Stripperiffic / The DCU

The DCU

• Any heroine or villainess featured in any of the Ame-Comi Girls books. Special shout-out to Steel, who somehow manages to have a Stripperiffic suit of high-tech battle armor.
• Martian Manhunter's pre-52 costume was quite literally just a pair of small blue shorts, boots, red bandoliers crossed in an X over his chest, and a blue cape. Around Blackest Night, they finally decided to give him some pants, then covered him from literally neck to toe in fabric after the World War III miniseries. Nowadays, his chest is partially exposed but the rest of him is covered.
• Mostly averted in the case of the Batfamily:
  • Stephanie Brown/Spoiler. The first iteration of her costume (relatively loose-fitting catsuit, cloak, hood, gloves, and full face mask) had nothing exposed anywhere, not even her hair. Later on she loosened up to the extent of allowing her ponytail and the lower half of her face to be seen. This is more notable in that she was a teenaged girl, and one who spent considerable time in her early appearances trying to catch the attention of a teenaged boy. Apparently she felt that showing skin was for amateurs, and since she did eventually catch him, one can admit she had a point.
  • Cassandra Cain/Batgirl II. Her costume is more scary than sexy: head-to-toe black leather, a stitched up mouth opening, and black-tinted eyelenses (this combined with the black suit gives the appearance that she doesn't have eyes). In essence, Batgirl's costume looks more like something you'd expect a male villain to wear.
  • Barbara Gordon. As the original Batgirl, she wore a sensible costume that covered everything except for the lower part of her face; the high heels weren't present in every version of her costume. As Oracle, she sat behind her computers in a wheelchair and dresses in comfortable, often casual clothes.
  • Male example: the original Robin costume, with its green panties/short shorts, was for a long time the most stripperiffic costume of the Batman family.
  • Huntress' costumes either offer good protection and cover her from the neck down, or have been designed by Jim Lee. Especially jarring since Huntress is a Badass Normal and very much the Combat Pragmatist you can expect a Batfamily member to be, and showing her midriff when she once took four bullets in the stomach seems like a very, very bad idea.
    Black Canary: By the way, what's with the new outfit?
    Huntress: Seven-hundred sit-ups a day.
    Black Canary: Say no more.
  • The pre-Crisis Huntress — the Earth-2 Batman's daughter — wore a much better example of this trope, particularly for its time. Essentially a one-piece bathing suit with a low neck, sometimes with thigh-high boots, long before such things were anywhere near as common as they are now.
  • Played with in her live action incarnation on Arrow. When she needs to go undercover at an actual strip club she dresses in a version of her comic book costume. Her target takes a look and immediately believes she works there.
  • Catwoman wears a Spy Catsuit. The amount of skin showing is very, very little. However, that Depends On The Artist. She's often shown with a good amount of cleavage exposed, despite the otherwise practical nature of her costume. Especially noticeable in Arkham City and Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe.
  • Kate Kane as Batwoman goes on the list too, with a full-body suit that leaves just the lower half of her face uncovered. It looks like her hair is exposed, but that's actually part of the costume - it's a wig that pulls away with minimal effort, perfect for throwing off a villain who tries to grab it.
• Harley Quinn of Batman is an inversion of this as her costume covers her body to the point that her pigtails, hands, and feet are covered. In the New 52 however, her original costume◊ involved a pair of short shorts, stockings, a small cape, and a corset. She eventually switched to another one◊ that was somewhat more modest, but still more risqué than her old one with short shorts and a midriff-bearing top with some cleavage exposed. As Harley herself put it:
  "Nothing says l'chaim like a girl dressed in a stripper clown outfit wielding a hundred-pound mallet."
• In case you were starting to think that Batman and Batfamily related comics completely averted this trope, however, then Poison Ivy would like a word. As her thing is generally seduction and manipulation based on her looks, she's tends to reliably walk around in costumes that are incredibly skimpy at best. Her classic costume (and one of her more comparatively modest) involves a leafy corset and a pair of skin-tight green leggings, several modern versions have given her what's basically a prison jumpsuit top modified into a midriff-exposing tied-up shirt (an example can be seen on her character page linked previous), and her control of plants have given artists free-range to explore the... creative applications of fauna as clothing, to the point where some versions of her have been practically naked except for a few strategically-placed leaves and vines.
• One of the running complaints about the Star Sapphire Corps. Their origins lie in a race of warrior women and their place on the emotional spectrum is "love". Their costumes involve bare midriffs and nothing to cover their chest.
• A Stripperiffic male outfit is the costume Cosmic Boy wore in the Legion of Super-Heroes back in the '70s. His costume was actually held on by his magnetic powers. The costume was basically a black leather corset with matching gloves, booty shorts, and boots.
• Doom Patrol:
  • Flex Mentallo, a character introduced in Grant Morrison's run, is a rare male example in that his clothing typically consisted solely of a leopard-print speedo.
