The celebrated Mr. K breaks out the needle and thread… Columnist Paul Kupperberg has costumes on the brain this time around — and maybe it’s because he’s had Green Lantern rattling in his mind. After all, his new book Son of the Unpublished Comic Book Scripts of Paul Kupperberg features a very GLish mask on the cover. (Click here to order!) Anyway, Paul channels his inner Edna Mode here with MY 13 FAVORITE 1960s SUPERHERO COSTUMES. Groovy. — By PAUL KUPPERBERG There’s an old saying, “vestis virum facit,” or “clothes make the man,” coined in 1500 by Erasmus, although usually attributed to Mark Twain, who did write, “[One] realizes that without his clothes a man would be nothing at all; that the clothes do not merely make the man, the clothes are the man; that without them he is a cipher, a vacancy, a nobody, a nothing… There is no power without clothes.” If he’d known what was coming, Twain might have added, “And that goes double for superheroes!” Without the right costume, a superhero ain’t nothing! Originally, superhero costumes were all cut from pretty much the same pattern, featuring tunics, tights, and capes. Superman wore the first of the great comic book superhero costumes; designed by Joe Shuster, it was based on the traditional circus strongman get-up. Some heroes, like Captain America, Namor, the Human Torch, Wildcat, and Mister Terrific, eschewed the cape, but by and large, there wasn’t that big a difference in superhero silhouettes. Come the 1960s and the proliferation of hundreds of new characters from scores of publishers, costumes began to take on a modern, sleeker look. The seeds of the new look were planted by Carmine Infantino in his groundbreaking costume of the 1950s, the seamless bodysuit worn by the Barry Allen Flash introduced in Showcase #4 (September/October 1956). It was the skinny tie and narrow lapels of superhero costumes. Here, in alphabetical order, are MY 13 FAVORITE 1960s SUPERHERO COSTUMES: — The Atom by Gil Kane (1961). Starting off the decade right, the Atom was one of the many Golden Age heroes revived and revitalized by editor Julie Schwartz and his team of storytelling superstars, which included Gil Kane. Like he’d done with his earlier Green Lantern revamp, Kane ignored virtually everything about the original incarnation’s costume and stripped it down to the...