Author Avatar - Television Tropes & Idioms

Excel Saga has both Koshi Rikudo (the Manga author) and Nabeshin (a contraction of Shinichi Watanabe, who made the Animé based on it).
- Anime director Nabeshin has appeared in more than just Excel Saga. He's also appeared either as a canon character or just a brief cameo in Nerima Daikon Brothers, Puni Puni Poemy, Hayate the Combat Butler, Nurse Witch Komugi-chan, Eyeshield 21, and possibly others.
Mokona from Magic Knight Rayearth represents (unsurprisingly) Mokona, the lead CLAMP mangaka.
- It's worth mentioning, though, that she's only the lead artist. Ageha Okawa is a lead scriptwriter, and her (new) name, meaning "Butterfly", obviously explains CLAMP's penchant for butterflies in their recent works.
- She actually takes turns with Nekoi as lead artist. Basically, Mokona is the one behind the fluffy bangs and the thick eyelashes, and Nekoi is responsible for the noodle people style.
Naoko Takeuchi named the protagonist of Sailor Moon's entire family after her own family, and compares Usagi to herself on occasion.
Astro Boy creator Osamu Tezuka frequently inserted self-portraits into his printed material; he invariably represented himself as a tall, skinny, big-nosed, bespectacled man wearing a beret and smoking a cigarette. In the Astro Boy collections, he drew new introductory pages for almost every story, in which he would provide opening narration and insights into the process of making manga. In his Buddha comic, he actually appears as a minor character, in his real life capacity as a white-coat wearing medical doctor.
Mattsu and Asu Tsubaki, the authors of He Is My Master, show up in heaven (as an alligator and a hamster, respectively) every time Izumi mentions God, usually to ignore her plea for help.
The nurikabe that appears in Mahoraba is apparently an avatar of author Kojima Akira.
Miho Obana makes several appearances in Kodomo No Omocha (with a single self-voiced catchphrase "I'm Obana.") and naturally she's well known to the characters for no adequately explained reasons.
- The television series mascot Babbit is sometimes confused for an Author Avatar since he gives so much running commentary, but that's more a result of Executive Meddling producing a surprisingly funny character.
- Meh, Obana's overt appearances are silly or humorous. Her real avatar is Sana's mother, especially in the manga.
Mangaka Shirow Masamune often draws himself as an octopus with a minigun for a nose.
Ken Akamatsu, Love Hina's mangaka, made appearances in the two Love Hina specials, which the girls in the cast commented on several times; at one point in the TV series, Keitaro Urashima works a very short time as a manga "inker" for Akamatsu. He also made an appearance in another animated adaptation of his work, Mahou Sensei Negima. His avatar is never used to voice opinions, though; he's only used as a plot device when the characters need something (like money or transportation).
- According to what I've heard, Keitaro and Mutsumi from Love Hina are based on Akamatsu and his wife, even though the main heroine is Naru.
- In one episode of the anime (never read the manga), Naru was temporarily an singer idol; possible a reference to the fact that Akamatsu's wife was a former singer idol.
In Doctor Slump and early issues of Dragonball, a small robotic man wearing a hat, with a face like a gasmask, would sometimes appear walking around in towns and villages. This was in fact the Author Avatar of mangaka Akira Toriyama.
- Wonderfully used when Turbo, Senbei's son, goes missing.
  Senbei: Turbo! Turbo! Where are you?
  Dog: (barks)
  Robot Toriyama: You've got business with my dog Turbo?
  Cut to Senbei angrily chasing Robot Toriyama around the field.
- Another great use of this was in the trailer for the third Dragonball Z movie. It opens with a majestic, swooping shot of...Robot Toriyama at his drawing desk.
- Akira shows up in this version as a videogame character as well, in one secret ending of Chrono Trigger. Mask hat and glasses all present.
  - Toriyama Robot also appears as a secret character in the videogame Tobal No.1, when the player clears all the floors of the expert level dungeon in Quest Mode. Akira Toriyama was the character designer for the game.
Johji Manabe caricatured himself and his two chief assistance as background characters in several of his stories. Most notably in Caravan Kid. "Pipe down it's just a patrol. We don't run unless the editor shows up".
