Live-action superhero costumes are caught in a bind: fidelity to the original comic book designs privileged by fans tend to result in impossible garments, which can create diegetic gaps that prevent audiences from fully accepting the costumed hero as ‘real.’ Visual
fidelity, believability, and pragmatic feasibility are all desirable, but fidelity tends to be mutually exclusive with the other two criteria. The representational gaps that these impossible garments seem to demand only reinforce the palpable disconnect between the live-action body of the actor and the (increasingly) computer-animated body of the costumed superhero. The way out of this problematic is to treat the cinematic superhero as an ontologically hybridized figure – always both man and superman – that requires a hybrid mode of representation that seamlessly blends live-action photography and (digital) animation in order to transcend the gutters of the comic book and be fully cinematic. A discussion of the Iron Man film franchise will demonstrate how this strategy contrasts with the dominant approach taken in the vast majority of superhero films.