Comic Book Dictionary

Comic Book Dictionary - Underscorigins

by Brian Cronin
Wednesday, August 6th, 2008 at 8:25 AM EST

This week's first issue of Venom: Dark Origin brings up something that I call "underscorigins."
Read on if you don't mind being spoiled about the first issue of Venom: Dark Origin!

Comic Book Dictionary - Exit/Return Quality Quotient

by Brian Cronin
Thursday, May 22nd, 2008 at 1:54 PM EST

How odd - comments were off for some reason. Strange. I re-enabled comments! Sorry about that. - BC
Two recent illogical returns of comic book characters made me think about this one, which states that the the quality quotient of a character's return in the eyes of fans seems to be based upon the dividend of [...]

Comic Book Dictionary - Hang a Lampshade

by Brian Cronin
Thursday, February 7th, 2008 at 3:58 PM EST

Steven Padnick let me know about this term, which is not really a comic book term, per se, but more just a literature term that also applies to comic book writing as well as it applies to any other literary medium (Stephen actually used the alternate term, "hang a lantern").
It refers to the practice in [...]

Comic Book Dictionary - 90s Good

by Brian Cronin
Sunday, October 14th, 2007 at 12:32 PM EST

Commenter Todd Lawrence reminded me of this concept when he was discussing Karl Kesel's Daredevil run in an entry last week. Lawrence brings up a strong point - during the 1990s, there was a number of good comic books. However, there was also a special subset of comics that were what I am now defining [...]

Comic Book Dictionary - Pygmalion Characters

by Brian Cronin
Wednesday, September 5th, 2007 at 10:41 PM EST

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 [...]

Comic Dictionary - False Epiphany Characters

by Brian Cronin
Tuesday, July 17th, 2007 at 5:19 PM EST

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 [...]

Comic Dictionary - Grace Notes

by Brian Cronin
Tuesday, July 17th, 2007 at 5:17 PM EST

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 [...]

Comic Book Dictionary Help!

by Brian Cronin
Thursday, April 26th, 2007 at 3:29 AM EST

in Comic Book Dictionary, General
74 Comments

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 [...]

Comic Book Dictionary - Women in Refrigerators

by Brian Cronin
Monday, April 9th, 2007 at 2:25 AM EST

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 [...]

Comic Book Dictionary - Obligatory Continuity

by Brian Cronin
Wednesday, February 14th, 2007 at 8:52 AM EST

I've explained nepotistic continuity and paternalistic continuity, now today I will explore obligatory continuity.

Comic Book Dictionary - Gimme Idea

by Brian Cronin
Thursday, October 26th, 2006 at 2:43 AM EST

A gimme idea is an idea that is so good, a comic would be pretty good just by the existence of the gimme idea.

Comic Book Dictionary - Colorform Cover

by Brian Cronin
Sunday, September 24th, 2006 at 8:06 PM EST

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 [...]

Comic Book Dictionary: Venom Discretion Test

by Brian Cronin
Saturday, July 29th, 2006 at 4:04 AM EST

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 [...]

Karaoke Comics

by Brian Cronin
Wednesday, June 7th, 2006 at 8:45 PM EST

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 [...]