Superheroes are more popular than ever, and especially the Marvel side of the comic book spectrum is seeing incredible heights in popularity. No matter how many movies they bring out, they always seem to bring in a few hundred million easily. And the upcoming movies seem like they’re going back to the glory of the earlier movies, so the hype level is rising again.
But not everything that Marvel did has turned into gold. With the movies switching to a more comic-accurate look for many of their superheroes and villains, this seems like the perfect time to look at those times when the comic book outfit wasn’t all that good.
Cable
Despite how good he looked in Deadpool – and it is a somewhat comic book-accurate look for him – the biggest thing you need to remember is that the good sir Rob Liefeld once touched Cable. The result was a suit with nothing more but insanely big shoulder pads and a dozen or so pouches. Not even a shirt underneath or anything. Just shoulder pads and pouches.
Emma Frost
Despite Emma Frost only being a telepath and not a telekinetic, she somehow does manage to keep that outfit up. Just look at it. There’s nothing holding any of that outfit up. I get that her character is all about being seductive but this is just plain bad design and clearly made up by someone who never had breasts in his life.
Armored Spider-Man
One day Peter Parker got attacked by goons with machine guns and figured he needed a bulletproof suit because the good ol’ Spidey Sense and superhuman reflexes weren’t doing it anymore for some reason. Enter the ugliest Spider-Man suit known to man, and boy he’s had a lot of suits over the years. It looks like it’d seriously slow you down and it has almost nothing to do with Spidey’s iconic red-and-blue look. It’s just horrible and it’s no wonder it was destroyed in not even a handful of issues.
Tigra
I mean, you can hardly even call this an outfit, right? She’s just wearing a string bikini. Lore says she does so because actual clothing would cause her body to overheat with all that fur, but I think we all know why they really did this.
Hawkeye
There are very few classic Hawkeye outfits that don’t look horrible. First of all, purple and blue really aren’t colors you want to be matching so vigorously. Secondly, what is that design? How is that ever going to be useful when doing archery? This is another one of those form-over-function outfits and boy Hawkeye has at least a dozen variants of this horrible suit.
Captain Ultra
Speaking of form over fiction, I don’t even know what this is supposed to be. So many shapes, so many colors, and no real theme or design in it. It’s just a mix of every cliché superhero costume of the last 50 years painted by someone who’s either colorblind or blindfolded. If you want to know how bad this suit really is: no pictures of people cosplaying as Captain Ultra exist. Not a single person looked at this and thought “I want this”. No one.
