Monday, February 25, 2013

Spider-Suit

One of the things that's always irked me about the Spider-Man films is the oddly-designed and proportioned costumes. Here's an overview of Spider-Man's look from the comics over the years:


Spider-Man's physical proportions vary somewhat, but generally it's agreed that he's quite a bit thinner than most other superheroes, relying more on speed and spider-like technique than strength. The alt-universe reboot series Ultimate Spider-Man, which put the character back in high school, did this to the extreme.


Ultimate Spidey is short, skinny, and incredibly agile-looking, with huge round white eyes. This is easily my favorite version of Spider-Man. It's goofy, but it completely fits the teenage story that Ultimate told.


The 2002 Sam Raimi-directed movie version is both incredible and disappointing. On one hand, it's a gloriously-accurate version of the classic comics' suit, with nice features like raised textured webbing. On the other hand, that version of Spider-Man is mostly normally-proportioned; there's nothing about his body that screams "Spider-Man." The eyes are a little small, too, only adding to the feeling that this Spider-Man isn't necessarily all that specific to the character. Fortunately, they put him in a ton of super-iconic Spider-Man poses, somewhat offsetting the problems.









Overall, the movie suit just isn't spider-like enough. That's one thing that the reboot film, The Amazing Spider-Man, mostly fixed.




There, finally, we have a skinny, teenage-looking Spider-Man, complete with web shooters. There's other problems with this suit, however. This image of a collectors' figure based on the ASM suit illustrates it rather well.


The suit is predominantly blue, and the blue shines very, very bright. This is a big no-no for Spider-Man design; the red is always supposed to stand out against the darker blue or black. Furthermore, the ASM suit has blue creeping into normally-red areas, like the "belt" and the suit's fingers. What's almost worse is that the eyes are dark yellow. Why are they dark yellow? It makes little-to-no sense.

If one could combine the Raimi and ASM costumes (and perhaps make the eyes a little bigger?) the perfect Spider-Man costume would likely emerge. And, by happenstance, that's exactly what The Amazing Spider-Man 2 is doing with its new-and-improved costume.


OH YES.

Finally, twelve-year-old Aaron's dreams of seeing the perfect Spider-Man costume on-screen are being realized. Twenty-three-year-old Aaron is pleased.

1 comment:

  1. I never could get into Spiderman for some reason but I like your analysis of the costume. He does make the most sense as the skinny teen version. For me though the Avengers, Iron Man and Batman movies have set the superhero bar so high I almost can't stand to watch anything else now.

    ReplyDelete