#anyway the only part of the bottom row I haven't been able to find are those big ears but maybe Cathead and Deer have them behind their eye

[darknymfa]

Anyway while I'm talking about it (relatively speaking), I got a bone to pick with No Man's Sky's character customization. For the Traveller race, specifically. You start off with 7 distinct heads, with little further customization beyond getting to pick the color (and, on some of them, the eye type). And, looking at those 7 (in the top row), you can clearly see shared traits.

But then the random spawning Travellers in the bottom row use different heads, mashed together from those same bits and pieces, but in ways we as players don't get to do. Which, idk. I wish we got the same kind of customization as random one-off encounters. (these are grabbed from various screencaps across the Wiki and Reddit, don't have exact credits for each one)

[oliveroctavius]

I got this ask on main but thought I'd pick it up here, my comics history/fashion ramble blog. I'd been wondering this exact same thing recently, and Google initially wasn't much help—Rocketeer replica jackets describe themselves only as "Rocketeer jackets" and the one Lobster Johnson cosplay thread just suggested ordering one of those.

The most curious part is the double seam and horizonal row of buttons that mark out the entire front as possibly being an unbuttonable "bib", like a plastron front. (Please don't ask how late in the game I worked out that "plastron" is the right word for that.)

The closest genuine Golden Age example of a plastron jacket I found was the military tunic style uniform of Blackhawk, created in 1941.

(Pics from the '52 movie serial (right) really show how awkward it is to combine open lapels + plastron. On a double breasted coat, that chest panel IS the bottom lapel, folded shut.)

Here's the thing: This outfit mirrors that of the Nazi ace pilot he fights in the origin issue, von Tepp (middle). And compare further to the far right: real life WWI flying ace Manfred von Richthofen, AKA the Red Baron, in imperial German Uhlan (lance cavalry) uniform.

"The Germans had designed such great costumes, we decided to use them ourselves," co-creator Cuidera is quoted as saying in Steranko's History of Comics, which (more dubiously, in my opinion) compares the look to the Gestapo or SS. Breeches or jodhpurs weren't strictly a Nazi thing at the time, but they do add to the overall effect.

Compare two other military tunic themed costumes from 1940, on Captain Marvel and Bucky Barnes. These are asymmetrically buttoned, and switch to a more classic circus strongman look below the waist.

But somewhere around 1975, with the Invaders book, Bucky gets a buttoned bib! There's something infectious about it—the symmetry, maybe. (Even re: the characters we started with; Mignola didn't draw Lobster Johnson with buttons down the right side, but every artist after does. And Spider-Noir wore a sweater under his coat until Shattered Dimensions introduced the double-breasted vest.)

If it didn't reach his belt, Barnes' button-on front + shirt collar combo would resemble a bib-front western shirt, like the one that became the Rawhide Kid's signature look in '56. (Or Texas Twister's in '76.)

This shirt entered the old-West-obsessed public imagination in the 1940s/50s largely because John Wayne wore it in several cowboy movies. In reality it was rare among cowboys, more common with firefighters and civil war era militia.

Military tunics, Western shirts, alright, but does anything match the style and material and era, or are these jackets a total anachronism? I tried looking into 1930s leather flight jackets and was surprised when the closest-looking results were marked as Luftwaffe.

It took me a bit to work out why: USAF and RAF issued standard flight jackets with a center closure. The Luftwaffe instead let their pilots buy non-standardized ones. The 'weird' double-breasted black German flight jackets were in fact fairly normal (but repurposed) motorcycle racing jackets.

Far left is an English biker's jacket that dates back to the 1920s. Even without the bib, this may be as close as you'll get to an authentic Rocketeer. The jodhpurs were pretty common to complete the look. (What was an early motorcycle anyways, if not a weird metal horse?) The first biker jacket with the now iconic off-center diagonal zip was designed in America in 1928 and yet as far as I can tell, not a single actual pre-war pulp hero wore one.

The greatest weakness of this post is that I haven't been able to find any of these artists' notes on how, exactly, they arrived at similar versions of this iconic Pulp Front Panel Jacket. I'm sure I've missed some things. But as far as I can tell, this jacket is an odd bit of convergent stylistic evolution from the above influences that's picked up enough momentum to now be self-perpetuating.

The problem with pulp heroes is that for the most part, they just wore clothes. The appeal of this jacket is actually very similar to what the 1940s thought the appeal of the bib-front shirt in westerns was: It's alien enough to feel "old". It looks like something invented before zippers or synthetic fabrics. It looks formal and militant but also renegade, rebellious. It also looks a little mad-sciencey*. It's a costume, but you can nearly fool yourself into thinking the past was weird enough that you could find something this cool on the rack.

If I wanted to end on some grand point, I could try to argue that there's a thematic throughline between fascist fashion, John Wayne movies, and throwback pulp. A manufactured aesthetic valorizing the violence of a fictional golden age... but I think the noir stylings of the post-Rocketeer comics in this lineup mean that, at least on some level, they know the "good guys" didn't dress like this.

*If I had another couple weeks of time to burn, I'd try to trace the visual history of the Howie coat in popular culture and investigate its possible connections to this. Alas, I do actually have a life.