Give heroes back their capes.
As much as I love Pixar/Disney's The Incredibles, there is one joke that I really wish they hadn't made. In the movie, the costume designer-character Edna Mode goes on an extended montage about the out of date, the impractical, and the downright passe tradition of superheroes having … capes. For some reason, this joke is taken way too seriously by comics fans, as if any hero wearing a cape can now be immediately dismissed out of hand. I'm sure these same people were laughing at the scene from The Incredibles and saying to themselves, "Yeah, that's right! That is SO impractical! What were we thinking?!"
And I'm sure a lot of this stems from the increasingly modern notion that superhero costumes must be as "real" as possible. Even though we comics fans still accept many "unrealistic" tropes that still show up, such as wildly fantastic displays of power, mythological gods that walk among us, and the ability of a simple pair of eyeglasses to suddenly transform someone's appearance.
The bottom line-- comics are a visual medium, and capes are a visual metaphor. You really do need them. A cape immediately marks a hero as majestic and larger-than-life, or even as mysterious and other-worldly. You can do this simply by standing dramatically at the top of a building-- the visual metaphor does the rest. Standing dramatically at the top of a building in just a Kevlar-padded jumpsuit? That just makes you look like you misplaced your dirt bike.
Capes provide an additional visual shorthand for movement. Since comics are static pictures, we need capes to provide the secondary animation to a figure's pose. Of course capes won't work the same in live-action films-- the physics are completely different.
I end the post with a montage of the Vision-- whose signature cape was always a dramatic visual metaphor and also used to lend an animated flow to even his static poses. Surely an example of why capes are cool--
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