Costumes & Characters In The Original X-Men

March 18, 2021

Continuing along with our Marvel Girl theme from our previous posts I’ve found the word to describe the character of Marvel Girl…”Mysterious”.

I mean, she is clearly not a good guy character and is obviously evil with serpent like characteristics.

I’d have to describe the character as mysterious…always changing costumes and living alternate personalities, but Marvel Girl is still a hero character, maybe lost in the Phoenix Force never to return.

In the story there is no way even Professor X could offer Marvel Girl something that she doesn’t have already from the Phoenix Force, even a good character would be consumed by the Phoenix Force never to return…something far out of the control of Charles Xavier.

Just looking at some clips in the first X-Men you can see her as a mysterious character…perhaps just living an alternate life there for a while in the Phoenix Force.

Today people may be losing the context of the Original X-Men and not understand what they are reading, like the outside culture has changed leading to it’s failure by 1970.

The costumes for example, today they may look old and out of date in the original comics but the pictures aren’t really capturing the “essence” of what they are saying in the book.

Like the artwork and paint can’t capture the actual look and feel of their costumes, try and think of them in a Star Trek context…like in the future in Star Trek or in the new Star Trek movies where they are doing back stories of Captain Kirk and the original Enterprise and you get a different feel for the characters.

Imagine the Original X-Men in a new movie like the newer Star Trek films for their back story like Star Trek “Into Darkness” and you can get a different feel for what they are supposed to look like, super futuristic.

You can see the costumes better represented in the real life painted versions by artist Alex Ross although I couldn’t quickly find many of the original Marvel Girl and perhaps they weren’t painted.

These painted pictures are actually painted photographs of live models in the costumes as documented in the Alex Ross material.

So if you’re an artist looking for a job in comic books there is all kinds of work in painting scenes from old Marvel Comics, what they are doing is taking a photograph of a model in the costume and then painting over it…maybe even on a photo overlay of the model itself.

These real life paintings can be used for movie productions to present your scripts, like I would want to see all the Original X-Men modeled in real life paintings in their proper context for a newer movie like Star Trek “Into Darkness” for example which I am a huge fan of – the original Star Trek relaunch.

The Original X-Men costumes are supposed to look like leather outfits like from a new Star Trek movie, of past stories of Captain Kirk that’s how you can represent them the best.

That’s how you can see the look of the Original X-Men the best, and these are some of my favorite paintings of Marvel Superheros.

To get the look of the original villains in the old comics you can some it up in one word – perverts.

They all look like perverts, maybe all the original bad guys were perverts.

You can see it illustrated here in X-Men #2 “The Vanisher”:

Now imagine this as a real life painting, you can already tell what the solider would look like…now look at the Vanisher robbing the bank, in a real life painting the Vanisher looks like a pervert out in broad daylight at the bank.

That is what they are trying to illustrate in the original comics.

These characters and comic books might be more popular if people got the original context they were printed in.

In fact it wasn’t until recently that movies could actually capture the look of the costumes in the illustrated pictures which is one of the problems with understanding the old comic books.

They don’t capture the look properly to today’s artwork, but you can see them properly represented in real life paintings for art prints or movie submissions.

Right now the best model I can think of for the costume design for the Original X-Men would be like I said the Star Trek relaunch.

The good costumes in the movies didn’t really come out into good quality production in my opinion until Spider-Man with Tobey McGuire, the best on screen Spider-Man in my opinion.

That’s where the costumes really took off on the big screen, Tobey McGuire is the best Peter Parker and Spider-Man to me, I mean he could still have a huge career appearing at events doing Spider-Man in the costume, like if he is too old to play Peter Parker now.

Here is an example of Marvel Girl’s vanity in the original comic when she puts on the costume for the first time:

Like you can tell they are not taking this seriously with the first X-Men group and she could just be lying, with her “mysterious” character.

Other failed characters to Charles Xavier at the time include Ice-Man and Beast and you can see them goofing off the whole time as Ice-Man Bobby Drake wears his boots while in costume and dresses up as a snowman, later joining his likewise immature counterpart Peter Parker in Spider-Man And His Amazing Friends after the demise of this X-Men group.

Although some characters and groups failed in the original comics some remained and were successful besides the obvious one like Magneto including The Scarlet Witch, Quicksilver and The Blob.