Cape Fear

In which we explore a few opinions about superheroes who wear capes and why I dare to opine that it's (mostly) a good and useful practice.

This is far from a burning issue, but many readers and comics pros alike do have strong opinions about the practicality of capes on their superheroes.

Some think they’re not only useless, but dangerous. Let me illustrate this line of reasoning by an anecdote from my past:

When I was new to the Military Police (1978, if you must know), about to go out on my first night out on patrol with the 64th Military Police Detachment in Bremmerhaven, Germany, my wiser partner (a sergeant whose name I forget but he was a fine fellow as I recall) advised me to lose my black necktie and the shoulder strap to my pistol belt. “Why?” says I, since both were part of the designated uniform. I was fearing some first-night hazing, talking me into something that would get me into a wee bit of trouble with the desk sergeant during guard mount. “Because,” says he, “both are nice handles which a drunk and frisky suspect can grab onto, and toss you around helplessly.” He went on to say, “That’s why we call the shoulder strap a suicide strap, and even though the tie is required, use a clip-on tie from now on, which will simply come off uselessly in a perp’s hand when he tries to grab it.” It was good advice. I took off the shoulder strap and borrowed a clip on tie for the night. Since we got drawn into a bar fight at the post’s NCO club that first shift, I enjoyed not having anyone grab onto one of those handy handles and toss me around like a sack of beans.

The lesson boiled down to this: Don’t give your enemy things to grab onto and use against you.

In the superhero world it seems a flowing cape would fit rather perfectly into such a category. Therefore capes are bad and should not be a part of any intelligent superhero’s costume.

However, there’s another argument to be made, so I’ll make it.

Let’s say you’re a well regarded (and not at all stupid) creature of the night, who’s always worn a flowing cape and likely always will. Is there any tactical advantage to such a thing? If so, is that advantage enough to offset the disadvantages listed above?

My answer is, yes, there are advantages.

Another thing I learned early on in the military (the Combat Operations segment of Basic Training in this case) is that human beings are hard wired to pick out the human silhouette, even in bad light and from a great distance. That’s because, ever since the caveman days the presence of other humans was most often a sign of danger. So, through a few thousand generations of positive reinforcement, the more successful humans developed the instinctive ability to spot human outlines, even if we’re not looking for them. Since we are all descended from those more successful cavemen, we’re all wired to notice the shape of other people. It’s baked in.

Other species are similarly wired to respond to shapes that are dangerous to them. I once watched a fascinating documentary on how ducks will scatter when the shadow of a hawk passes overhead. It’s automatic. But drag that same shadow (a wooden cutout) backwards over the same ducks and they don’t react at all. Since there were never any backwards-flying hawks in their countless generations, no instincts were needed, nor created.

But back to capes.

So then, if like Batman, you’d like to have a better chance of sneaking up on the bad guys, as you stalk them through the night, it would be helpful to break up that telltale human silhouette in some way. In the Army we used camouflage and ponchos. Batman makes fine use of his really cool cape (or cloak, which literally cloaks him against easy observation).

So then, a cape can be useful for sneaking up on an enemy, but that still leaves the disadvantage once you get into fighting range. A lucky thug in the battle scrum might be able to grab onto said cloak and use it to our hero’s disadvantage.

Unless that’s exactly what you want them to try to do.

During my run on writing Robin I decided to immediately address that weakness in my first issue.

If you’re a tricky cuss, like Batman or Robin, the seeming disadvantages of the cape can be turned into advantages. The longtime Batman and Robin writer Chuck Dixon recently did a video on just this subject. I’d link to it, but I’m computer inept and don’t know how. But the gist is he weaponized Batman’s cape with many nasty things, which is exactly the sort of thing Batman would do, right?

Says Chuck Dixon (I paraphrase), “The first thing I did was put weights along the bottom of his cape.” He knew that was a tactical improvement to any fine garment with an interesting history: In Musketeer days, when sword-wielding bravos were always picking fights with each other at the slightest provocation, the weapons of choice were usually a rapier in the dominant hand, and some other useful item in the other hand. Some liked two swords of identical length. Some liked a shorter blade for aid in parrying and for dirty close-up business when the longer blades were forced off-target during the tete-e-tete. Others would carry something to aid in defense, like a shield boss, which is basically a small shield for deflecting an opponent’s blade.

My favorite off-hand weapon, were I a swashbuckler of that day, is the armored, weighted glove. It’s protected enough to deflect an opponent’s blade (looking far too cool as you contemptuously slap it aside, as if it ain’t no thing), or better yet, actually grab the blade, removing it from play for as long as you can hold onto it. It was also handy as a weighted sap. Go out and get hit with a sap for a lesson on how effective it can be.

But another popular off-hand weapon was to use your own cape or cloak to entangle your enemy’s blade, or even whip it over his head, blinding and binding him. To aid in this one would often sew weights in the cloak’s lining, to make it a more dynamic as a whipping and tangling instrument.

So you see? Chuck Dixon had good historical precedents for his improvements on the Caped Crusader.

To sum up: Capes bad, if you don’t want to gift your villains with something extra to grab onto. Capes good, if you want to add to your stealth by breaking up your silhouette, or add to your battle effectiveness by weaponizing it.

Therefore capes are helpful in the never-ending battle — if you want them to be. But they aren’t automatically and axiomatically stupid, as some have opined.

One other consideration before I shut up. We’ve covered some of the reasons for capes, as if we were discussing real tactical concerns in a real world. There is an artistic consideration not to dispose of capes in your comics. Comics are made of static images that try to simulate motion. A nice flowing cape helps your artist do that. It’s Motion Helper.

Thank you.