Sometimes, Pants Are Involved

If you're one of the legions of comics readers that undoubtedly jumped onto DC's One Year Later books, you might have noticed that this week's issue of The Outsiders features an appearance by the most jive-talkingest character in comics history, Metamorpho, The Element Man!

He is, of course, wearing a sensible pair of slacks.

I'm not exactly sure why this is what sticks with me from reading this issue at work, or if it's in Judd Winnick's script that Metamorpho shows up in a pair of black dress pants, or if Matthew Clark just didn't feel like drawing his crazy legs, but really: Metamorpho probably shouldn't be running around in a pair of Dockers, no matter how stain resistant they are.

I mean, even beyond his amazing propensity to get dismembered every few issues...


...the guy turns into corrosive gas three or four times a day and spends the majority of the time bouncing on cobalt springs or something. That sort of thing's hard on a pair of pants. Especially the dressy kind.

But then again, this doesn't come as an utter shock. This is The Outsiders we're talking about here, a book that until recently featured Black Lightning's daughter running around in a costume of teal, pink and yellow with a blonde wig, thus making her appear to be the Li'l Kim of the DC Universe, minus the reality show about impending jail time. The whole thing's a fashion train-wreck even before you get to Grace, a character that I just fail to care about despite Winnick's best efforts, for one simple reason:

Sorry, Judd. She can have as much sex with Speedy as she wants and reveal every single memory of her tortued childhood to John Walsh, but to me, she'll always be a character that looks super-stoked about scoring third-row center tickets for The Crüe.

Given the nature of that sort of coif, I guess Rex could just be sporting the pants in an effort to class up the joint. Or maybe they were a gift from Sapphire and that dizzy gal suggested he wear them while stomping out a little flare-up in Mali. They just don't seem practical is all.

But at least they're not jodhpurs.