Other top contenders for the title of this post were “Consider the Trench Coat,” “Understanding the Trench Trope,” and “The Wearing of the Trope Coat.”

Gathering the content for my earlier Fantastic Four post brought to mind something else I have been wanting to put together. This one has to do with costumes, or more appropriately disguises over costumes, at least in these early cases.

From the earliest days of Fantastic four, when Ben wanted to “blend in” he would take to the streets in a trench style rain (or over) coat and a fedora. It makes an appearance in the new movie trailer, and to rightful great acclaim.

Within hours of the trailer landing people were already peppering the internet with memes and notes.

There is a special edition Funko Pop that features coat and hat. And a Marvel Legend action figure.

But, Mr Grimm is far (FAR) from the only sartorial superhero to grace the page. For each one that will end up in here there are scores I don’t know about. It also shows up in varying media but it’s as ubiquitous as the scientists lab coat, but with different, and expected connotations.

Sometimes you get a character that does both.

The trench coat: the comic thinking bubble of clothing. The X-men Animated series continued the trend well into the 1990s.

Beast probably had the most diverse “civilian” wardrobe of anyone on the original seres, and if he can find a tailor and get a suit to fit him, then you certainly can, too.

You probably have already started clicking through your coated heroes. Let’s see if they made the list.

The Bogart Look

Remember, The Fantastic Four arrived on newsstands and comic racks in 1961. That’s just under the 20 year mark from Humphrey’s Casablanca. Less than a generation and the influence starts. I haven’t backed it up past that in media, but given they came to prominence replacing the heavier great coats during World War One, you know, the one with trenches.

Later that same decade when Scooby Doo need to “look human” to get the ghost of the Vasquez Castle to chase him, the gang gave him a trench coat and hat. And a mustache. The hat this time is a bowler and not a fedora but we’ll work with variations on a theme. Also the pep talk about being brave came with the advice “Think of John Wayne.”

This version of Scooby Doo also got a Funko Pop figure.

Incidentally I can’t think of a John Wayne movie besides The Quiet Man where he wore a trench coat (“Dusters” don’t count because they deserve a post of their own, mainly so I can explain why they are cowboy lab coats).

Though being a man of his time, he did travel (at least once on this trip to London for the premier of Rio Grande) in the style.

Stepping back into the 1980s, and sticking with disguises, for a bit here, too

You’d be forgiven for wondering how on earth someone the size of a cement truck could possibly think that a trench coat at hat could help them not be noticed on the street. But, as we see above, and as you see in the Fantastic Four trailer, (have I mentioned I am happy it’s a period piece?):

Look at photos of the period and you’ll see that yeah, other than size, this would have been a great way to blend in. The fact that it has been fossilized as a trope in media now is also fun.

In the early 2000s I wore a fedora regularly.

One time at the doctor’s office the doctor saw it hanging on the door and laughed. He said that when his family moved to America from India in the 1970s all he really had to understand the country were old films and he was worried (and upset) that he was going to have to dress like this because that is what everyone did here. He was very thankful that was not the case–and it had already been waning for at least a decade by then.

Thanks, Jack.

The poem, The Death of the Hat was the first I had ever read by poet Billy Collins. It’s the one that set me down the path of following him, marveling at how much the Academy dislikes him (which I will unpack in a Billy Collins and Norman Rockwell post someday), and enjoying the time spent reading his poems with my son.

Somehow along the way incels picked it up as a prop and I moved to bowlers, and a straw gambler style for summer. I suppose if these get usurped in the next generation I’ll go back farther and start wearing tri-corn hats. But, I digress. Often. In fact, if you are on the hatrack about how this is a strange thing to spend time writing about please take a moment to look at this collection of hats worn in Hanna-Barbera Cartoons.

The 1980s had its share of continued trends. It really had become cultural shorthand for a character being “in disguise.” In 1988 when the younger version of Shaggy and Scooby were trying to hide from the comic book devouring Dr. Croaker, you know what they chose?

All the while Daphne was emphatically trying to set them straight.
“Don’t you two know the Bogart Look is out this season?”

The ensemble starts out as an homage but turns into at least a pastiche if not a running gag in the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles properties. The 1990 live action film sees Raphael taking in a movie (Critters) incognito in a fedora and a trench coat. Later when he is running and rolls over the hood of a taxi the driver says “looked like a giant turtle in a trench coat.”

