NO CAPES!
—Edna Mode
That would explain why they wear costumes, but not why the costumes are tights rather than, say, cordouroy, or denim, or leather.
A scene from an early episode of *Grey’s Anatomy *(yeah, I actually watched the first couple seasons): one of the characters was a former model, and used her modeling career to pay her way through med school. Shortly after getting the job at the hospital, a new ad campaign came out using her to advertise lingerie, much to her chagrin and consternation. One of the other characters comments, “She looks amazing. If I looked like that, I’d walk around naked all the time. I wouldn’t need a job, I’d just be naked for a living.”
Surely you didn’t forget Ballerina Man from “Mystery Men”?
Yeah, it’s acrobats. But why acrobats, instead of other heroic guises? Because visually it’s all about movement.
All visual depictions of movements are variations of the two basics: superbly controlled efforts of the human form or superbly controlled apparatus anchored by the human form.
For the former, the unadorned body is key. That was realized far more in modern dance than in classical ballet, though. Look at someone like Nijinsky and the costumes that he made famous. It was modern dancers who stripped the costuming away and emphasized the bare form, and that became a major artform by the 1920s, when comic strips started featuring proto-superheroes. Even so, the most avant-garde before recent days couldn’t go to pure nudity. And in fact pure nudity was actually counter-productive, besides being actively illegal. The naked human body has parts that flop in opposition to the ferocious control of the limbs and head that dancers exemplify. Some minimum of restrictive clothing helps, rather than hurts, the illusion.
There’s also an old tradition of making the movement larger through the use of props, especially moving cloth. Annabelle Moore’s butterfly dances were the hit of early cinema, and they were probably copied from Loie Fuller who fastened cloth onto sticks and made the whole, with colored lights playing on her, an integral part of the dance.
Circus acrobats and strong men wore tight-fighting outfits to best have their movements seen from a distance. The rest of the show didn’t, for the same reason. Ironically, modern acrobats look more like superheroes than anybody else.
The early comic book artists had mostly limited skills. They had to suggest movement on a crudely printed page. They took what they knew worked. And drawing a bare body and coloring it in worked better than trying to draw clothing. Compare this very early Flash Gordon comic strip to this later panel. The early Flash wears regular clothes that he seems to haul along like a weight. The later Flash is basically a superhero and moves inside that single panel. He’s also David to a Goliath made huge with the cape. That can be turned around to make the small superhero the giant menacing figure, ala Batman. (The less said about how Alex Raymond stripped away his women the better.)
Like everything else, costumes evolve to best fit their niches. As soon as morals permit, movement costumes get reduced to skintight with optional added flowy things. Acrobats, dancers, muscle men, swimsuit models, and superheroes all have the same needs and so do their costumes. Why be surprised that they converge? It would only be odd if they didn’t.
That’s the very reason that the Incredible Hulk, who started out as grey in his debut issue, turned green. Stan Lee had wanted the Hulk to be grey so as not to suggest any particular ethnic group, but colorist Stan Goldberg had difficulties with the grey coloring, resulting in different shades of grey, and even green in the issue.
If you’ve seen strips showing the Phantom out of his costume, it is clear that the whole thing is a head to toe girdle. The guy is quite chunky!
Watchmen did it (first).
I’ll tell you as soon as I figure out how girl get pragnent.
I don’t know who did it first, but I doubt it was Watchmen. I remember a Teen Titans comic from the 70s where Aqualad stepped on some third-rate villain’s cape, jerking his head back, before punching him out. Not much worse out there than being humiliated by Aqualad.
Aerodynamics. You simply won’t be able to leap tall buildings with your pants on the ground. Not in a single bound, no sir.
At the other end of the spectrum, a disillusioned but still impossibly admirable Captain America (a) briefly called it quits in the wake of the Watergate scandal, but of course (b) couldn’t actually bring himself to stop fighting crime and saving lives even in 1974, and so promptly tried to rebrand himself with a different costume and persona; he promptly tripped over the cape while trying to bust a couple of crooks. “He tripped over his cape! I always knew I’d see someone do that someday!”