away, there are two things you want to avoid when it comes to setting your your heroic identity.

First, you want to avoid choosing yellow as your primary color, because (news flash!) in our culture, yellow is the color of cowards. You rarely want to combine running-away powers with cowardice.

And second, on the off chance some dim-witted criminal misses the whole “I’m bladder-voidingly afraid” vibe, you probably don’t want to name yourself anything even vaguely reminiscent of, in fact, pissing yourself.

And yet, I give you “The Whizzer”:

Super-heroes use costumes to send a message about themselves, whether that message is “I’m a bright icon of hope” for Superman or “I’m about to kick you in the face and you won’t even see it coming” in Batman. It ought to go without saying — and apparently, tragically, it most definitely went without saying where The Whizzer could hear it — that you don’t want to send a message that says “Please don’t hurt me or I’ll pee on both of us.” I would bet you’d have a hard time inspiring fear in anyone besides the men’s room attendant with that kind of look.

But let’s say somehow you have attracted a Rogues’ Gallery of epically clueless proportions, who have, against all odds, completely missed the fact that you’re depicting yourself as a galactic-level coward. In that unlikeliest of events, the very last thing you would want to do, the absolute worst way you could possibly reinforce the unfortunate stereotype of your moniker, would be to mount a chicken on your helmet. And yet:

Oh sure, he’ll claim that’s an eagle, but I think the preponderance of evidence would clearly show it’s a chicken. Because I’ve met eagles, my friends, and I can assure you, not one of them would be caught dead hanging out with the King of Wee. Even future guests of KFC have more pride than that.

(Many thanks to reader Kate for once again pointing out an awesomely bad Golden Age costume!)

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The gang at Project: Rooftop have a cool new feature where they redesign an old public-domain character along modern lines, kind of like we’ve done a time or two with character contests here at HeroMachine.com. Their first pass is with “The Red Cross”:

However, they’ve overlooked his greatest enemy — the hypervigilant copyright attorneys employed by The International Red Cross. They’re almost as vicious as Girl Scout lawyers!

I always like the thoughtful super-hero fashion design stuff at Project: Rooftop, and this looks like another great feature.

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Having a bad costume foisted on you is demeaning enough, but a far sadder spectacle is a bad costume the recipient actually likes:

This revamp (get it, re-”vamp”?! I just slay myself!) is from the Golden Age of comics, when an intrepid publisher tried to cash in on the whole super-hero fad by combining spandex and Dracula. It must be frustrating to have all the supernatural power of the night and still no fashion sense, but he’s really pulled it off here. From the Daredevil like horns and spandex mask to the gigantic bat buckle holding up his underwear, you’d think at least he’d be granted the mercy of not being able to see his own reflection in a mirror like a real vampire, but no. Even that is forbidden him, and he is forced to endure his own sartorial horror for all eternity.

Now that’s a curse you can believe in.

Update: As several commenters pointed out, this is actually from a Dell comic in the 1960’s. That’s important because they had to make him non-scary due to the pernicious Comics Code. Remember kids, censorship leads to bad art, that’s key.

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The hardest thing about art is knowing when to stop. The second hardest thing about art is trying to do fashion design with industrial grade road painting rigs. The people behind Red Tornado, sadly, learned neither lesson:

Someone should’ve stopped earlier with the stripes in honor of Maxim One, because he looks like roadkill via Maxim Two.

The question that has puzzled Super Hero Fashion Philosophers for years has been whether the red on Red Tornado is “flesh” or clothing, because if it’s flesh, suddenly the garish yellow stripes are not decorative, but utilitarian, in that they are actually clothing. And not just any clothing, but the only clothing standing between us and a serious case of Naked Robot.

Which in turn makes you realize, queasily, that he’s got the worst case of one-strap-thongism this side of a Lady GaGa concert. Seriously, I don’t want to know where that groin strap goes. Just … no.

