Heros In Flight - Costume Delight

Ok, CQ folks. Today we have come to fulfill your ultimate nerd fantasy. Walk to your closet. No – actually run, because this event will be blow you away – literally.

Go get your costume. Don’t argue with us, we KNOW you have one. Come on down to New Paltz and unite with other Superfriends as you soar above the universe.

For more about this amazing event which our friends at FunList put together, read on…
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For anyone who’s ever wished they could fly, we’re offering the next best thing – the chance to free-fall while wearing a Superhero costume.

On Saturday, Oct. 24th, join us for a day of pant-soiling & skydiving near New Paltz, NY. Everyone is encouraged to bring a costume and prizes will be awarded to the best dressed. People dressed as themselves will be rewarded with non-stop ridicule.

Afterwards, we’ll take our renewed appreciation for life to the town of New Paltz for a few drinks. FunList will provide everything you need for this trip, including transportation from NYC and new underwear.

Included

• Transportation
• Skydive (training, gear, instructor, etc)
• New Underwear

Not Included

• Your Creative Costume

Departure/Return Info
Our group of about a dozen will depart from 37th/10th, in Manhattan, at 10am. We’ll be traveling about an hour and a half north, via our 15 passenger FunList van.

After our afternoon of skydiving and evening in the quaint town of New Paltz we’ll head back to NYC, arriving around 9pm. Upon our return, we’ll drop you off anywhere in Manhattan.

RSVP Info
This event is made available to you by Elizabeth Kressel, founder and CEO of Collectors’ Quest.

To RSVP, simply Register on FunList and click on the RSVP button for the Superhero Skydive event.

We’ve explored ten full years in the history of Batman as he appeared in his tiny, pixelated, fightin’ form, between 1986 until 1996. Batman has probably appeared in more video games than you’ve realized, so check ‘em out here.

By 1996, the Super Nintendo was the gaming system of choice in North America, having been around for five full years and gaining a well-deserved stranglehold on the hearts and souls of our nation’s youth. My nostalgia for the 8-bit is only matched by my love of the variety that 16 bits brought us. Faster response times, more complex controls, larger images, sexy graphics, rotating polygons, and games that spanned gigantic worlds – all things that added amazing things to gaming.

I’d be remiss to not note Batman’s appearance in Justice League : Task Force on the SNES, a relatively simple Street Fighter-like game in which you could choose one of a few core Justice League heroes to battle your way to Darkseid. This was in 1995, and Batman’s third appearance on the SNES. It was certainly LIKE Street Fighter, but it was no Street Fighter.

In 1996, the world suffered through Batman Forever, as well as the games that came with it, versions of which appeared on the Super Nintendo, the Sega Mega Drive, Game Boy, Game Gear, and even the PC. This is yet another game that focused on punching things into submission and some unbearably awkward controls on certain systems, but at least the option to play through as Robin was an option, or to play with two players at once – a gaming rarity that always invited more social gaming aspects, or chucking the controller at your friend’s head, knocking out a tooth and your parents making you hug. Ultimately, this was the beginning of the darkest phase of the Batman series video games, and the last time Batman would appear on the SNES. A similarly titled arcade game was released both in arcades and for the PlayStation and the PC.

In 1997, the movie-centric Batman & Robin was released for the PlayStation, exclusively. While it’s the first game where you can actually wander around Gotham completing missions instead of being pushed through sequential screen after screen, it’s also commonly regarded as a completely miserable game to play. Perhaps the stigma of the movies just weighed too heavily on it for the game to be properly enjoyable, but it’s an easy game to skip. As the Batman franchise recovered, there were no more games for three years. Yes, the game sucked so hard that it actually created a vacuum.

During this time, DC attempted to reboot the concept of Batman after it was so brutally beaten into idiocy with the premiere of Batman Beyond, an animated show on Saturday morning TV. 2000 saw the release of Batman Beyond : Return of the Joker (no relation to the previous ‘Return of the Joker’ game), again based on a movie. There was a simultaneous release for Nintendo 64, PlayStation and Game Boy Color, and took a step back into side-scrolling, face-punching action with some minimal third-dimension action.