Another iconic one-off that received a Funko Pop, and a separate adult collector action figure™

The running gag part falls into the animated series where early in the series it’s used in a more serious manner (to be fair the first season was used in a more serious manner).

Later the hats and the series was much lighter.

Then the whole thing took a very uncanny valley turn when April brought them bald latex human masks.

This look was so iconic, that even though it wasn’t in a ton of episodes, it it scarred everyone enough to remember it as if it were that when NECA offered the four turtles in disguise the creepy masks were part of the accessories.

Screen accurate cartoon turtle figures were a long time coming. I’d say, about long enough for one of us to grow up and start making the toys we wanted as kids. There was an undercover turtle in the playmate line, but it was only Donatello and it was more Spy Turtle than what we’d seen on television. It is a favorite though.

The 90s animated Fantastic Four kept Ben in his coat, though this one pulling from a different color palette.

To be fair there was a blue one back in the original run of comics, too.

I haven’t watched that series of Fantastic Four (yet), but I did get enough while working on the screenshots for it that Ben’s girlfriend is blind. In an episode of X-men, Beast has nearly the same relationship while working to cure a woman’s blindness in the episode imaginatively entitled Beauty and the Beast. This episode is where most of the images of Beast wearing his trench coat disguise come from.

There are also variants of course, with a few mods here or there depending on the medium. In addition to his suits and coats, Beast also has more fitted duds and is apparently a fan of Howard the Duck.

Ben gets the cowboy treatment with a western style fringed cowboy jacket on the cover of the All Ages Marvel Adventures series.

Blending In or Standing Out?

When is a costume not a costume? When it’s a uniform. Let’s be real for a second. As if any of the preceding material would lead us to believe we can. There is virtually no difference between a uniform and a costume except maybe in the number of them that look the same.

The trench coat and hat is part and parcel of anyone calling themselves a detective, inspector, or a spy. Inspector Clouseau for one.

The animated bits before the movie featured the Inspector in a trench coat. The character was changed slightly when Depatie-Freleng started the Pink Panther cartoons and gave the Inspector his own series of shorts.

The Pink Panther himself takes up spy work not once but twice. Once it the 1965 short Pinkfinger and later in the 2010 Pink Panther and Pals series short The Spy wore Pink. Separated by 45 years, the style is the same.

Excepting the loss of the pipe.

The practicality of a trench coat might be a little overstated. This may lead to disappointment when you discover upon attempting to purchase one for yourself it does not come with nearly unlimited storage on the inside which doesn’t change the cut and drip of the coat on the outside.

Likewise finding one that is bulletproof, like Secret Squirrel or the corporate drug dealers in the movie Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man may be more difficult than expected.

Another famous inspector, and one who ended up with a letter from MGM about shaving, utilizes the coat in more ways than storage.

Another interesting aspect to Inspector Gadget is that the coat itself changes along with the character design. In the rebooted 2015 run on Netflix the premise of bringing Gadget out of retirement the overhauled his look for the 21st century which basically only shortened his trench coat for more “modern styling.” The center gadget with darker coat was from Gadget and the Gadgetinis which was a series on Fox kids but started about the time of the selling and merging and was only broadcast in Europe. Thanks to the internet you can find them, and I need to talk more about them in a full Gadget post, but for now it’s a midline in comparison and worth a watch if you can find it.

It also doesn’t get more iconic than the noir detective films. Robert Mitchum’s Philip Marlowe nails the style solidly.

This style, and I don’t just mean clothes, inspired a host of creators that dropped them back into the public consciousness less to extend their lives than to simply pay tribute to things they loved. It shows up a lot in the Real Ghostbusters cartoon. This one specifically as Philip Spade comes back from the dead in order to finally solve a cold case that had above average supernatural involvement. It’s not the best episode but it is one of my favorites. First as a kid liking the characters, then later when I realized it was a love letter to the old detective films, still later when I started working on museums in popular culture, and still later than that when it was one of my son’s favorite episodes because he liked the mummy.

There is also everyone’s favorite rumbled detective Columbo in his trench style rain coat.

The living half of Valiant and Valiant Detective Agency was similarly clad in working attire.

