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Friday, April 17, 2015

Superheroes and Glasses



Name a superhero who wears glasses. And I mean clear-lens corrective eyewear, not sunglasses or goggles or visors or corrective lenses embedded in masks and helmets. And I DEFINITELY don't mean eyemasks like... well, like about 75% of classic superheroes wear.

Nice try, but Clark Kent is not a superhero. Neither is Peter Parker. Or Barbara Gordon. Or Dave Lizewski. They're all the plainclothes personas of superheroes. Superman, Spiderman, Batgirl, and Kickass do not wear glasses.

Or maybe you went X-Men and suggested Beast.

(I've been told that two Green Lanterns wear glasses, but I've yet to find an image proving that, so help me out on that one.)

Okay, so as a person who won't compromise her glasses for cosplay, I have three choices when it comes to superheroes: either paint myself blue and crossplay as Beast, be a "secret identity" of a superhero (all of whom - except Clark Kent - are unrecognizable), or be whatever other superhero I want to be, but with glasses.

As you can tell from the link in that last paragraph, I also believe that you can cosplay whatever character you want, whether you're the same race/sex/height/weight/whatever as them or not. Which means I also believe that you can be Spiderman with glasses or Batman with face tattoos or Kickass in a wheelchair or Asian Wolverine. But I was hoping to find ONE good option of a superhero with glasses.

And by "good option," I mean a superhero who is supposed to be wearing glasses and is recognizable by most people who would attend an event where I would be cosplaying as this superhero. Not Animal Man. (I had never heard of him before searching for a superhero with glasses, and would never recognize him in cosplay form.)

Look, I get it. Most superheroes don't have bad eyesight because whatever makes them "super" (Superman's being-a-super-alien thing, Batman's extraordinary amount of money, Spiderman's mysterious spidey-DNA) makes them not need glasses, plus they're inconvenient to wear in super-battle. So those superheroes who wear glasses in plainclothes either do so because they used to need them and want to keep looking normal (Peter Parker), or as a really lame disguise (seriously, Clark Kent, it's a little ridiculous that you think that's working). But it's annoying to the glasses-wearing cosplayer like me anyway.

Time for a silver lining, though. The nice thing about my glasses (and the rest of my look) is that I can pull off a librarian / 1950s version of superheroines/supervillainesses if I want to. I have both the body shape and the glasses for it.

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