For the next five years, it seems like we were hit with a rapid succession of completely forgettable Batman games, each one more desperately trying to capitalize on Batman and the idea that a more realistic, immersive gaming experience would create a better game.

I had a Game Boy Color, only because I happened to acquire every Game Boy that ever existed for one reason or another, but the system seems to be a forgotten, between-systems attempt by Nintendo at coming close to what the Game Gear offered years before. Batman : Chaos in Gotham came out in 2001, but remains forgettable. Batman also got a racing game with Gotham City Racer in 2001 for the PlayStation, though putting Batman in a racing game is the equivalent of putting him on your underoos. He’s equally relevant in either place.

I should also mention that none of these games, just like the first batch, have any notable value and can usually be snagged for under ten bucks, so it’s an easy collection to assemble. If you want to make it more challenging, aim for video games that still include their original packaging and manuals (which are usually more expensive), or if you want to shoot for the holy grails of gaming, sealed boxes. They’re out there, but not particularly on my radar as I try to amass the rest of my NES collection.

Batman : Vengeance (2001), Dark Tomorrow (2003), and Rise of Sin Tzu (2004) and Batman Begins (2005) all appeared on the ‘next gen’ systems, some scoring less than one point out of ten, though Batman Begins was praised for having amazing graphics – albeit a poor story and crippled AI.

Perhaps it’s the inherent awesomeness of Lego, but 2008′s Lego Batman was generally well received, and the last Batman-centric game to be released before Arkham Asylum comes out in a week. Batman as a Lego guy followed up on games like Lego Star Wars and Lego Indiana Jones. Can Lego American Graffiti be far behind? Lego Harry Potter and Lego Rock Band have been confirmed, and I sincerely hope that the Rock Band iteration doesn’t involve jamming the word ‘Lego’ into classic rock songs to make it relatable. ‘Black Lego Sun’ and ‘Psycho Lego’ are things I don’t need.

Batman made an appearance, although an incredibly strange one, in the fighting game Mortal Kombat Vs. DC Universe. It’s like that unexpected moment when you find out that pretzels and chocolate, two things that are great in their own right, actually taste pretty great together – owing largely to the animation, great graphics and solid fight engine that’s built into the game. He was also a core playable character in Justice League Heroes (2006), a kind of fighting quest game that traversed a variety of terrain as you managed your heroes through battle, sometimes directly, and sometimes indirectly… and which I gave up on after I was continually killed by thugs for no apparent reason.

So, that’s the history of Batman as a video game character. It’s not all bad news, but I’ve always taken any Batman game as a significant investment risk, inasmuch as the fun I’d get in return for my money was potentially minimal. They’re not worth picking up at a tag sale unless you’re really into Batman, because it’s doubtful you’d ever get a solid return on eBay, but it’s Batman. And that, as you know, if good enough for me.

Over the past decade or so, the world of comics has been grudgingly granted some measures of legitimacy, as it fights hard to move beyond the common misconception that it’s all ‘muscles and fights’ and guys punching things and girls with ridiculous proportions and non-costumes (obviously drawn as such to attract the arrested arousal of adolescents and other men trapped on a adolescent state). The whole ‘comics are for kids and losers’ stigma is fading, so I’m a fan of anything that takes comic fantasy seriously as a significant cultural phenomenon. Even if you’re not a fan of comics, you can’t deny the impact they’ve had.

So, when an institution as important as The Met says ‘hey, we’ve got superheroes!’, I listen. Using an array of well-known, super-heroic costumes as inspiration, a small gathering of ultra-famous designers and design studios were summoned to create their own versions of the costumes. The characters represented included Batman, Iron Man, Superman, The Incredible Hulk, The Flash, Wonder Woman, Spider-Man, Mystique (and her mutant ilk), and Catwoman – movie versions all. Photography was not allowed, so please click around to see links to photos and videos elsewhere on the web, snapped by braver souls than I.