Given that unsettling concept, we’ll opt to believe that in fact the red isn’t skin, but some sort of cloth-like covering. Yes, I know, he’s basically just a giant toaster oven and thus human norms of sexuality and clothing don’t apply, but even toasters should be afforded a little dignity.

That only gives relief from a moral outrage standpoint, however, not from fashion outrage, because the stripes just don’t make sense. Not only are there too many of them, but why do the pants stripes go under his briefs? It’s a very awkward break. And integrating the chest insignia with the central stripe just adds to the confusion, tying it down instead of making it stand out like a good insignia should.

The whole effect of the striping is to make what should be a character who’s all about chaotic twisting and dynamism instead look static and tied down (literally). Lines of consistent thickness and uniform direction serve to stabilize him when that’s the exact opposite of what a tornado should be.

OK, let’s leave off the stripes for now … Wait, of course I am kidding. How could I talk about stripes and not deal with that ridiculous arrow on his head? Seriously, look at that thing. It’s ludicrous. What is it pointing at? His nose? Are we to assume that his tortured twisting is going to fling off an astounding stream of Red Snot? I have no idea what that thing is supposed to denote, graphically. It’s just a big yellow distraction.

Oh, and why do the leg stripes continue through his boots, making the cuffs look like they’re just sewn on without being, you know, actual boot tops? I hate that.

Moving on, I also hate his cape. It’s way too big for a guy who functions in high winds. Believe me, at my wedding we did an outdoor dance, and my wife’s veil (which was nowhere near as voluminous as that gigantic blue number Tornado sports) almost beat me to death. Of course, for some unknown Comic Book Physics reason, only his bottom half rotates, which whatever, but still, the cape goes all the way down. Wouldn’t that grab him by the throat and choke him to death? Ha ha, he’s an android, he doesn’t need air, sucker! Unfortunately.

The black stripe on the cape mirrors the same thickness as the out of control, and yet too-controlled, yellow stripes of the costume, again destroying anything dynamic that might have arisen from the design. Plus it’s black. Why black, when there are no other black elements to the costume? Because the rest of the cape is blue, which also doesn’t appear anywhere else!

See, thinking about it makes you dizzy, just like you would be in a real tornado! And that is pure, beautiful genius.

Stay twisty, my friends.

(All art and the Red Tornado character are © DC Comics, Inc.)

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I am turning over today’s installment of “Bad Super-Hero Costumes” to Brian Hughes at “Again With the Comics” for his most excellent run-down of two-issue Golden Age sensation “Dynamite Thor”, who is every bit as awesome as you would expect from a guy whose “power” is throwing dynamite at anything getting in his way.

Head on over to Brian’s place and check out the full article, it’s really a hoot. Or, rather, it’s dynamite!

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For the first time, we at HeroMachine.com are proud to bring you the previously untold story of how Namor lost his “Worst Dressed Aquatic Hero” award:

Look, ribbons may count as a “sport” in the eyes of the International Summer Olympic Committee, but in no way should they be considered as substitutes for an actual costume in the annals of super-heroic adventuring, a memo Phantasmo clearly missed. I just thank whatever deities may exist that we are exposed only to his dorsal view, because I have no desire to see what that ribbon is doing on the flipside.

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I think, if you’re going to have a super-power that involves exploding things, that you should carry that theme through to the absolute extreme. Name, costume, effects, everything should be an assault on the senses so violent that you are forced to cover your eyes and look away in horror at the resulting carnage.

You know, like “Boom Boom“, aka “Boomer”, aka “Time Bomb” aka “A lame character by any other name is still lame”:

Tell me you can look at that costume in those colors and not think something blew up. I dare you.

Note how thoroughly this to-the-max redesign pounds the metaphor home. From the hair that looks like it is currently in the midst of a nuclear blast to the bomb-shelter high collar to the massive eye protection, they don’t miss a beat. But in case the reader is dumber than a sack of hammers, they also threw in some explosion logos on her boobs (because let’s be honest, that’s immediately where most fan-boys’ eyes go), arms, and leg strap thingie.

