In the recent X-MEN film, one of the most telling in-jokes was Cyclops' line, in response to Logan's disgruntled sneer about the leather jumpsuits the X-Men wore, about whether he would prefer wearing spandex. In the context of the film, this was a throwaway pop-culture reference to the film's source, the X-MEN comics, as to most movie-goers, comics are about a bunch of people in funny outfits hitting each other. In terms of subtextual commentary about comics as a medium, it was much more insightful than it seems.

Sequential art has long used its own unique and distinctive methods of identifying characters and people, long before comics ever became a medium on its own. In European culture, sequential art was used hundreds of years ago to educate the illiterate lay-people as they visited church. Altarpieces, triptychs and the like bore scenes from the Crucifixion or the Book of Revelations, illustrating the importance of remaining faithful and best preparing oneself for the Day of Judgement.

So that a priest's illiterate flock might be able to grasp the meaning of these sequences properly, it was of vital importance that saints, angels and Christ himself be immediately recognisable. This was achieved by using repeated motifs such as haloes, the iconography of the Cross or the Lamb, and, for individual saints, identifying symbols like St Peter's crossed keys.

Elsewhere in a church, the sets of stained-glass windows also showed the peasantry who their feudal lords were in the form of heraldry. The exploits of a serf's secular master were of great importance, so it was necessary to be able to tell him apart from any other characters, just as a modern reader might at a glance need to tell, say, Dr Doom apart from Dr Strange, or Spider-Man from Spider Jerusalem. Thus a knight or lord's own personal insignia were displayed about his person, or even became a symbolic representation of the lord - a lion or bear, for instance, standing rampant over its vanquished foe. Not a million miles away from a bat signal projected into the night's sky.

The usage of identifying motifs in medieval sequential art was not confined to churches, though. The most famous surviving example of sequential art from this period, the Bayeux Tapestry, illustrates the Battle of Hastings, fought between the Anglo-Saxon forces of King Harold and the conquering Norman troops of William. In order to differentiate between the two sides in the busier battle scenes, the Saxons were characterised by their 'kite'-shaped shields, and the Norman invaders were mounted on horseback. The most important characters, such as William and Harold themselves, were distinguished from the rest by Latin inscriptions, and the hirsute Harold was a clear contrast to the clean-shaven William from a visual perspective.

Whereas the usage of uniform and easily-recognisable motifs and features in medieval sequential art was designed to tell individual characters apart and to make the most important instantly recognisable, no matter how crude the representation, later ages modified what costumes and repeated symbols might mean. In the works of sequential art created by the English artist William Hogarth in the 18th century, a particular character could be identified from one painting or print in a sequence to another by similar methods, such as a repeated motif, or in the case of MARRIAGE A LA MODE, by the large black spots that represented venereal disease.

'Prints became less simplistic and iconic, and more realistic and representative.' What made Hogarth's use of symbol and uniform different was that he gave it an entirely new level of significance - the black spots didn't just mark one character from another, but also revealed that the character in question was corrupt and the bearer of disease. 'Uniform' had come to mean something by itself - it had become social commentary as well as a purely distinguishing feature.

This development also marked an increase in the sophistication of the art. It was no longer of fundamental importance to give the viewer visual clues as to who people actually were, as artists were able to portray the same character from 'panel' to 'panel' with a degree of precision and technical adeptness that simply had not been available to pre-Renaissance creators. Therefore, the paintings or prints were less simplistic and iconic, and more realistic and representative of their subjects.

Moving much closer to the present, the fledgling comics industry of the early 20th century ran up against new factors that influenced the need for a regressive step to a more simplistic artistic style: mass-production and cost-effectiveness. If a pulp comic strip had to be printed every week and distributed around a whole country, then by necessity some artistic shortcuts would have to be taken to ensure that the strip made its deadlines. In Hogarth's day, making the plates for a whole set of prints or engravings would have been extremely time-consuming, but it only needed to be done once. For a weekly strip, the creative process would have to be repeated every seven days.

To make the production of these pulp comics easier, simple lines and extremely limited colours were used. In the Golden Age heyday of Detective Comics, this meant that distinguishing one pin-stripe-suited gangster from another was particularly difficult, and a trenchcoat-wearing detective would be far too similar to a different comic's protagonist anyway.

No wonder that Chester Gould's Dick Tracy had the weirdest line-up of villains imaginable; after all, real-life gangsters Dillinger and Nitty were just normal men in suits. Flat-top, Itchy and Mumbles were memorably grotesque - you'd never mix them up with any other bad guys. And as for the heroic protagonists, why not give them their own gimmicks? Why not dress one guy up as a bat, have him swinging on a rope, and dispensing his own brand of vigilante justice? It would certainly set him aside from the other hardboiled private dicks.

This method of distinguishing one character from another was merely the tip of the iceberg in relation to the benefits of having costumed heroes. It meant that the character in question differed not only from other characters, but also from the rest of society in general. After all, it's not a normal pursuit to go running around rooftops fighting crime during the middle of the night, and the costume serves to point this out to the reader straight away, just as a halo on a saint illustrates his divinity and separation from the rest of humanity.

Technical and financial limitations also dictated the appearance of characters. Colour printing was difficult and expensive for early comics, so the more basic and simplistically coloured an outfit, the better - hence the bold primary colour schemes of Golden Age characters such as Superman. A simple costume would always be recognisable, no matter how crude the reproduction. Due to the convention of costume, the readers would also still be able to distinguish who the hero was if a strip changed artists or styles over a period of time.

'A simple costume would always be recognisable, no matter how crude the reproduction.' Now that the production values of comics are better than they have ever been, it has become less of a priority for an artist to make a character stand out a mile. In recent works such as Eric Shanower's AGE OF BRONZE, the members of the huge cast list are given distinctly individual characterisation with a lightness of touch that represents both a commitment to accuracy and a subtle grasp of each personality. The reader doesn't need two utterly different outfits to tell Odysseus from Paris.

The same is true of Rucka and Lieber's WHITEOUT; the characters are distinctive, but don't need signs dangling around their necks proclaiming X to be a police officer and Y to be a doctor. The visual storytelling of comics has reached a level of sophistication that means that prominent symbols would appear in many cases to be far too crude or bizarre a means of identification.

Comics are still regarded as being about a bunch of people in funny outfits hitting each other, though, as the X-MEN movie proved. They might not have been wearing spandex, but they were wearing leather jumpsuits. So, it's a step away from the lurid designs of pulp comics, but a tentative one at best. This is hardly surprising, and neither is the recalcitrant public perception of comic-book characters, when one takes into consideration the fact that the subjects of European sequential art have been walking symbols for centuries. That kind of continuity is even harder to circumvent than that of X-MEN, but there are encouraging signs that sequential art, and comics in particular, are maturing quietly into something more than a collection of heraldic insignia.

Lindsay Duff is a literature graduate and researcher.

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