It was a little disappointing that the paper heart of comic culture was not tapped more heavily, and only the superficial movie costume designs were utilized. If the idea was to access the most popular aspects of the characters, the movie versions of them would be it – even if the ‘movie versions’ of all superhero costumes are much more practical and realistic than their truly fantastic comic counterparts. I can’t help but think that exploring the true depths of comic imagery would have yielded some even more wild and/or sexy results. Of course, the designers made it very apparent that the physical appearance of the costume was pretty much irrelevant – it was what the costume represents that they were exploring.

These weren’t redesigned superhero costumes at all, so don’t let the title of the show fool you into some false sense of familiarity. No one’s fighting anything in these, except for a possibly to-the-death battle with dignity. These ‘costumes’ were all super-manifestations of the essences of superpowers – from abstract, angular sports designs for the speed and aerodynamism of The Flash, to a simple, tremendously ugly brick-pattern-slash-football-outfit to symbolize the strength and endurance of the Hulk.

Being completely ignorant of the fashion world, I wasn’t exceptionally thrilled (or even conscious) of the fancy designer names, nor seeing original designs in the flesh. What I WAS excited about was seeing each original movie costume that the absurd ‘designer’ costumes were inspired by. These included Christopher Reeves’ screen-worn Superman costume (accompanied by an excellent hologram that switched it back and forth between his Clark Kent, civilian attire), the Iron Man Mark II armor, and the surprisingly tiny Michelle Pfeiffer Catwoman costume. Lynda Carter’s Wonder Woman costume remains in one piece, though it bears the fading and loose threads of a costume ten times its age. The Batman costume of choice wasn’t a classic Adam West getup, or the acceptable Michael Keaton gear, or even the tragically-nippled Schumacher versions, but the Batman outfit from the upcoming Dark Knight film. The Met was so topical that it was showcasing costumes that no one had even seen yet.

If they really wanted to see something, The Met would have tossed out some classic villain costumes to reinterpret. Those guys are crazy, and they don’t care if their helmets have 9-foot tall fins on them, or that purple really doesn’t go with green. While heroes are about unity and coordination, the bad guys survive on discord and discomfort – which are two things that would be really fun to see in a ‘fashion’ sense. As it was, making a spider-webby dress to express Spider-Man is a disappointingly obvious decision, and green, inflatable Hulk muscle vests were a clever juxtaposition of form and function – even if they had zero aesthetic appeal.

It wasn’t unexpected that most of the the fashions were fairly pretentious (using one’s own initials instead of Superman’s trademark ‘S’), and had very little to do with superheroes. Every ‘fashion’ expressed very human qualities – things that heroes happen to occasionally represent when they’re not punching things. Sure, the show addressed the complexity of fictional heroism, but it could have very easily excluded the idea of heroes entirely and focused on the spectrum of human emotions. It might have made it feel a lot more coherent, but also far less appealing to a population that’s ready to embrace superheroes. And I wouldn’t have been able to see Rebecca Romijn‘s mutant appliqués in person.

As a small bonus at the end of the show for real hardcore geeks, The Met assembled a collection of the most valuable comics in all of geekdom. We’re talkin’ Action Comics #1 with the first appearance of Superman, the first appearance of Iron Man in Tales of Suspense #39, and some astonishingly early Batman appearances, all in one place and under plexiglass. For people to tap on, apparently. Why one would tap on the glass in front of an inanimate object as if it were a sleepy kitten, I’m not entirely sure, but it was done. For the record, none of the comics seemed to notice.

The gift shop included some alarmingly (but appropriately) gaudy, $30 t-shirts, a super-glossy show catalogue paperback for $30, or a handsome tin-covered version for $50, among other more common items. The cost prevented me from partaking in the acquisition of new superhero items, as much as I like to extend my tangential superhero book collection.

