31st century fashion critic

I'm a LEGION OF SUPER-HEROES fan. I liked the comic when I was a kid. The Legion has been through a ton of changes since they made their first appearance. DC has had more than a few continuity shake-ups. So, the team would get rebooted. Well, it does make it tough to keep continuities straight and sometimes when talking about the Legion you have to specify which Legion you're actually talking about.

So we have yet another incarnation of the Legion which is supposed to be a previous incarnation of the Legion as part of DC going retro which I'm obviously a huge fan of. As you can see by my Top Ten list I'm not terribly thrilled with the costumes of this Legion in carnation. Gary Frank is a great artist, but those costumes are mostly terrible. I look at this image and it doesn't strike me as an iconic superhero team.

Had a chat with Linda about this last night. She's a bigger Legion fan than me and she agrees about the costumes. She dislikes them to the point of calling Ultra Boy a 'doof' because of his costume. Well, of course I had to counter by making fun of Brainiac 5's coat since she made fun of my favorite Legionaire and I needed to counter in a mature manner.

To take things a little further I did some quick sketches of some ideas I would likely use if I was redesigning the costumes.

Lightning Lad is one of the premier Legion characters. Along with Cosmic Boy and Saturn Girl, he founded the team. When I was a kid reading the comic I always thought he was the leader of the group. I wanted to keep is costume pretty straight forward. A bit of old school time tested stuff. Very blatant lightning motif. The areas i shaded a bit would be a dark blue. Gloves and pants would be white. Trim and lightning bolts yellow. This isn't a big departure from many of the classic costumes the character has had. Please notice that he does have sleeves. I kept the haircut conservative. I wanted his look to scream 'traditional super hero'.

Timber Wolf is another poor sole who suffers from 31st Century Sleeveless Syndrome. His previous costumes have ranked from straight super hero to urban fighter. He's also had some tricky costume issues since his color scheme of orange and dark brown were swiped by a Marvel Comics character with a somewhat similar power set, Wolverine. Well, it time he took it back. The shaded areas would be dark brown with the non-shaded being orange. Timber Wolf also used to have very animalistic facial features and a haircut that seemed to resemble wolf's ears. While it did set the character apart from others visually, I didn't see much need for it. I kept it short and spikey figuring the character would want a hair style that's low maintenance and out of his face. Having a set of slightly larger canine teeth to resemble fangs would work nicely too.

Wildfire was another favorite of mine from childhood. His costume is different because it serves a distinctive function. It's a containment suit. The character was human put has been transformed into an energy based being. The suit keeps him from dissipating. I went with a more armored look. Had to keep the trademark face visor on the helmet. The main armored parts of the suit would be red with torso and sleeves being orange. I put his "winged star" emblem on the shoulders of armor. Its a bit of a departure from the classic look but not as much as the see through casing with little armored bits here and there look. I don't need to see his glowing innards. The character may be more comfortable with himself and his glowing innards, but I don't have to see them.

Finally, we have Ultra Doof-AHEM-Ultra Boy. He's the last of the big trio that suffers from 31st Century Sleeveless Syndrome in the current incarnation. It's one think for a Legionaire like Blok to run around shirtless, after all he's a huge giant who looks like a rock. Ultra Boy is one of the heavy hitters, but the nature of his power means he's going to need a bit of protection provided by his costume. So I went with a jacket, gloves and a larger belt, like a weight belt. The thing with Ultra Boy is that he can only use one power at a time. If he's using his super strength then he's not invulnerable. The boots are kinda funky, but its a throwback to his original costuming. His color scheme has always been a bit much with black, red, brown, and green; but simplifying it wouldn't really help anything and only make him less identifiable. Boots, belt and gloves would be brown. Under-shirt and jacket trim would be red. Shaded area is black. The rest is green.

I thought about doing a Karate Kid sketch, but the current version is having a slight case of being dead.