Akira Toriyama's long-time friend Masakazu Katsura parodied this in his early series Wingman, where his characters would allude to a certain Mayarito-san. This is an allusion to Toriyama, only with the syllables reversed.
In Slam Dunk, a chibi named "Mr.T" would from time to time appear to explain basic basketball rules to the viewers. Logically, this is the Author Avatar of Takehiko Inoue.
In one episode, Elizabeth, an enigmatic creature/alien in the anime Gintama is revealed to be the director wearing a weird costume.
- This is more than likely a one-off joke, however, as it isn't referenced again any time in the series after that.
- The actual mangaka is portrayed as a gorilla in a t-shirt who complains about his boring life and how all he wanted to do was become a stack of waffles...
The author of Hidamari Sketch manifests as a Metapod-lookalike named Ume-sensei.
Harima in School Rumble.
Rohan Kishibe from Part 4 of Jojos Bizarre Adventure is intended to be a representation of Hirohiko Araki, the author. The character is a manga author to boot! His Stand is also very telling: he can read information on people and even write commands which they must follow, a very symbolic ability for someone who represents the author. He's also an Insufferable Genius.
- Ironically enough, Rohan absolutely despises Josuke, who Araki has stated to be his favorite character.
In the Nasuverse, Kinoko Nasu is depicted as a mushroom.
- Punny Name: "kinoko" means "mushroom" in Japanese.
If you see a small cartoonish bipedal cow with glasses in Fullmetal Alchemist, you've just met Hiromu Arakawa's avatar. She appears at least once in the anime (when Scieszka goes on a tangent about aliens), and several times as alchemized weapons or items in the games. She also appears at random times in the manga, whether on a logo of some sort or just a random appearance in the background.
Similarly, in the manga and anime D.Gray-Man, a pink rabbit called Yoshi with his tongue poking out often appears in various places — sitting on Lavi's shoulder, being thrown through the air by Kanda, ect. Yoshi is the avatar for Katsura Hoshino.
- In one of the gag comics, she reveals she's given birth to a baby... kitten.
Barasui, the creator of Ichigo Mashimaro, appears at the end of the first manga volume, mainly to apologize for the art shift and to be criticized by the main characters.
Eri Takenashi, the author of Kannagi appears as a blue humanoid thing twice in the anime version. Once on an information card, and the second time in a crowd of people Daitetsu scares out of the bathroom.
Black Dog, an H-manga mangaka, frequently appears in his work as a tiny black figure that apologizes to the audience for various things.
Makoto Raiku frequently appears in bonus material in the Konjiki No Gash Bell manga, but he makes one memorable appearance in the anime... as God. Victoream eats a magical melon which lets God grant him one wish, and he of course wishes for another melon - which Raiku cannot grant, because he ate it already. So Victoream instead wishes for a movie to be made about him, and Raiku complies.
Maeda-kun (aka MAEDAX), assistant to the creator of Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei, makes constant appearances in said anime in the form of a censorship bubble, clock face, or oddball cutaway.
- Koji Kumeta himself often appears as a stereotypical (probably correctly so) overworked manga artist.
In Keroro Gunsou, one of manga editor Aki Hinata's employees is called Yoshizaki-sensei, referring to Mine Yoshizaki (who not only created Keroro but used to work with Vision of Escaflowne creator Katsu Aki). This character goes on to appear onscreen several times, including one scene in the third movie where he's enthusiastically sketching Dark Keroro's flying fortress.
- To a lesser extent, there's a one-shot character called Yoshi Minezaki, a pallid woman in office garb.
In Busou Renkin, the author, Nobuhiro Watsuki, appears as a cartoony pig, and even appears for a very brief cameo in the anime, voicing himself in both the Japanese and English(!) versions.
The principal of the Yazawa Arts High School featured in both Gokinjo Monogatari and its Spin Off Paradise Kiss is the author Ai Yazawa herself. She does appear in Gokinjo (and takes the opportunity to lampshade the huge amount of Author Appeal going on in the manga), but in the latter she only turns up in a particularly crazy omake.
Shouji Kawamori, one of the creators and current mastermind behind the Macross franchise, appeared in several episodes of the recent Macross Frontier as a taciturn movie director, filming the in-universe version of Macross Zero. He was drawn in his perfect likeness except for a thick, bushy beard.
