Okay, the last time around I gave you the Sun God Superman, in an heroic suit of armor and flowing red cloak meant to be worn for his transformative adventures in the Fourth World. Now, the flip side of the coin ...



Conveniently enough, the Superman mythos have arguably acquired in their seventy years both an enlightened supernatural realm (The Fourth World) and a benighted afterlife (The Phantom Zone). This is handy for the journey component of the heroic myth, wherein during his essential transformative quest the hero not only ascends into heaven but also descends into hell. Were I writing a cohesive heroic edda for the Man of Steel (and who's to say I'm not ... IN MY MIND), before the inevitable portion of the myth where his physical self would fully die, he would move through a number of other realms wherein he'd live seemingly complete lives, the Fourth World and Phantom Zone being among them.

So, for story purposes - say, if this were to appear as a costume in an issue of Action Comics - consider this to be Superman's Phantom Zone armor; the vents and devices constituting the armor along his arms and shoulder (and back) are Kryptonian devices engineered to allow him to retain some semblance of his powers, as well as to remain 'real' enough to avoid the disseminating effects of the Phantom Zone upon the emotional and psychic fiber of the human beings imprisoned there. As a sub-realm of reality, far heavier and denser than our reality, the colors of his costume are muted and simplified, and the light emanating from his harness is slowed down enough to effectively behave like a gas (thus his "halo" effect).

Now, design-wise: As this is the opposite number of his Sun God costume, I deliberately tried to make something which was effectively its opposite, symbolically. For instance, where the other costume broke the lines of the body, this one is skin-tight and clinging - I wanted to give the effect of his being naked, as a corpse, with the flowing white cape (pressed down by heavier gravity, unlike the wide flowing red dawn-like cloak) behaving like a shroud, wrapping around his limbs and preparing him for the journey into the underworld. As the other costume relied on natural materials, I wanted this one to be unearthly, strange materials which seemed otherworldly.

As this is this night aspect of the Apollyonic figure, I gave him storm motifs in the costume - lightning bolts across the trunk, the cloud-like light emanations from his harness, the halo like the moon glowing a white patch on clouds heavy with rain. There's also a skull motif in the headpiece, and both the harness and the insignia are meant to evoke bones, like a strange alien skeleton in the night. The harness specifically, even more than attempting to evoke a death aspect, is meant to look like chains - this would be the punishment and retribution period of his transfigurative journey, the part that always ends in necessary tragedy.

The one design element which gave me the most pause was the insignia - whether to stylize an "S" to put in the diamond or to remove it altogether in favor of a new motif. Part of the problem - as I went on and on the fuck about before without any hope of stopping - is that the shield is one of THE symbols by which we recognize Superman. Since I'd removed the red-and-blue motif, I was left only with the cape and shield to make him identifiable. Still, the whole metaphor of death in the heroic monomyth is to represent the shedding of the ego, the hero's willing submission to forces greater than himself and the 'death' of selfish identity. To that end, ziiip, away goes the "S" itself in favor of a diamond-shield penetrated by lightning (which is itself symbolic of divine power, the submission which comes upon the hero in this stage of the journey, blah blah, listen to me go on)

Okay, one more to do - I promise, the next one is actually free of all of this comparative mythologies stuff. It's just a fun costume for a future Superman, I swears it!