  • The tendency for characters in superhero comics to be scantily clad was mocked, alongside other conventions of comics at the time, in the alternate future Doom Force one-shot, where the villain Count Zero forced his sister Una to wear revealing outfits. After Dorothy Spinner inquires why Una wears barely anything at all while her brother is more formally dressed, Count Zero unconvincingly claims that his sister wants to dress that way. By the final battle, both siblings end up wearing so little that Una has pasties over her nipples and both her and her brother Anton have tiny coverings over their genitals with nothing covering up their rear ends.
• Power Girl's infamous Cleavage Window was actually deconstructed (or Hand Waved) once; she wanted to put a symbol there, like Superman, but could never figure out what to add. In the New 52, she now wore a more modest outfit◊ for a while. Critics and fans remarked that the creators were obviously not happy with this, and thus subjected PG to gratuitous amounts of Clothing Damage in order to compensate. She eventually returned to a variant of her old costume.
• Pre-Crisis Supergirl's costumes were -usually- relatively modest, but once she wore this costume◊. Remarkably, it was designed by a female fan. The post-Crisis pre-Flashpoint version of Kara Zor-El was also notorious during the early portion of her career for her skimpy crop-top and super-low-rise microskirt with constant panty shots, which was one of the several issues which contributed to the period being widely seen as an Audience-Alienating Era.
• Taken to its natural conclusion in Secret Six, which has an actual strip club where the dancers dress up as scantily-clad versions of DC superheroes and supervillains. In what may be a subtle lampshading of the trope, several of them aren't actually that different to the costumes they were originally based on.
• Teen Titans:
  • Ravager is an inversion; she dresses in revealing clothes as Rose Wilson, but her Ravager costume is neck-to-ankles chainmail.
  • Starfire, on the other hand, plays this completely straight as the resident Gold-Skinned Space Babe. Most versions of her costume are swimsuits with boots. Starfire's already-revealing costume went up to eleven in Red Hood and the Outlaws. She effectively had only a pair of pasties covering her nipples, and the bikini she wears late in the first issue actually manages to be more modest than her default costume. Word of God also said that they intended for the bikini scene to have her swimsuit be semi-transparent until DC issued an Executive Veto on it. The re-appearance of Blackfire also has her wearing less clothes compare to her pre-52 days. Funny enough, Starfire was wearing a bodysuit that cover her entire body sans her face when they face off.
• Watchmen
  • An odd Lampshade Hanging occurs in the graphic novel, in which a character uses it as a warped justification for Attempted Rape. It's also noticeable that the costume was only very Stripperiffic by 1940 standards.
  • And Dr. Manhattan, whose progressively-diminished costume provides a Stripperiffic clue as to how far back in his personal timeline each of his flashback appearances lies. The fact that he's first seen buck-naked, and is only later seen in skin-tight bodysuits or Speedos, may be a bit of a joke on this trope. The clothes are also used to show how disconnected from humanity he became over the years. He goes from full body suit, to what looks like a one-piece, then a speedo, then nothing at all. Each change in clothing represents a loss in his sense of humanity, with nudity showing his disconnect with traditional human values, such as modesty.
• Considering her stature (in both the comic book and real worlds), it can be a little jarring to really look at Wonder Woman and realize that her costume uses less actual cloth than practically every other superheroine's out there. There was a period in the 90's where the bottom of her suit basically became a thong, which was followed by a mercifully short-lived stint where she wore a new costume that was even skimpier◊.
  • Artemis, Diana's Anti-Hero Substitute and later ally occasionally wore thong leotards (particularly a white and green number) even after she stopped wearing the already revealing Wonder Woman outfit.
• Parodied, as with all things, in Young Justice on a few occasions. First was when Arrowette lamented that she'd have to become a super-villain and would have to start showing off her cleavage... then whining that she'd have to get cleavage (In a much later issue showcasing an alternate universe, semi-evil YJ, she is, indeed, wearing a cleavage-revealing outfit). Note that her costume was already kinda stripperiffic to begin with, combining. Which itself was parodied when she complained about ANOTHER archer in a similar outfit, wondering how that other archer was supposed to be taken seriously in such a get-up. She realized the hypocrisy and grumbled.
  • Played With: Empress/Anita Fite looks like this trope, but it's actually a full-body costume; all the "skin" in that picture is part of the outfit.
• Zatanna's and Black Canary's costumes both consist of fishnets and something with all the covering of a swimsuit (generally with a jacket on top). Zatanna is, admittedly, a Squishy Wizard (with more squish than average) so it doesn't much matter what she puts on, but Black Canary is a martial artist. Justified in Zatanna's case because she is a Stage Magician who can do real magic, and as such her outfit wouldn't be out of place onstage. The New 52 Black Canary gives a similar explanation: Dinah Lance is the lead singer of a famous rock band in the new continuity, so her Black Canary costume is designed to look like something that could be worn onstage.
• The Warlord: Nobody, male or female, wears much in the way of clothing. Somewhat justified given the tropical climate of most of Skartaris but, even so, you'd think the warriors would go for something a little more protective.
• Folding in the Quality Comics characters as the Freedom Fighters into the DCU had DC inherit Phantom Lady. Infamous for being a "good girl" pin up from the 40s, no version of the character had anything resembling a modest costume. In one case aside from the cape, gloves and boots, Phantom Lady fought crime in a pair of panties and a pair of vertical straps to cover her top.◊