The show is worth seeing, if only for the original super-costumes. While I came away with a new understanding of exactly what ‘fashion’ is and stands to represent, I’ll leave it to the experts, while I ponder how Wolverine gets his face-pointies to stand so straight. I’m willing to bet that it’s simple cardboard inserts. The show will be open through September 1st, 2008.

Say what you will about Warren Ellis and Frank Miller and Alan Moore redefining the genre of superhero storytelling with their expert and unusual scripts and characterizations, but I’m still a huge fan of an awkwardly written, completely illogical criminal caper. Capers involving time-travel gases and mind-control fluids, uncharacteristic feats of agility and intellect, and rocket boots. Everything is made fifty times crazier with rocket boots. I wish I had rocket boots.

The only thing better than reading these tales on yellowed, old pulp is hearing them. Hearkening back to the pre-television days of radio serials and imagination, I’ve found myself collecting superhero related records, beginning with a dusty old tag sale find of a Batman LP containing four tales. How can you resist ANYTHING that says ‘If Music Be the Food of Death’ and a picture of The Riddler on it? You’d have to be dead inside. I had to know—WAS music being the food of death? And what’s with the grammar on that? Contained therein were a classic set of sound effects, exhortations and stilted voice acting the likes of which I’d never heard. And it was all about Batman.

When I had a radio show in my college days, I made sure to get the turntables in the studio operational so that I could share the wonders of ‘The Scarecrow’s Mirages’ over the airwaves. I didn’t expect the listeners to dissolve into a sea of nostalgia as much as I expected them to giggle at Bruce Wayne’s incessant referral to his boy sidekick Robin as ‘Dick’. It makes for some suggestive and awkward sentences, not at all helped by some of the pre-existing assumptions about the relationship between the Dark Knight and the Boy Wonder.

The thrill of this record became the need to discover more. As far as I know, your friendly turntable is the only place you’ll be able to hear such wondrous tales as ‘Gorilla City’ and ‘Robin Meets Man-Bat,’ as there’s been no concerted effort to make official transfers of these recordings, which mainly focus on DC Comics’ holy trinity of Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman. Marvel comics also got in on the action, releasing recorded stories of Spider-Man and the Hulk, among others.

The classic of all of these records, though, is the Justice League of America album. The second you start hearing the shrill, nasally declarations Hyrdo the Dehydrator from the planet Exadoom, you know that you’ve found something very special. Something that will either reinforce your love of comic mythology or destroy your already tenuous connection with it. Among the collection of stories on the album are songs written for a variety of characters by the late Arthur Korb, a man who had also written music performed by greats such as Louis Armstrong. What’s he doing writing songs about Metamorpho and Plastic Man? Blowing my mind is what. Just try and describe The Flash to me using the phrase ‘The Wizard of Whizzle, yes indeed!’ and not steal my heart. I’ll be all yours.

Collecting superhero records has also expanded into collecting records that are even remotely tangentially related to the comics, such as the disco-fied ‘Wonder Woman’ by the Wonderland Band, with such classics as ‘Thrill Me (With Your Super Love)’ and complete with a cover depicting a woman wearing a costume that looks nothing like Wonder Woman’s favored attire or weaponry.

The most recent addition to my collection is ‘The Batman Theme Played by The Marketts.’ Now, there are a lot of records out there that feature the ’60s Batman theme song as interpreted by any number of bands, but this one is a boisterous, surf-rock exploration into many themes present in the Bat-iverse, like the Bat Cave, The Joker (which sounds rather a lot like ‘Wipe Out’) and even the Bat Signal, all interpreted musically. It’s kind of like watching an interpretive dance rendition of The Godfather.

To the benefit of the super-LP collector, most of these albums can still be found for under ten dollars, the rare exception being a set of four Batman 45s with shaped sleeves released in 1966, each of which include two Batman-related songs. Beyond that, it’s not easy to ascertain a complete list of superhero vinyl, as many different records containing similar stories spanned more than one record label.

Regardless, if you have an operational turntable, there’s nothing like sending one of these for a spin. Grant Morrison ain’t got nothin’ on this.