Costume Spotlight: Spider-Man's Advanced Suit

Of the thousands of comic book characters out there, I'm pretty sure none has had as many video games as Spider-Man has. Wikipedia lists 35, stretching all the way back to the Atari 2600, and the newest one - simply called Spider-Man - debuted earlier this month (September 7) on PS4.

The game was first announced at E3 in 2016, which is also where they showcased a new suit that would appear in the game and took focus in most of the marketing.

A similar suit debuted in Peter Parker: The Spectacular Spider-Man #305 (June 2018), which came out the same week as E3. There are several differences between the two outfits (especially at the wrists and ankles), but it's clearly supposed to evoke the Advanced Suit of the game.

But in case that's not close enough to count for you, never fear. The character himself appears in Spider-Geddon #0, out today!

Spider-Geddon is a sequel to the recent Spider-Verse event, which famously included "every Spider-Man ever". They did a pretty good job with that, so will this be the only new addition? Surely there are a couple they weren't able to include before - I don't ever recall seeing MTV's Spider-Man, for instance, and Atari's Spider-Man almost certainly never showed up. Anyway, I'm excited to find out!

Just A Small Little Thing: Cottonmouth's Name

Canon immigration due to synergy can be a strange thing. Introducing a new character or concept to make the comics more like the new adaptation or to promote said adaptation makes sense, but it doesn't always look like that. They're not all Aqualad or Aya. Sometimes they're a small detail that most people won't even register. Cottonmouth is a great example of that.

Cottonmouth is a Luke Cage villain that first appeared in Luke Cage, Power Man #19 (April 1974) after being mentioned in the previous issue. He's a drug kingpin who tries to hire Luke as muscle, which Luke accepts as a way to get evidence that Willis Stryker framed him for the crime that sent him to jail. Cottonmouth was obviously involved as well. Despite sounding like a villain name or a street name, and despite having connections to Stryker, aka Diamondback, it is implied that "Cottonmouth" is simply Cornell Cottonmouth's last name.

Cottonmouth is a pretty minor character even though he has ties to a superhero's origin, only appearing a total of 7 times (until recently), and two of those were in an alternate universe. So some may find it strange that he was featured so prominently in the Luke Cage tv series (September 2016). But featured prominently he was, and if anything good can be said about that series, it's that it did a great job at humanizing its villains. So Cornell Cottonmouth became Cornell "Cottonmouth" Stokes, a shady club owner and gun runner. In the MCU, "Cottonmouth" was a nickname he picked up as a kid when he got some teeth knocked out. He hates it and people use it mainly to make him mad.

Of course, one of the great things about adaptations is they can raise the prominence of characters. Most people only know Luke Cage through the Netflix shows, so suddenly Cage's biggest villains are Cottonmouth, Diamondback, Black Mariah, Shades, and Bushmaster, even though they've only had a handful of appearances each. And that means when Luke Cage gets a new series - Power Man and Iron Fist - because of the show, those characters definitely get their share of the spotlight. Thus, we get Power Man and Iron Fist #10 (November 2016), where we not only get Cottonmouth and Mariah working together (along with Piranha Jones, who isn't a villain in the show, and Tombstone and Mr. Fish, who aren't in the show at all), but we see Cottonmouth's full name:

It's a small detail, but honestly, it makes more sense this way.

Costume Spotlight: Captain Marvel

Despite having a release date less than a year away, Marvel has been surprisingly tight-lipped on the upcoming Captain Marvel film (March 2019). Many of the cast members are known and, for the most part, we even know who they're playing, we know it's set in the 90s, and that's about it. Even the promotional photos are just like actors in director's chairs, not costume reveals or anything like that. So it was big news in January when someone managed to get pictures of Brie Larson on set in costume...but it wasn't the costume people were expecting.

As you might guess, fans were not happy. Even after it was explained that this costume is probably not something she wears the whole movie and is a combination of her current one and the Kree Centurion uniform that the original Captain Marvel wore at first, they weren't having it.