Many of the '60s and '70s scenes in Twentieth Century Boys are based on incidents from author Naoki Urasawa's childhood, though he denies that the main protagonist Kenji is actually based on him.
A variation in To Love Ru: the Girl Next Door is based on illustrator Kentarou Yabuki's wife...until he found out his wife was cheating on him behind his back, which lead to the abrupt cancellation of the manga. See Creator Breakdown.
Kagami Yoshimizu, creator of Lucky Star, depicts himself as a spherical cat with a tail. It never shown up in the main manga, but is commonly seen in the omakes and also the anime eyecatch.
In the author notes of Pokemon Special, the author is an Electrode, the first artist is a pencil-wielding, glasses-wearing Oddish, and the second artist is a Swalot. In the beginning of the Emerald arc during the Battle Frontier opening ceremony, an Electrode and a Swalot are the rental Pokemon that Lucy and Spencer fight against. (Does it say anything about the creators seeing how those two Pokemon got the shit beaten out of them?)

According to various fan theories at any rate, in The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen - Black Dossier, Alan Moore rather brazenly (if in a way that's fitting, given the nature of the work) adopts William Shakespeare's Prospero to act as his Stand In, using the character to discuss Moore's theories about the nature of fiction. According to these fans, as drawn the character certainly resembles Moore...
Grant Morrison inserted himself as godlike character in his run on Animal Man. This character, now referred to as 'The Writer' was killed in an issue of Suicide Squad by John Ostrander (possibly as a Take That).
- Morrison also quite obviously modeled King Mob of The Invisibles after himself, and certainly seems to believe that he and the character enjoyed some sort of mystical link, pointing to the fact that he suffered a collapsed lung during the time period when the character was recovering from a gunshot wound. Why, yes, Grant Morrison is a very strange man...
Yoshiro Togashi of Yu Yu Hakusho often turns up in the background of his work as goofy-looking dog, generally a stuffed toy or logo. In Hunter X Hunter he includes his wife, Naoko Takeuchi (also a manga-ka, of Sailor Moon fame) in her preferred shape as a bunny rabbit.
Jack Knight, The DCU's most recent Starman, was blatantly and unabashedly a dual creator avatar. The first volume's introduction has a third party writer note that Jack is writer James Robinson and that he bears a strong resemblance to artist and designer Tony Harris.
Jim and Maggie Power, the parents of Marvel's Power Pack, are very, very thinly-disguised versions of the husband-wife writer/artist team Walter and Louise Simonson. Louise Simonson co-created the original Power Pack series.
Warren Ellis does this quite a bit; sometimes the avatar's a writer, sometimes not. Pete Wisdom both in Excalibur, and later in Ultimate Human. Curzon, the British detective in his run on Thor. Spider Jerusalem in Transmetropolitan. The Wildstorm Universe has at least two: Planetary has Elijah Snow, and The Authority has Jenny Sparks.
Bryan Talbot has multiple facets of himself in Alice In Sunderland.
Stan Lee once admitted that of all his characters, he identified most with his most popular character, Spider Man, and even that he had modeled Spidey's way of talking on his own.
The title character of Johnny The Homicidal Maniac is meant to be an author avatar of Jhonen Vasquez, even down to the part where he writes a comic ("Happy Noodle Boy" — it's quite popular with the homeless insane) whose main character is meant to be an author avatar of the author avatar.
- Actually, Jhonen has debunked claims of this many times, including several Take That strips targeted at people who believe this.
  - To be fair, the fact that it's Johnen writing about Johnny, not to mention all the social commentary, could be part of why attempts to dispel this belief have been mostly unsuccessful. The fact that Jonny was also implied to be a former artist whose sanity decayed with his abilities does not help either.
  - The character Devi is probably closer to this. The stuff she goes through with NERVE is supposed to be similar to the way he felt while working at Nickelodeon.
In Neil Gaiman's The Sandman, Morpheus can change his shape as he likes, but he usually walks around looking like a tall, thin, pale man with messy, longish black hair, and he shows a preference for wearing black leather jackets and boots. Which also rather nicely describes Gaiman himself. He also calls himself "Prince of Stories" etc., appropriate for an avatar who tells stories (especially surreal, nightmarish ones) for a living.

