The actor:	Brad Bird
The character:	Edna Mode
The film:	The Incredibles
The line:	“No capes!”

On April 23, 1957, the SNL and sitcom veteran Jan Hooks was born, but we know that death is as much a part of life as birth. On that same day, the superhero Stratogale was killed when she was sucked into the turbine of a passenger plane. No word on what happened to the airline or its passengers; Chesley Sullenberger was six years old and unavailable to land the plane.

On November 15, 1958, Tyrone Power died at the tragically young age of forty-four. On that same day, Thunderhead foiled a criminal plot only to be killed when his cape got stuck on a rocket. In a similar space of time, three other superheroes were lost not to combat or treachery, but to their capes. Capes are to superheroes what typhoid was to soldiers in the Civil War.

Even after loving this line for years, I’ve never really given a lot of thought as to why superheroes would wear a cape in the first place. For the answer to that question, I headed to capes.com, where I found this article about what the deal is. My first instinct, that this has to do primarily with Superman having a cape, appears to have been more or less correct per this article. However, just as Superman is far from being the first serialized superhero, so too is the cape on a hero older than Clark Kent’s alter ego. Aside from other comic book characters with capes, the author of the piece reminds us that many of the heroes of 19th Century fiction, such as Alexandre Dumas’ musketeers or Zorro, wore capes for one reason or another. The cape is a practical consideration the further back you go, whether it’s about warmth or stealth or even protection in combat.

While Edna, designer to the superheroes, has her basically impossible ways of creating power-dependent supersuits for the supers in the world of The Incredibles, there’s no sign that she put the capes on any of those suits for reasons beyond the aesthetic. They do, as Bob says, look pretty sharp. Given that Thunderhead, Stratogale, and Dynaguy all wore their costumes to Bob and Helen’s wedding and looked nifty, the evidence is on Bob’s side even if his nuptials have a higher body count than one usually associates with the blessed day. And Stratogale looks great with her cape fluttering in the breeze up until the moment when she slides right into the engine like a digit into a Chinese finger trap.