The Weekend Review: The Problem with Daredevil's Costume

In which I review a selection of last weekend's entertainment.

Normally, this article series is dedicated to reviews of things that I saw over the weekend.  The problem is that I really didn't see anything over the weekend that really qualified.  I rewatched a few things that I already weighed in on, watched one movie intended for another article and revisited a few episodes of Dragonball Z.  I had intended to review Daredevil, but my packed schedule kept me from seeing it all in time.

So I thought this once that I could weigh in on something here that's been tugging at the back of my mind since Marvel released their first image of Daredevil's iconic costume.  Coming off of traditional renderings of already awesome costumes (Iron Man) to dramatic reimaginings of substandard ones (Yellowjacket), the general consensus was that Marvel's perfect costuming streak had ended.

Though I had to agree with the assessment, I couldn't help but feel that the odds were stacked against this particular costume from the start.  And no, I'm not talking about the irony of a blind man designing a crime-fighting costume for himself.

But where did the costume go wrong?  While I think that most people will agree that the new costume is underwhelming compared to the traditional one, what's really all that different about it?  It has the same stunted horns, the same crimson coloring and the same visual style.

Sure, the mouth opening is wider on the physical costume.  The red is darkened and mixed with some black swatches.  The texture is overhauled with overlapping Kevlar panels.  It's still essentially the same costume.  Outside of a new ornamental modifications, nothing's really been changed.

There is an argument to be made that Ben Affleck's costume in the movie was a better version of the costume, but think back on that.  Was it really all that good to begin with?  The color's a bit closer to the comics and it lacks the series' tactical reimagining, but it still looks awfully silly in the flesh.

When staring at the new face of Daredevil, I realized the key reason why the costume wasn't up to snuff: the only real difference that can account for the difference between badass and visual pushover.  One is from a comic and the other is from a TV series.

Seriously, that's it.  There's nothing inherently wrong with the new costume.  There's nothing that they messed up on.  There's nothing that you can ultimately blame the makers of the show for doing to the costume.  It's problem is that it was physically made.

Whether we want to admit it or not, what visually works in a comic book doesn't always translate to the big (or small) screen.  A live-action costume needs to be made of actual cloth and fit on an actual person.  It can't be made of some non-descript red fabric that fits the character perfectly in all that places that count, allows them a full range of unhindered motion and still makes him look like a total badass on every page.

The visual concerns of a comic are vastly different from a TV series.  Comics used bright, heavily saturated colors for the combined purpose of drawing in young readers and making each character as visually distinct as possible.  Certain colors popped off the page so perfectly that they were constantly recycled (consider Beast's, Mystique's and Nightcrawler's blue coloring) or were used no matter how idiotic it would look in real life (Wolverine's traditional yellow costume).

There's a reason why we haven't seen Hugh Jackman in yellow spandex yet.  There is no possible way that Fox could make that look good.  The closest that we actually got to seeing him in costume is the black getups from from the first movie and Days of Future Past.  That's because black is easy to make look good in camera.

For as awesome as he looks in the comics, base-yellow costumes are hideous to look at in real life.  They're too bright, too garish and far, far too silly.  It's the exact same reason why Yellowjacket had his color scheme inverted for the upcoming Ant-Man.  Black works, while yellow doesn't.

This is why Batman visually translates to movies and TV series so well.  Bat-nipples aside, there really hasn't been a bad Batman costume, because base-black (or gray) combined with a somewhat-tactically grounded sensibility is perfect for the televisual medium.

Some costumes are just doomed from the start, barring dramatic reimagining.  But that option, too, carries with it a lot of risk.  People are tuning in to see Daredevil, not some blind guy with a baton.  If you change the costume too much, especially for your protagonist, there will be a backlash.  Daredevil has too much to live down with its infamously bad live-action movie to risk maligning fans any more than it has to.  In this sense, a poorly visualized costume is far more preferable than an unrecognizably altered one.

Wolverine gets away with it because the X-Men franchise is first and foremost  about a team, not any one individual.  Sure, you don't get your iconic Wolverine, but Cyclops still gets his iconic visor, Magneto still gets to look like M. Bison and Mystique is still iconically blue whenever she can afford to be.  If you do enough things right by the characters, you can allow a few details to slip by.

Likewise, Yellowjacket gets away with it because he's not the hero.  Less people are familiar with him than Ant-Man and even less people are all that invested in him in the first place.  His secondary status as the villain allows him more leeway with switching up his costume, especially when Marvel absolutely nailed its protagonist's iconic look.

Daredevil's costume was doomed to fail from the start.  Either you piss everybody off because you messed with his costume too much, or your disappoint them because of how underwhelming it looks in real life.  Some costumes can't maintain fidelity to their source material and look good doing it.  Iron Fist faces a similar problem when his series hits Netflix later this year.

So what other superheroes' costumes do you think will be difficult to realize on the big / small screen?  Share your thoughts in the comment section below.

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