It's Tuesday night, and you know what
that means...everyone in America is watching the new smash hit TV thriller,
V, in which a British freedom fighter rallies against the tyrannical rule of British lizard people in the shape of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. Tonight's special guest: Amy Winehouse! Is she human...or lizard...or
both? [SPOILER ALERT: Lizard.] For the rest of you, however, there's
Tuesday Nighty Tighty-Whities, the incisive and all-encompassing survey of
superheroes in their underwear!
Tonight: he's seven-foot-five, five hundred pounds of solid Soviet stainless steel...the Moscovite mutant we all call...um...(glancing at my copy of
The Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe Deluxe Edition #3)...
Colossus! And as you can see here, the Communist Crusher couldn't get enough days off from Professor Xavier's Academy for the Genetically Overactive to stand in line at GUM to buy pajamas, so he sleeps in...you guessed it...his
Fruit of the Looms!
Panels from [Uncanny] X-Men #137 (September 1980), co-plot and script by Chris Claremont, co-plot and pencils by John Byrne, inks by Terry Austin, colors by Glynis Wein, letters by Tom Orzechowski. Hey, how much of a fanbull does it make me that I knew by heart and I didn't have to look up the creator credits on this ish?
Ta-da! Changing into a strongman giant made of organic steel certainly beats
my morning routine, which consists of two and a half sit-ups and then a chocolate Pop-Tart for breakfast. But hey, how does Peter Rasputin keep his underwear from ripping to shreds when he changes from teenager to titanium? Well,
two answers to that pressing question, actually...
Answer #1:
Panel from Fantastic Four v.3 #63 (January 2003), script by Mark Waid, pencils by Mike Wieringo, inks by Karl Kesel, colors by Paul Mounts, letters by Richard Starkings and Albert Deschesne
Ask any fanboy who invented unstable molecules, the miracle fabric that stretches, resists burning, turns invisible and splashes back grape juice spills, and you'll hear the dead-certain answer "Reed Richards!" Which only goes to show you,
you're dead wrong. (If you were a contestant on
QI, you'd be Alan Davies and that big board on the back would be flashing your wrong answer while the buzzer blares away.) Mr. Fantastic didn't
invent unstable molecules, he
discovered them—passage through the cosmic rays on that fateful journey back
in 1961 about ten years or so ago turns the FF's crew jumpsuits into that hyperactive fabric with the give and pull that allows Ben Grimm to go out in public without showing everyone his rock collection. So I betcha Colossus has undies made out of unstable molecules. We already know that lots of superheroes get their unstable costumes from Reed, but technically, they "lease" them from Fantastic Four, Inc...the technology is still too expensive, even for Reed, to mass-produce unstable swimsuits, no matter
how many times Namor asks him. We
do know that the X-Men Mk. II's uniforms are made of unstable molecules...remember, for example, how Storm used to transform her street clothes into her fighting costume by sending an electrical spark through it? And how Cyclops's yellow booties would turn into pirate galoshes every time that Dave Cockrum came back near the strip? It's all
unstable molecules...my friend...and yours!
But that's only
one answer to the sartorial conundrum of why Peter Rasputin ain't bustin' out all over when he changes into Colossus in his y-fronts. For the No-Prize, here's
Answer #2
The Comics Code Authority: protecting you from Peter Rasputin's area since 1954.
Hey, a
letter just landed with a "you've got mail" in the Comics Oughta Be Fun! emailbox, so let's take a look. Hmmm, it's from a Miss "K. Pryde" of "Deerfield Illinois" and she asks, "can we look
again at Colossus in his underwear? You know, just one last peek?"
I'll do you better than that, Ms. P, here's an all-new, all-different, all-uncannily peek at the Colossus from
Earth-9112, a world where everyone looks pretty much the same but they're more
Flexographically-colored...from the original version of
X-Men #137 before Jim Shooter twiddled his fingers into it (and, let's face it, made it a better story):
Panels from Phoenix: The Untold Story one-shot (April 1984), words and pictures and yadda yadda yadda by the same guys I listed from memory above, okay?
Phoenix: The Untold Story was a special comic that reprinted Claremont and Byrne's original story, ending with the Jean Grey
living. The art is the same as
X-Men #137 until the last handful of pages, but the dialogue's substantially different throughout, as you can see here. It's an interesting alternative story, but again, I still prefer the original, even with more Claremont verbiage per square inch than the special.
So, there you have it...superheroes in their underwear, digressions into the worlds of Amy Winehouse, the Fantastic Four, and the scary, scary place that is the creative mind of Chris Claremont. Who says this isn't the Mighty Bully Age of extra content in a blog post?
Eh, never mind. I know the only
real reason you stopped by here tonight:
Colossus in his underwear...
Partial panel from [Uncanny] X-Men #131 (March 1980), by you know the drill by now.
...with
bonus extremely-hairy Wolverine! Sweet dreams
now, kids!
Marvel Comic Annuals! Every summer they'd regale us with double-sized action, adventure, thrills and excitement of which our poor little puny human minds could not stand, so that we'd go back to school with our brains wiped, eager and ready to learn about the Taft-Hartley Act. Oh, those wacky guys at Marvel in league with the educators of the leaders tomorrow...how you bent our brains and shattered our senses!
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