Asking the Tough Questions About Superheroes and Public Nudity

[james_davis_nicoll]

Asking the Tough Questions About Superheroes and Public Nudity

Comments

[petrea_mitchell]

IIRC, the canon explanation for why Superman's clothing survives everything that happens to him is that Mrs. Kent made his outfit from some super-strong Kryptonian fabrics that made the trip with him. (How human-made sewing tools were able to cut and join the fabrics to fit him is not examined.)

[jbwoodford]

She used this glowing green needle that had come with the fabric.

[(Anonymous)]

Sewing doesn't require damaging the fabric, as it's purely a topological operation; I seem to recall reading an origin story (just how many origins has that poor man had by now, anyway?) where Ma Kent worked a few threads loose to sew with. Not that this helps with how she cut to measure.

[metahacker]

Supergirl the TV show takes this way further, with Kryptonian cape-fu as a martial art...

[theresawright]

In modern versions the materials are synthetics, so Ma Kent had young Clark use his heat vision to cut and weld the fabrics. In older versions they were textiles, so she unravelled a bit of thread from one piece of fabric and used that.

[(Anonymous)]

Mystique shows up in "X Men: First Class" as a 10 year old - and also pretty clearly naked.

[kgbooklog]

Some shapeshifters have whatever they're wearing (and sometimes even items carried) go Somewhere Else until they shift back. The webcomic Sleepless Domain also does this for magical girls.

[scott_sanford]

As you know Bob, Jennifer Walters, the Sensational She-Hulk, wears indestructable unmentionables protected by - or perhaps woven from - Comics Code Authority stickers.

(Full context here, an encounter with Stilt-Man.)

[(Anonymous)]

Well. *Cracks knuckles* I have considered this problem at length. 8-)

The most general solution is indeed this: "befriend or at least be able to hire someone who can provide a costume of the required durability."

One of Doc Future's lesser known but definitely useful talents as a genius gadgeteer is his skill with durable costume design, often incorporating force-fields. He has employed his talents on behalf of Armadillo, Jumping Spider, Neodymium Man, Bedrokk, Eyetaker, and at least one fire based hero.

The Volunteer has a symbiote, though that is not generally known.

Doc's abilities were not sufficient for Virago, so he had to resort to tattooed subcutaneous hologram projectors for her, putting her also in the "concealed nudity" camp. It helps that she flies and very rarely lands.

Journeyman uses a variant of a strategy often used by magical heroes: "Make the clothing the focus for whatever makes you hard to hurt". He anchors many of his wards in his clothing.

Flicker has the most severe problem and uses several strategies. First, her father is Doc, so she has access to durable extraordinary costumes from the start. Second, one of her main self-protective secondary powers extends to up to ten centimeters from her skin. Third, she uses a variant of the "cheap and easily replaced clothes"--her costumes are neither cheap nor easily replaced, but that is just part of the expense of being a superhero for her and Doc, so she keeps plenty of spares and often runs home with super speed to change before slowing down enough for anyone to see her.

And finally, in the most severe cases, she can fall back on "I just left a trail of plasma and mushroom clouds behind me sufficient to set off warnings from monitor satellites intended to detect nuclear weapons, and do indeed have the power to destroy the world. If your biggest problem is that I'm not currently wearing clothes, that's something wrong with you, not me."

Riderius

[scott_sanford]

Running home to change clothes is a more practical option for Flicker than for most people.

[rwpikul]

Then there's the solution used by some, such as my fursona in hir original envisioning as a potential Champions character:

Shi has fur, what's more having a tauroid bodyform means the more important bits aren't up front and obvious.

[dormouse1953]

I'm not a comics fan, but I do remember someone pointing out to me a Paul Cornell character called Birthday Girl, whose costume seems to be strategically placed balloons.

[james_davis_nicoll]

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