Earlier this year, I asked for help naming a particular term, and thanks to poster Kid Kyoto, I have my name for it - Pygmalion Characters.

Pygmalion characters are those characters where, while not a proxy for their author/creator, the writer still goes out of his/her way to make their creation “the best at what they do.” I think we can all agree that it is, generally speaking, pretty tacky when a brand new character created by a book’s writer is suddenly beating up established characters, with the presumed intent of making the creation of the writer look better. They are basically just pet characters.

Remember how annoying it was when Batman was turning to Tarantula for help during War Crimes? Stuff like that - it’s silly and poor writing.

Tarantula, though, was not a “Mary Sue” of writer/creator Devin Grayson. But she WAS a bad character who fits into a specific reoccurring category of characters written by their creators who suddenly are “the best” and have other characters talk about how good they are (Another good example is Constantine Drakkon in Green Arrow).

So Kid Kyoto suggested Pygmalion, based on the famous Greek myth of the sculptor who fell in love with his own creation. That nails the concept beautifully, doesn’t it?

So pygmalion characters, it is!!

This one is by T.

False Epiphany Characters are characters that writers have become obsessed with writing the ultimate end-all/ be-all story for. Writers are so attracted with writing breakthrough stories for these characters that they regularly negate the previous writer’s breakthrough for the same character and simply hit the reset button. After seeing how Miller was able to make a legend out of himself by writing the breakthrough maturation of a B-level character like Daredevil or how Morrison made his mark with Animal Man and Doom Patrol, a lot of writers want to do breakthrough stories of their own with well-known, B-level characters in hopes of making legends of themselves also. It’s harder to do a breakthrough with Batman and Spider-Man because they have had so many classic runs, but lower-tier characters give a better chance at this.
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Over on the Comics Should Be Good forum, everybody’s pal, T, started up a thread about suggestions for the Comic Dictionary. So I figured I’d post a few of the suggestions that I thought were neat. Today I’ll do one by Omar Karindu (this one) and one by T.

Grace Notes are plot points that exist as homages, references, and reenactments of past stories of a character or title that have become iconic for that character or title. When Jean Grey goes Phoenix again, that’s a Grace Note; when Bullseye or the Green Goblin threaten the hero’s girlfriend, that’s a Grace Note; when Batman winds up facing Ra’s Al Ghul in a swordfight in the desert, that’s a Grace Note. When Green Lantern teams with Green Arrow for an issue or two, that’s a Grace Note.

The difference between a Grace Note and a mere homage is that a Grace Note is a plot point; and homage can be a deliberate coincidence of image or a reenactment sequence with no major bearing on the plot.
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Okay, so we are all familiar, more or less, with the term “Mary Sue,” right? It basically refers to self-insertion by the author in a story via a proxy character. However, is it really still a “Mary Sue” if the character is not a proxy for the author, but still, the writer goes out of his/her way to make their creation “the best at what they do”?
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As I mentioned when I started this particular series, the point of these entries is to explain to folks what I mean by certain terms that I use often. If people like my particular terms and definitions, then they are certainly welcome to use them as well, of course. I bring this up because today’s entry is about a term that I have seen many people use in many different manners, which makes it difficult for me to use the term, as folks do not know how I am using it. Here I will give my definition, so you at least will know what I mean when I use the term in the future. The term, of course (you can see the title, natch), is “Women in Refrigerators.”
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I’ve explained nepotistic continuity and paternalistic continuity, now today I will explore obligatory continuity.
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A gimme idea is an idea that is so good, a comic would be pretty good just by the existence of the gimme idea.
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Someone asked me what I meant by this the other month, and since I use the term so often, I figure it is worth doing as a Comic Dictionary entry.

Quoting Wikipedia’s entry for colorforms, the toy colorforms are “paper-thin, die-cut vinyl sheet images and shapes that could be applied to a slick cardboard background board, much like placing paper-dolls against a paper backdrop. The images would stick to the background via static cling and could be repositioned to create new scenes.”

