COMICS: Initial Designs For Captain America's New Marvel NOW! Costume

Thanks to MTV Geek, we have the following early designs of Captain America's new costume by artists Jerome Opena And John Cassaday. Both of them will play a major role in Marvel's NOW! relaunch with Opena working with Jonathan Hickman on The Avengers, and Cassaday teaming up with Rick Remender for Uncanny Avengers. Also below are comments from editor Tom Brevoort on the redesign, although you can find much more by clicking on the link below. Bear in mind that these are just some of the initial designs and that the final product will look a lot more like the costume seen in the finished promo images at the very bottom of the page.

"The approach and the thought was very simple: we wanted to modernize Cap’s outfit so as to reflect the gear worn by actual soldiers, to convey that sense of the character visually. Every costume design change is really change for change’s sake, and certainly Cap’s costume is a classic. But that said, it’s been updated before, and so long as what we ended up with still looked like and gave you the silhouette of Captain America, that was what was important to me. We just did years of stories in which Bucky wore a variant of Cap’s costume, and people were able to accept it just fine, and still recognize and react to him as Captain America. Same thing here. We weren’t really thinking about the movie incarnation per se, though it’s difficult to avoid it I suppose. But even there, Cap’s already had two completely different suits in the movies, in CAP: FIRST AVENGER and then in MARVEL’S THE AVENGERS. What we were really going for, more than anything, was the feeling of Cap being an actual soldier. At the outset, I did some research and collected a bunch of different photographs of modern military gear, helmets and what-have-you, and they all informed the design we eventually settled on."