Friday, October 29, 2010

In your satin tights

Michael Chabon on comic-book fanboys and the impossibility of getting the costumes just right:
This sad outcome even in the wake of thousands of dollars spent and months of hard work given to sewing and to packing foam rubber into helmets has an obvious, an unavoidable, explanation: a superhero’s costume is constructed not of fabric, foam rubber, or adamantium but of halftone dots, Pantone color values, inked containment lines, and all the cartoonist’s sleight of hand. The superhero costume as drawn disdains the customary relationship in the fashion world between sketch and garment. It makes no suggestions. It has no agenda. Above all, it is not waiting to find fulfillment as cloth draped on a body. A constructed superhero costume is a replica with no original, a model built on a scale of x:1.
I reckon The Simulacrum would be a fabulous name for a comic-strip villain.

4 comments:

Robert Swipe said...

"The superhero costume as drawn disdains the customary relationship in the fashion world between sketch and garment."

It's still fun wearing the tights though, isn't it?

xxx
Bob

Dave said...

A long black cassock (my superhero costume) hides a lot of imperfections.

expat@large said...

I don't know, sometimes they work out OK...

http://joannecasey.blogspot.com/2010/10/dog-tron-costume.html

Tim F said...

Certainly helps out the old varicose veins, Bob.

Well you wouldn’t want to expose your shortcomings, would you, Dave?

Or indeed http://www.facebook.com/#!/photo.php?fbid=1064411701881&set=t.741270270, e@l