I think Jim’s blog, Invisible Costume, pretty adequately illustrates how bad costume designs were in the 90s. One thing it doesn’t account for though is that the Fantastic Four had rapidly declining sales in the EXTREME decade. The costume redesign was the last ditch effort to make aging and irrelevant characters appeal to a new generation (In a desperate attempt to relate to Gen-Xers, the tag line of Fantastic Four #375 even reads “This is not your parents’ comic magazine,” pictured below in Jim’s Blog). Though the Invisible Woman should have used her powers to hide her horrible she-mullet and Vampirella hoochie outfit, nobody was reading Fantastic Four at the time to actually remember this fashion don’t, and therefore this can’t make her costume the worst of all time. Wolverine, on the other hand, was arguably the most popular character of the 90s, and by 1996 he looked like he would have to ride the short-bus to the Xavier Institute.
After Magneto ripped Wolverine’s adamantium out and nearly depleted him of his entire healing factor in X-Men #25, he returned to the team as a feral animal. This feral Wolverine period features the worst costume redesign in comic history. What was Marvel on? It should be fairly obvious that taking your most popular character and making him a drooling, fang-ridden idiot, that has random patches of fur coming out of his forearms and can barely formulate coherent sentences, is a bad idea for sales. No wonder the company went bankrupt shortly thereafter this fiasco.

To pour salt in the wound, Marvel had to add the ultimate 90s costume no-no to feral Wolverine: the superhero bandana. If his guttural rants and fur patches weren’t enough, now comic readers had to accepted that every time Wolvie was stealing Cyclops motorcycle he was wrapping a bandana around his untamed hair and probably rocking out to Limp Bizkit. Was Wolverine doing it all for the nookie? I know he didn’t want Jean Grey to marry Cyke, but come on. Maybe he should just try shaving and getting a pedicure.

Finally, there was my most hated Wolverine plot element every: the damn bone claws. Normally, you can add claws to any character and young boys will think they’re cool, but wolverine’s bone claws are sinfully bad. The claws didn’t even look cool. Wolverine just looked like he had a severe lack of calcium with those brittle dry-bones. So ultimately Wolverine’s mid-90s look translates to Marvel trying to appeal to the malnourished, unkempt, mutant freak demographic. Thanks for perpetuating the stereotype…

My runner up for worst custom ever would have to be the Superman Red & Blue costumes. Fleet has adamantly disputed this with me, but I have to disagree. At the time Superman was suffering the same fate of the Fantastic Four, and DC struggled to make him relatable to the modern comic reader. The result was a costume that looked instantly dated the moment it debuted. I remember when this happened in 1998, Norm MacDonald joked on SNL’s Weekend Update:

Beginning in March, D.C. Comics will change Superman’s traditional red and blue costume to a new form-fitting bodysuit. The problem with the old costume? Not gay enough.

What the hell’s going on in the country? That’s not Superman!

I think the real evidence of how bad of a costume this was is right on the front cover of Superman RED BLUE #1. Where it should say who the writers and artist are for the issue, it just states, “From the writers and artist of Superman.” Apparently, everyone at DC knew this was such a bad idea they were too embraced to even put their names on the cover.

So, who would win in a fight, feral, brain-dead Wolverine or ultra-gay, electro Superman?

-Jon

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