Wednesday, October 04, 2006

Halloween and Superheroes


First off, if you too hate Civil War you HAVE to read this! I stole it from Jim who stole it from Shawn :)

"Is it morally wrong to clone a God and put Hitler's brain inside of him? And then let him loose to kill? That's a tough moral quandary, isn't it? I mean if you're RETARDED or whatever."

On to my post!

So, I tend to spend a lot of time with Halloween stuff while, you know, running a frelling seasonal Halloween store out of (apparently) the goodness of my heart. Many of the items we get are the same year after year, but luckily the costumes seem to be getting cooler - mostly. I'm going to share a few pros and cons of the Superhero Halloween costume.

Growing up in a comic book store, despite being female, I really wanted to be a Superhero for Halloween. Of course back when I was a kid there were almost NO superhero costumes around for the season, and if there were, they were boys costumes. In fact one year I had a Batman costume. Because it'd be a cold day in hell when I could get a Batgirl costume (not that I'd have been able to fill one out back then *cough*).

The first time I worked for Spirit Halloween (about 3 years ago) this was still the sad state of things. The ONLY women's superhero costume was Wonder Woman, and well, lets just say I'm not a 6 ft Amazon hottie - and I don't want to walk around at some party with my ass hanging out. Instead I went a Lara Croft and convinced my boyfriend to be Indiana Jones (because I actually wanted to go as Indy, but Lara was the same sex as me).

Last year I went back to Spirit and happily found the superhero situation much improved - the guys had all sorts of options, not only Bats and Supes but Wolverine, Hulk, Thing, ect. Us girls had Batgirl! Yay! Of course the costume wasn't exactly Babs, but it was a cute costume that got the point across without being a Legs Avenue costume. Unfortunately the wrist glove things were way too small and the belt was teen sized (literally, they had a teen sized version of the costume and all the adult sizes had that belt). So that year I went as Robin Hood. Yet another Halloween dress as a male hero, because dammit, that's what you can fins the costumes for. Well that and the fact that I'd honestly rather dress up in some of the guys costumes anyway. Every year it seems as if the girls costumes have less and less to them and I'm not a naked kinda person.

This year is much better - the Batgirl costume fits right (I think I'll actually get to be Batgirl this year - although I found myself an actual Batman utility belt for the costume), the Wonder Woman costume is cute while still paying homage to the actual character - ignore the cape - and Supergirl's costume is straight out of the comics. Also, a few of the stores have Susan Storm costumes :) There's still a ways to go, but at least there's improvement. They even have little girls superhero costumes (the WW one reminds me of Wonder Tot), which makes me very happy. If only they had been around when I was a kid!

4 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

The Invisible girl costume, is that for when you tell your friends you were at the party, but they couldn't see you?

The Supergirl costume is almost exactly like the current version - cool!

Thursday, October 05, 2006  
Blogger Gwen said...

well, yes, I suppose that could work too....

Yes, I think it's awesome how close they got the Supergirl costume to the comic book version :)

Thursday, October 05, 2006  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

I was at a Halloween store (in California, sorry) last week and noticed that a lot of superhero costumes came in at least two versions. There were two Supergirls, for instance, and two Wonder Woman costumes. The other Wonder Woman costume was a little closer to the comic version.

The men's costumes mostly varied on whether they included fake muscles or not.

Saturday, October 07, 2006  
Blogger Gwen said...

Yeah, but some of those are last year's costumes

Saturday, October 07, 2006  

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