Is he wearing a “Wife-Beater”?

Not Cosmic Boy. But it’s an easy mistake.

In 1976’s Superboy & The Legion of Super-Heroes 215, Rokk Krinn, a.k.a. Cosmic Boy, formerly one of the more staid members of the Legion, acquired a new wardrobe designed by Mike Grell and apparently influenced by Frank N. Furter’s corset costume in The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Doubtless upset by his colleague’s reactions to his new look (we don’t see their comments, but I’m sure there was some jocularity and ragging  on the old Legion Cruiser on the way to the mission), he has a bit of a sulk later when his comrades are trapped, and the sole escapee, Light Lass, begs him to save them – but he refuses, because his religious observances prohibit him from using his magnetic powers on that day!

Cosmic Boy in his Rokk-y Horror inspired ensemble.

Light Lass, understandably a bit peeved, continues to harangue him, until he strikes back in a brutal and, sad to say, very twentieth-century manner.

“What do you tell a Legion gal with two black eyes?” “Nothin’ you haven’t already told her twice!”

Now take away the trappings of them both being super-heroes, in a perilous situation, etc, and what do you actually have here? What’s the overt message being conveyed? The image is of a powerfully built man striking a slightly built woman for no other reason than that he didn’t like what she was saying.

At this time, comics were still a mass-audience medium, and this message was being conveyed to the young boys of America, and of the world; that if you don’t approve of what a girl or woman is saying, it’s perfectly okay to hit her to shut her up! Hardly the pinnacle of partnership between the sexes that writer Jim Shooter had espoused in his earlier 1960s works.

Well, you might believe in equality, Invisible Kid – but have you run that by Cosmic Boy?

Normally the Legion, a couple of embarrassing flickers aside, was  pretty rock-solid on gender parity – they were the first team to have a) a female leader, b) more than one or two token girl members, and c) female members with markedly distinct personalities. But when they backslid, in the hands of inattentive or just plain uncaring scripters, they really slid back a very long way.