The title of this paper comes from a line spoken by the character Jenny Sparks in Warren Ellis's first issue as writer on the WildStorm title Stormwatch (#37, July 1996) after she is recruited to the eponymous super-team. Something of an avatar for Ellis, Jenny's attitude towards conventional superhero costume is representative of Ellis's own dislike of what he has termed 'pervert suits', and her reluctance to join the team because superheroes always target 'the soldiers not the generals' is an expression of Ellis's dislike of the superhero genre's essentially reactionary power dynamics.

Despite his contempt for the superhero genre, Ellis revitalised it in the late 1990s/early 2000s with his work on the titles The Authority and Planetary for WildStorm, an imprint of the independent publisher Image Comics. Although not creator-owned books – produced under work-for-hire conditions they are the intellectual property of the the publisher - these comics nevertheless contributed greatly to Ellis's growing status as a revisionary comic book auteur comparable to Alan Moore or Grant Morrison. Significantly, both titles prominently featured super-powered characters who wear 'civilian' and/or military clothing rather than costumes. Earlier this year, Ellis released a 're-imagining' of the WildStorm Universe (the fictional world shared by the publisher's range of superhero titles) with the on-going DC Comics series The Wild Storm (DC having acquired WildStorm in 1999 and later made it defunct) which dispenses with traditional superhero costumes entirely.

In this paper I will discuss how Ellis's rejection of traditional costume expresses his distaste for the genre but also his ambitions for it, arguing that his use of civilian and military garb is part of an entryist strategy to subvert generic conventions in an attempt to reposition superhero comics within other genres such as crime, tech thriller and science fiction. In doing so I will draw on Richard Reynolds' classic structuralist reading of superhero comics Superheroes: A Modern Mythology (1992) and Geoff Klock's analysis of Ellis's WildStorm work in How To Read Superhero Comics and Why (2002), as well as my own previous work in this area.