Therefore, when I refer to a colorform comic book cover, I’m talking about a cover where it appears as though the cover artist drew a background (often by copying a photograph of a locale) and then photoshopped other figures s/he drew on to the background, making the figures not exactly appear as though they organically belong on the background, but rather, that they are like colorforms on a background.

In his weekly column, “One Fan’s Opinion,” yesterday, Erik Larsen discussed the idea (which Stan Lee has brought up) that, in the broad sense, readers are the “real editors,” in that they decide, by what they buy, what books are produced. It’s an interesting article, with a whole lot of truth (especially the part about the fickle nature of readers), but I think there’s a certain aspect of the comic industry that Larsen left out of his piece, and that’s what I will call the Venom Discretion Test.
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After doing a little karaoke recently, it made me think about how the concept could be applied to comics (it is quite strange how many things I think about how they could be applied to comics..hehe), and it occured to that there have been a bunch of books out there that I would consider to be “karaoke comics.”

A karaoke comic is a run on a comic that follows a previous run very closely, but as it is a copy, ends up being inferior to the original product.

Some examples:
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Idea Repertoire describes the stock amount of ideas certain writers continually fall back upon, no matter what type of comic they’re writing.
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Formatitis is when a comic book story suffers from being forced to commit to a specific format.

Notable examples of Formatitis include:
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Today’s term is “Easy Writing,” (for the pun value, I wanted to go with Easy Writer, but it just didn’t make as much sense as Easy Writing) which is defined as “When a writer has certain events occur in a comic, not because they make sense, but because the writer needs certain things to happen a certain way, and it is just easier to have characters act out of character/illogically than to put in the time to make the scene work logically.

Very often, this occurs during outside writing, but it does not always have to be outside writing. It can sometimes just be when a writer personally wants a story to go a certain way, but usually, it happens in outside writing, when an editor tells a writer that “X” HAS to occur, so the writer will just have X happen, and not spend the time to see if it makes sense or not.

Joe Rice came up with this term recently, and I really liked it, so I am offering it up to you folks here now. Rather than saying “Morrison’s X-Men,” the Progressive X-Men Era is expanded to include all the titles from the X-Line of the time, which marked a specific tendency to try new, progressive ideas.

The era started in May of 2001, with the launch of both Grant Morrison’s New X-Men, but also Peter Milligan and Mike Allred’s X-Force, plus Joe Casey’s Uncanny X-Men and X’s The Brotherhood. Not all of these projects worked out, of course (Casey and X’s projects basically flopped), but this time marked an age when the X-Books were willing to at least TRY new things. Other examples include the X-Factor mini-series and the David Tischman run on Cable.

The era officially ended with Morrison’s last issue of New X-Men in March 2004, but really, it probably ended a few months earlier, in late 2003, with the capitulation of Marvel editorial regarding the Princess Diana storyline in X-Statix. That was a clear statement of a return to conservative thinking on the X-Books.

Ah well, at least we got almost three years of progressive comics!

And, thanks to Joe, we also have a term to refer to it.

I thought I had this up here, but apparently, I only had it posted on Snark Free Waters, so I figured I might as well post it here, too.

The Ron Frenz Rule of Costume Design is a simple one. Don’t design a comic book costume too ornately. With every costume you design, always do so so that, if Ron Frenz were ever to draw it, it would look cool.

This is NOT meant to be a knock on Ron Frenz at ALL. His style is just geared towards simple designs, not ornate ones.

Therefore, if he can make your costume look basically the way you designed it, then you passed the test.

Examples of costumes that FAIL the Ron Frenz rule of costume design include the alien War Machine armor, a lot of Iron Man armors over the years, Metamorpho during Gerry Jones’ JLA run (that’s a slight exception, as it did not look good in JLA EITHER), Jericho’s costume, Namorita’s current look, etc.

Feel free to mention any costumes that you think break the rule!