Regardless, that was only the first time we saw it. Marvel is currently in the middle of an event called Infinity Wars, and leading up to it was a series of one shots called Infinity Countdown that featured the various holders of the Infinity Stones using them (there was some more lead-up with the characters actually finding the stones, but that's not important). Captain Marvel has the Reality Stone, so in Infinity Countdown: Captain Marvel #1 (May 2018), the Reality Stone shows her Captain Marvels from alternate realities.

Some of them are her, some of them are other Captain Marvels such as Mar-Vell or Spectrum, and others still are characters related to Captain Marvel in some way, such as Rogue. But the important one is in the top right corner.

Of course, this isn't really the MCU Captain Marvel. She doesn't own the Reality Stone. But some version of her (Earth-1999998, maybe?), or at least someone with her same costume, does.

UPDATE (08/05/2021): The Earth-616 version of Captain Marvel uses a version of this suit in Avengers #47 (August 2021).

Marvel Tsum Tsum

This is a weird one, so get ready.

In 2013, Disney created a new line of plushies in Japan called Tsum Tsum. The name comes from the Japanese word tsumu, which means "to stack", because Tsum Tsums are designed to be stackable. (Note: pictured are plastic ones that were introduced later; the originals were plushies, as seen in the next image.)

Over the next couple years, they expanded the line to include Pixar, LucasFilm, and Marvel. The Marvel ones specifically debuted in September 2015, and that first wave basically included everyone you'd expect: most of the movie Avengers (minus Scarlet Witch, Falcon, and Hawkeye), the Guardians of the Galaxy, Ant-Man, Spider-Man, Captain Marvel, Chitauri, Loki, Ultron, and Ronan, plus a few surprising choices like a Hydra agent, an AIM agent, and Venom.

A year later, Marvel - for some reason - released a four-issue miniseries called Marvel Tsum Tsum. Issue #1 came out in August 2016. The premise of the series is that a crate of these Tsum Tsums are en route to The Collector (from another dimension, I believe, but I could be wrong about that), but they end up on Earth. And not only are the Tsum Tsums alive, they consider themselves to be the real heroes and Earth-616's heroes to be strange imposters!

It's a bizarre plot, to be sure, but it seems like a lot of fun and an interesting way to use the brand.

Kingdom Come Spotlight: Robotman

I try to avoid cross-comic canon immigrants when I can, but I set the precedent by including Kingdom Come ones on this site, so I guess I have to continue. As a compromise, however, I will post these and any future ones like these on Saturdays.

If you're not familiar with Kingdom Come, it's about a future of the DC Universe and how older versions of the current heroes we know clash with the new generation of heroes. The whole thing was basically a satire of 90s superheroes compared to Silver Age superheroes, and it was very successful, both critically and commercially.

Nearly every character who appeared in it got a new design of some sort, and for the most part, the designs fell into one of a few categories:

1) A design that combines aspects of multiple identities of the character to make it unclear which identity it was. Flash, Green Lantern, and Hawkman are examples of this kind.

2) A design that combines multiple separate superheroes as certain heroes take on new identities. Red Arrow and Red Robin are examples of this kind.

3) A design that plays on the trends of modern superheroes. Magog and Kid Flash are examples of this kind.

4) Minor tweaks. Captain Marvel and Wonder Woman are examples of this kind.

Robotman is an example of #2.

The original Robotman, Cliff Steele, was a founding member of the Doom Patrol, a team of misfits that banded together because they couldn't lead normal lives. His story was basically that he was a race car driver who got into a terrible accident, so his brain was put into a robot body.

Cyborg, aka Victor Stone, has a similar story. He was a football player instead of a race car driver, and the accident he got into varies based on the continuity we're talking about, but the result is the same: part of his body were replaced with cybernetic parts.

It's therefore not much of a stretch to reveal, like Kingdom Come did, that Cyborg eventually "graduates" into being the new Robotman. You can see here that he's now gold all over like the original Robotman, but the clothes he wears still mimic his Cyborg costume.

JLA/Titans was a miniseries that...well, except for launching the Titans ongoing series, I'm not exactly sure what happened in it. I've read the individual episode synopses but they didn't make a whole lot of sense to me. But I do know that in issue #3 (December 1998), Cyborg gets a new, all gold body.

That, thankfully, didn't last, and he got his classic body back just in time for the new Teen Titans series in 2003.