Why Do So Few Marvel Comics Heroes Wear Capes?

It has been remarked from time to time that DC and Marvel Comics' casts of heroes differ in, among so much else, their propensity for cape-wearing.

DC's most iconic superheroes wear capes--both Superman and Batman doing so. Wonder Woman is less identified with them, but she is not unknown to wear a cape herself--which means the Justice League's "Big Three" are covered here. And of course one has an easy time coming up with other examples--most obviously figures derivative of or associated with the Big Three, like Superman's fellow arrival from planet Krypton Supergirl (and Powergirl), and Batman's sidekick Robin (and Batgirl and Batwoman), but also that original Green Lantern Alan Scott and the Martian Manhunter (making for at least five sometime cape-wearers in the Justice League), and Robin's fellow Teen Titan, Raven.

By contrast capes are less common in the Marvel universe. Among the X-Men, for example, only Storm is apt to be seen wearing one--a single member of the principals on the X-Men team, as against all those Justice League members, while it says something that one could miss the fact given the split design of her particular cape in the version of her appearance most are probably familiar with. (I actually misremembered the cape as a wingsuit until I checked up on the matter for this item.) Thor and Dr. Strange both wear capes, but in fairness they are relatively minor Marvel figures--certainly next to Spider-Man, or the Hulk, or Captain America, or Iron Man, or the members of the Fantastic Four, or Wolverine and the other X-Men, whose cape-wearing was, at best, rare, obscure, likely not seen in a very long time. (Indeed, a glance at one recent list of the Marvel cape-wearers confirms this--only the really hardcore fan of superhero comics likely to have even heard of most of those likely to be seen in a cape, as with a Moon Knight.)

In fact the more prominent Marvel cape-wearers tend to be villains--like Dr. Doom and Magneto.

Why is that?

My guess is that Marvel in the classic, Silver Age period in which it churned out the superheroes we know it for inclined to more grounded figures--to whom the flamboyant impression made by a cape is less suited. At the same time, probing the possibilities of the superhero form in that way that tends to go with the second, "middle," generation of a genre's life cycle, they hit upon a lot of characters whose wearing a cape would make no sense whatsoever--as with wheelchair-using Charles Xavier, the Hulk-transforming Bruce Banner, or your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man swinging along from webs he shoots out of devices on his wrists (that was how it originally went if you remember those old numbers), while this was even more the case with those cash-in-on-a-trend types like '60s spymania product Nick Fury, or the Mack Bolan-inspired The Punisher.* There was less such inhibition regarding the villains, where I think there was less aspiration to produce something different from DC's offerings.

* I refer here to John Barnes' theory of a three-generation life cycle. Discussed previously on this blog in many a post, you can find it applied to superhero comics specifically here.