Those giant-sized Man-Things are perhaps more relevant than some cosplay nay-sayers might like to admit. It's true that comics in recent years has tended to define itself as authentic, serious, and male against the frivolous artificiality of cosplay. But in other contexts, it's comics themselves that have been defined as feminized, frivolous, and artificial. Bart Beaty in his 2012 book Comics vs. Art pointed out that high art has often framed comics as "feminized kitsch"—much to the discomfort of comics creators. Pop artists like Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, and (more recently) Jeff Koons use comic books as a way to tweak high-art seriousness and the cult of the swaggering expressive male genius. In doing so, they linked comics to gayness, femininity, and camp. Beaty says that the massive success of the Adam West Batman TV series was especially painful for comics fans, since that show "drew heavily on a camp aesthetic." It did this, not least, through its colorful costumes. Ellis scorns the non-stick-thin bodies of cosplayers, but before those folks dressed up, Adam West was proudly sporting his Bat-paunch, to the delight of many a lusty villaineness.

More, according to Beaty, pop art was often validated as masculine itself in comparison to feminized comics. Lichtenstein, he says, has been figured as "a masculinized saviour of commercial culture" in comparison to "popular forms" like comics that are seen as "sentimental and feminized." In the catalogue for the 1993 traveling exhibition High & Low, curators Kirk Varnedoe and Adam Gopnik, for example, argued that "Pop art saved the comics." Pop art used comics to undermine masculinity, and then, in Beaty's view, built its own masculinity on a vision of itself swooping down to rescue a lower art form in distress.

The backlash to cosplay is in part guys trying to keep girls out of the male clubhouse. But in this context it can also be seen as feminized guys panicking at yet another in a long line of demonstrations that the male clubhouse isn't all that male to begin with. You could argue that cosplay's associations with fashion actually make it more highbrow than comics—the New York fashion runway and the New York gallery scene are more kin than either is to low pulp superhero comics. Cosplay is appropriating superheroes for art, much as pop art has done—and some in comics fear the results.

But they shouldn't. The truth is that cosplay is not a continuation of pop-art denigration by other means. Instead, it's an antidote. Pop art's self-conscious manipulation of comics is only possible, or painful, in a world where comics defines its legitimacy in narrow terms. Lichtenstein is only an outsider co-opting comics if you insist on seeing Lichtenstein as something other than a comics artist himself. Cosplay—like the Batman TV series before it—could be a way for fans to be the pop artists: to cast aside the wearisome performance of legitimacy for a more flamboyant, less agonized fandom. Once you stop neurotically policing boundaries, the question of whether comics or superheroes are masculine or feminine becomes irrelevant. If superheroes and comics are for everyone, that "everyone" automatically includes people of all genders, wearing whatever they wish.

Jo Yong Hak/Reuters