Female Characters Done Right (Comics)

Despite the horribly designed fanservicey characters ever popular in comic books, new characters and newer redesigns are helping to give us some much better, complicated and realistic designs within the superhero world.

Original

Redesign

Captain Marvel, a character from a much more military, sensible background wears a modest outfit that actually makes sense for the job, and doesn't distract her while fighting. It is still skintight without being revealing, and is much more reminiscent of your typical male superhero costume (see: Captain America)

Ms Marvel is a new character - in fact, she is the first muslim character to have their own book in Marvel (and most probably in all mainstream comics). Her design even more had to be modest because of her culture, and I feel like this design captures that well. Again it is practical, yet feminine and it also stands out from a lot of superhero costumes.

Original

Redesign 1

Redesign 2

Scarlet Witch has had a redesign that definitely deviates from the original. Her design works especially well for her change of role from an outright superhero/occasional villain to a more of a mother/mentor figure in Young Avengers. She also has a slightly more casual version (second redesign) in the Avengers comic where her primary role is a hero. This has much more personality in it than her old one and even being a dress, it is much less sexualised than a lot of other superheroes in the past would have been.

Redesign

The original Batgirl designs were never quite as bad as a lot of other female characters in comics, apart from being a very shiny black catsuit. The recent redesign is still an extreme improvement, and extremely practical, yet fashionable which does work well for the character. I feel like this is a great direction for superhero designs to go into, and it would be great if there were more like that.

These are all much more practical and more importantly, much more like the sort out outfit a female superhero would pick to wear. Who wants to worry about keeping your chest in place when fighting crime?