7 Most Memorable Alternate Superhero Costumes

ELECTRIC SUPERMAN

After losing his powers during the event miniseries The Final Night, Superman...got married.

On his honeymoon, he had no powers. It was kind of cool, being able to have a regular, non-crisis-y kind of honeymoon, except of course that there were pirates or terrorists or something and Lois had to save him.

After that, the pair returned home and Superman tried everything to restore his powers. Ultimately they came back -- but they surged and waned and acted funny and all kinds of stuff.

After a while, he started to spark lightning, which he knew wasn't normal, so he got looked at: turns out, he was actually turning into a being of pure energy and would dissipate if he wasn't tossed into a containment suit right away.

Eventually he would come to grips with his new, electric-fueled powers, and then shortly after that an attempt to kill him would create a second, red, duplicate. The two of them would ultimately re-merge and become the "classic" Superman again.

But there wasn't anybody reading comics in the late '90s who doesn't instantly know what you mean when you say "electric Superman" or "Superman Blue."

SUPER SOLDIER

At least twice in the last 25 years or so, there has been a comic book where Captain America Steve Rogers has instead gone by "Super Soldier."

That's not entirely surprising: he's often not Captain America, or at least not the only Captain America, and as we've seen with families of heroes like Green Lantern and Robin, writers will generally come up with ways to differentiate heroes if more than one of them has the same name. The fact that his powers come form a "super-soldier serum" and heroes on Marvel's Earth are called "superheroes" makes the "Super Soldier" moniker a pretty sensible one.

(Also, in the case of the first title, it was published under Marvel and DC's joint "Amalgam Comics" event, and Steve Rogers was merged with Superman.)

That's not the one we're talking about, though; we're talking about the "Super Soldier" costume that made its appearance following Steve Rogers's return from the "dead" during Ed Brubaker's acclaimed run on Captain America, and which beats out all the other various "alternate" Captain America costumes (US Agent, the armored one, etc.) by virtue of being remarkably similar to the one Cap wore in the Captain America: The Winter Soldier movie.

It's a pretty great, clean look, and it uses his intelligence and military experience to craft a transition away from his traditional Captain America suit that makes sense. And it's likely no surprise that Marvel used this in the film: like many of their post-Civil War (the comics, not the movie) redesigns, it eschews the mask, making for a more attractive costume in a movie where actors doin't want to spend the whole time with their faces obscured.

KNIGHTQUEST BATMAN

Back to the '90s for DC.

Over the years, few characters have changed costumes at DC Comics more than Batman. Many superhero costumes are changed -- at least temporarily -- in response to the pressures of other media, and Batman has been on TV screens or in movie theaters almost constantly for fifty years now.

Whether it's tweaking the costume to look more like the '66 TV show, tweaking it back to make it more menacing and noir, redefining its general shape while retaining the color palette or abandoning the blue and gray for blacks and browns, Batman's costume is constantly in a state of flux.

Usually, though, it's basically the same suit. After Bruce Wayne broke his back fighting Bane, though? Things changed a lot.

It wasn't an exoskeleton to make him able to walk again, a la Booster Gold's blissfully-mostly-forgotten armor or the similar stuff that has, at various points, kept Iron Man or Captain America alive. Rather, the radical shift in the look, feel, and utility of Batman's costume in the early '90s was because Bruce stayed on bedrest and recovered for months, while he was replaced by Jean-Paul Valley, a young vigilante Bruce had then just met called Azrael.

Rather than tapping Dick Grayson -- who had literally been training his whole life for the gig -- to step up when Bane threatened the city and Bruce couldn't be there, Bruce attempted a Hail Mary pass to restore the Batman name, defeat Bane, and get Azrael's ultra-violent tactics and deep psychoses off the street all in one fell swoop.

Well, two out of three ain't bad.

Ultimately, Bruce had to retake the role of Batman by force once he recovered -- in no small part because Jean-Paul was abusing and killing people in his name. Along the way, the costume went through at least four alterations -- the classic Batman costume with clawed gauntlets, the one seen above, a more armored version of the one seen above, and then a red version of that third take -- before Bruce came back in the classic costume, showed him who was boss...and then let Dick take over for a couple of months, came back, and changed his costume again to something more like the Tim Burton movies.

SYMBIOTE SPIDEY

The black costume.

For a lot of '80s kids, this is the definitive cool superhero costume change.

Introduced during the (first) Secret Wars crossover, Spider-Man's black costume was a marketing gimmick that delivered dividends its creators couldn't possibly have imagined when subsequent creative teams transformed the suit into a Spider-Man villain so wildly popular that he's had his own series -- either limited or ongoing -- more often since 1990 than about half of the Avengers.

The short version is that during an offworld battle, Spider-Man's costume got trashed and the aliens who were working with Earth's superheroes made him a new one. This one was black and white, and lacked the web motif, but after he got back to Earth, Spidey decided that the costume -- which was kind of like "smart clothes," responding to his mental impulses, and didn't need to be washed -- was pretty handy. It also enhanced his existing powers.

