DonBoy

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Monday, March 10, 2008

Secret Skin

If you wanted to read Michael Chabon on superhero costumes, in the New Yorker, it would be here.

This sad outcome even in the wake of thousands of dollars spent and months of hard work given to sewing and to packing foam rubber into helmets has an obvious, an unavoidable, explanation: a superhero’s costume is constructed not of fabric, foam rubber, or adamantium but of halftone dots, Pantone color values, inked containment lines, and all the cartoonist’s sleight of hand. The superhero costume as drawn disdains the customary relationship in the fashion world between sketch and garment. It makes no suggestions. It has no agenda. Above all, it is not waiting to find fulfillment as cloth draped on a body. A constructed superhero costume is a replica with no original, a model built on a scale of x:1.

(And I think I know the book of Jewish morality exercises Chabon refers to early on; it also had something about point shaving, which was pretty well-known to the New York Jewish intelligentsia of the 1950s and 1960s.)
- posted by Don Porges @ 3/10/2008 06:08:00 PM

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