And just in case that wasn’t overkill enough, they also wrote her name down her leg. Which, honestly, was a great idea, because given the artistic team on X-Men at that time, it could be really hard to tell one character from another. This approach narrowly beat out the other idea of having them toting little name-signs a la Wile E. Coyote.

Without a doubt, though, what really brings this baby home is the color scheme. I can’t remember the last time I saw such an … innovative use of neon pink, day-glo yellow, and radiation orange.

No, wait, yes I can — I suddenly realized where James Cameron got the color scheme for Pandora’s jungles. Well done, sir.

My only criticism of this otherwise stellar outfit is that they made her keep her headgear retainer on. That’s just cruel. We understand that dental work is a delicate thing and that teens often struggle with it, but come on, she’s a crime fighter! Let the poor girl leave the acne cream and external dentifrice at home already.

(Character and image © Marvel Comcis, Inc.)

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Although not technically a costume, I feel the following vehicle qualifies as fodder for Bad Costume Wednesday:

For those of you scoring at home, that’s an invisible submarine tank crawler. Because sometimes you want to be underwater, and sometimes you want to crawl along the ground, you always want to be invisible. Except for the bits inside, but come on, who is going to see you in your big scary black robe or, in the case of Wonder Woman, with your breasts barely contained in shiny red, blue, and gold, right?

Just because you can make it invisible, doesn’t make ugly go away.*

(From “America’s Greatest Comics” number 1, 1941.)

* This motto coming soon to an After School Special near you!

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I’m going to go out on a limb here and suggest that perhaps wearing a costume that looks like someone’s given you an atomic wedgie of such massive proportions that your underwear actually forms a cape is not the best way to inspire awe in the Enemies of Freedom:

Throw in the way his head seems to be floating, severed, over the obnoxious underwear cape and the always-hated greaves-not-boots footwear and this is not America’s proudest moment. Plus, as frequent reader and gift-from-above-contributor Kate put it when she sent me the image:

“It gives me unsavory mental images of Captain V asking women if they’d like to lick his peppermint stick.”

On that note, have a Happy New Year full of randomness and bad super hero costumes, everyone! And because we’re all about the education here at HeroMachine, allow me to share with you a tip from the book “Atomic Wedgies, Wet Willies, & Other Acts of Roguery” on how to avoid an atomic wedgie. If only this helpful tome had been around in the Forties for Captain V!

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Marvel gets dinged twice on this one, once for the compulsive labeling of Black characters by putting “Black” in their name, and again for indulging their penchant for bad costumes:

Memo to all you aspiring super-heroes out there: Popped collars are not cool. Especially when there’s no cape attached. You can’t totally blame Black Goliath for this, of course, since he was just going by the modest success of Iron Fist and his outfit:

Of course, Iron Fist has other problems to deal with, notably the fact that he’s running around in green Capri pants and slippers, so maybe he just hadn’t noticed yet what was going on with his fake cape collar.

Black Goliath, however, has no excuse for that abdominal cut-out look he’s got going on. Girlfriend, that’s just sad. Even though at his size his six-pack abs are more like kegs, there’s just no way that kind of thing makes sense. How does it stay stuck to his pecs, for one thing? And in what kind of temperature profile is something with that design comfortable? Maybe if you have super-sensitive nips and pits, you’d want something like this, but otherwise I don’t see it.

Sadly, Black Goliath never really took off as a mainstream character, due either to his incredibly redundant power set, his obnoxious name, or (most likely) that costume. At least you’d think the costume was key to his demise, but don’t put anything past old-school Marvel, because like an unwanted zombie guest at your wedding, the outfit rose from the dead at least once:

Of course Nomad was also canceled, so maybe we can credit Marvel’s audience with good fashion sense, even if the Bullpen struck out.

(All characters and images are copyright Marvel Entertainment Group, Inc.)

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