Eventually when it came time to put the ol' Webhead back in his standard costume, they did so by revealing that the alien costume was actually a symbiotic life form that could potentially cause serious problems for Peter. He got rid of it -- which is when it found Eddie Brock and became Venom, kicking off an even more elaborate sequence of events.

T-SHIRT SUPERMAN

When The New 52 launched, there were two new costumes: the New 52 Superman "Kryptonian armor" thing wasn't really all that memorable. It was controversial becuase it represented the biggest change made to the costume in years, and probably the biggest one ever that was actually intended to stick and not to be a temporary story beat a la the black suit from "Death and Return" or the aforementioned electric look.

The more memorable look was the "Super Millennial" look of a tight Superman t-shirt and his cape, with torn jeans and work boots.

They revisited this look later, after his powers started to fail and his Kryptonian armor "left him," so it was in more than just the one story, making it a big part of the post-Flashpoint Superman's identity. And it was controversial-ish the first time: a lot of people thought it was silly, but since we had a "real" costume later (and one that more people were upset by), it wasnt'a huge point of consternation. Later, when it became the default costume for a while, there was plenty of wailing and gnashing of teeth.

You can still get it in statue form, though.

SCARLET SPIDER

We've got two Spider-Men and two Supermen up in here.

Yeah, during the '90s, after Superman died and came back as four people (long story), it became fashionable to replace your hero, either temporarily (Superman, Batman) or longer-term-bordering-on-permanently (Spider-Man, Green Lantern, Green Arrow).

With Spider-Man, the angsty teen hero had grown up, married the girl of his dreams, and generally had very few good reasons to be angsty. Some fans loved the character arc that represented, but just as many thought it betrayed the basic principles of the character.

Calling back to a story from the '70s, the decision was made to replace Peter Parker with...Peter Parker.

There had been a clone story years before and, as it turns out, readers only thought the real Spider-Man won, and further only thought that the defeated "clone" had died. Reappearing years later as "Ben Reilly," the "real" Spider-Man was meant to take over the role so that Peter and Mary Jane could run off together and have a happily-ever-after, leaving the lovable loser to take care of Aunt May.

It didn't work out that way; the '90s Clone Saga sold so well that management wanted more and more and more of it, until it wore out its welcome and collapsed under its own weight. Eventually Peter had to be restored just to give readers a sense of stability and Ben Reilly "died," then came back years later.

But the Scarlet Spider costume -- an outfit worn by whichever hero was not currently Spider-Man -- is a memorable one if only (like the Azrael Batman suit) for being so completely and utterly of its time.

RED ROBIN

This one gets a kind of honrable mention because for a while, DC wanted nothing more than to transform their workaday DC Universe into the world from Kingdom Come.

"Yeah, that terrifies me. Not because I'm protective of it. Not because I feel like it's our toy and nobody else should play with it. That's not it at all," said Kingdom Come writer Mark Waid during a 20th anniversary look back at the series earlier this year. "It's just the idea that I see some touches of Kingdom Come here and there that are well thought out and well executed and make me feel good, and I see other places where they just ignore the fact that it's supposed to be a cautionary fable. It's not supposed to be like this!"

It was, though, and we got a number of characters inspired by Kingdom Come looks coming between 1996 and 2011 or so. For a while, the Kingdom Come Superman even traveled back in time and two Earths over or something to hang out with the Justice Society for a while.

Probably the only one of those that felt like it could have remained a permanent part of the status quo and not just a momentary stunt was the move to make Tim Drake, then Robin, into Red Robin. It roughly coincided with the introduction of Damian Wayne, whom many fans (correctly) predicted would step into the Robin role, so it felt like Red Robin was more than just a nod to a really popular Elseworlds story: it was an opportunity to make way for the next in the Robin line of succession without losing Tim Drake entirely.

HONORABLE MENTIONS

Honorable mentions have to go to the many, many reinventions of the X-Men uniforms over the years, particularly to the blue and gold team redesigns of the '90s, which remain iconic, dated, beloved, hated, and, yes, memorable.

Why didn't they "make the cut?" Simple: they weren't really a shock to the system in the way these other changes were. Yeah, it was kind of cool and interesting and maybe a little strange to have the X-Men suddenly suiting up in matching uniforms like the Fantastic Four -- but it wasn't balls-out crazy like making Superman a lightning bolt or painting Spider-Man black.

Speaking of the X-Men, there's the movie-inspired fetishwear of the Morrison era, which barely missed the list because the outfits were so generic that it seems unlikely people will remember them once we're another few years removed.

There's a similar dynamic with Green Lanterns; while the Corps boasts a uniform look, numerous characters -- including John Stewart, Guy Gardner, and Kyle Rayner -- have taken it upon themselves to redesign their costumes to suit their individual personalities.

Daredevil's yellow costume should probably be on here, too, except that it's nto really an alternate -- it's his original, but it was short-lived enough that most people only know it now from flashback stories, merchandise, and the like.

The Planet Hulk Gladiator Armor probably should have made the cut here, but if it had, we would have had to count the gladiator armor from when Superman did the same story like ten years earlier and it just would have been confusing.