Lennie Briscoe (Jerry Orbach) took his coat with him across series and really caught the feel of what it looked like to be a detective. By the way, if the internet hasn’t told you already, he is also the voice of Lumiere in Disney’s Beauty and the Beast. There are some great clips of him recording the songs. He had a distinguished theatre career before he became the cop of the 90s.

Now that is a Coat of a Different Color

Stepping out of the standard drab here for a bit (Ben’s blue coat already mentioned notwithstanding), trench coats hit popular culture in a variety of styles, colors, and uses. I am just going to drop them here with a few notes and wrap this up because how can anyone have 2800 words to say about trench coats? (Did you not follow the cartoon hat link above?)

You may not know where in the world she is, but you definitely know and remember what she was wearing. Carmen SanDiego is immediately identifiable in her matching coat and hat.

Which is style that carries over into the modern reboot:

Older–if not bolder– than Carmen is the man in the yellow hat AND jacket: Dick Tracy.

Not to be outdone on that side of the color wheel, X-men’s Jubilee shares those chromatic sensibilities.

DC’s The Question comes in with another blue entry.

Hellboy’s brown jacket is darker than the standard tan, though it’s closer to sand in the comics. This may side with the duster style since it is single breasted and has that cowboy cape thing.

Anime is filled with them, or at least parts of them. Think Vash from Trigun or Alucard from Hellsing. Vash’s is split in places where pleats would have been and Alucard’s doesn’t button.

You may think that the titular character in Vampire Hunter D is also wrapped in a flowing coat, but it’s more of a cloak or a cape. I think that it is a degree of opposites with costumes in anime; they are as long as it can be or as short as it can be. 

For the mileage gotten out of them in media like comics and cartoons you can not beat the trench coat. It can be both dramatic and understated. You can have this great flowing great visuals giving all kind of movement in one panel or a splash page, but then you don’t have to spend countless hours redrawing every detail of a costume in every other panel. By not having to draw what’s underneath the coat in each panel, attention and detail can be placed elsewhere. Sometimes this works on the same page, within the same panel, or on a single cover.

While dramatic and/or reserved in live action bits, several iterations are used. The costume team behind Doctor Who had the long coats of Tennant’s 10th Doctor and Captain Jack Harkness in varying lengths depending on the needs of the scene. They had shorter ones for running scenes, which makes sense because a full on sprint in something that sits below your calves is just asking to recreate that scene in Dumbo when he trips and crashes into the ball. Also a full length wool coat is just heavy.

I am going to close with arguably the current most famous, or infamous, or recognized character in a trench coat.

It’s really hard to argue about this character design and all that it entails. With the whole “you should make characters who are recognizable in silhouette” rule, there aren’t any better than the X-men. A lot of X-characters where long coats. We’ve already seen Jubilee. Multiple Man does. And the cover of X-factor 100 illustrates the power of the costume in visual storytelling. The tattered and torn jacket conveys a TON of emotional investment without blood and gore.

When I say a lot, I mean mostly Multiple Man multiple-ly-ing. Quantity over quality.

And just like waiting patiently for Wolverine to show up in the movies in his yellow spandex, the internet vehemently erupted when the first leaked stills of Gambit in Deadpool and Wolverine hit the net.

I’ll have more to say about Gambit and his jacket in the X-men post when I get around to making that one. It was the first X-men action figure I had and I hated the vinyl jacket that came with it so much I got on my grandmother’s sewing machine and I made one out of felt. I also spent years looking for a long coat like this that was brown (not black) and more city styled than the weird Australian Outback ones that were waxed and had a giant cape with snaps under the arms.

I’d also be remiss not to had some honorable mentions here at the end of this. Rorschach from Allen Moore’s The Watchmen is another of those iconic trench coat wearing characters:

And then there is the 1999 four issue series The Trenchcoat Brigade consisting of John Constantine, Doctor Occult, Mister E, Phantom Stranger, and Rose Psychic who did wear a trench coat but was never on a cover of the limit four issue series. Both she and Dr. Occult debuted back in 1935. Phantom Stranger arrived in 1952, Mister E debuted in 1980, and John Constantine first became a supernatural advisor to Swamp Thing in 1985.

Some things never go out of style.

Here’s a funny post script for you. While these characters are all mostly men, or in the case of Jamie Madrox, multiple men, when you punch “trench coat” into the ever trusty Goog-lee, the first three rows of “All” are sponsored and product ads for trench coats… all for women.