Peanuts: Charles Schulz stated many times that he saw Charlie Brown as a miniature version of himself.
The title character in Cathy is basically a stand-in for creator Cathy Guisewite.
Elly Patterson, in For Better Or For Worse.
Stephin Patsis of Pearls Before Swine appears from time to time in his cartoons, often to get yelled at by his characters.
- During a brief arc where Darby Conley and Pastis collaborated on a gag, Conley appears in one or two Get Fuzzy strips where Pastis tries to peaceably get Conley to cease and desist his blatant ripping off of the day's Pearls Before Swine strips. He looks a bit like Rob, but distinct enough that you can tell you're looking at someone else; he portrays himself as an arrogant jerk who forgets Pastis' name as soon as he's done lying through his teeth at him.
Amos from 9 Chickweed Lane is basically the strip's author with the serial numbers filed off. Did I mention that Amos is a dorky cello player gets laid a lot?
Frank Cho appears in Liberty Meadows as ~~Frank the nerdy vet~~ a chimp in a sweater.
Bill Watterson described all of the characters appearing in Calvin and Hobbes as being "half me", although this was arguably subtle enough that few people noticed until Watterson actually came out and said it.
The title character of Frazz is into triathlons, and is particularly good at biking and bad at swimming. Which sounds remarkably like his cartoonist, Jef Mallett, except Frazz has better hair.

M. Night Shyamalan has cast himself in very small speaking roles in all of his films for simple Creator Cameos but then in Lady in the Water, Shyamalan cast himself as a writer whose work would "change the world" — a part coming much too close to a Marty Stu for many viewers.
- He's gonna be the Cabbage Man!
Quentin Tarantino tends to write himself slightly larger supporting roles in his films.
Stan Lee, in all the Marvel films except The Punisher. His role is becoming increasingly larger, and is something of an Easter Egg for fans. For example; in one of his earliest, he was a guy pulling a kid out of the way of falling debris in Spider Man. Now, he's seen, very clearly, drinking poisoned soda in The Incredible Hulk and telling Peter Parker that he's made a difference in Spider Man 3.
- Stan Lee found himself in Fantastic Four 2: Rise of the Silver Surfer, trying to get into the wedding but the doorman not believing he was really Stan Lee.
  - Which was inspired by the comics version of the wedding from Fantastic Four Annual #3, where Stan and Jack Kirby were thrown out of the wedding.
- Stan Lee also wrote a special comic in which he appeared alongside with the main Marvel heroes and each one of them expressed dislike for him. You have to admit, Stan the Man's great at poking fun at himself.
- In an episode of the animated series of Spiderman, Spiderman travels to a parallel universe and saves Stan Lee.
Stephen King, in adaptations of his own work. He actually becomes a very plot important character in his later The Dark Tower novels due to the meta nature and World as Myth qualities of the story, which include the Villains trying to kill him to prevent him from finishing the end.
Kevin Smith largely avoids this in his own movies, appearing as Silent Bob...until the very end, when he either has a huge hand in resolving the plot or delivers a critical bit of wisdom in one of his few speaking lines.
- Dogma is his character's least invasive role, where he utters maybe five words the entire movie, though he does still help out with Jay a fair bit.
  Silent Bob: No Tickets!
- Smith apparently wrote the role of Randal in the first Clerks movie for himself, but when he had difficulty memorizing all the lines, he decided to cast Jeff Anderson as Randal and became Silent Bob.

Many of Jorge Luis Borges' short stories like The Other feature a "Borges" as the narrator and the protagonist. In other stories like Tlon, Uqbar, Tertis Orbius (where the narrator is not named) Borges' friend Adolfo Bioy Casares appears as a supporting character.
Chaucer shows up as one of the pilgrims in The Canterbury Tales, and is the only one to get two stories out. The first is horrible, the second is applauded.
Agatha Christie used the character of mystery writer Ariadne Oliver as an Author Avatar in several of her novels. Oliver's comments about her detective creation, a vegetarian Finn, give some interesting insight into how Christie felt about Hercule Poirot.
Dante. Ur Example. Older Than Print
Robert A Heinlein has at least one of these in every book he ever wrote. Notables include Professor Bernardo de la Paz in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress; Johnnie's history and moral philosophy professor, Jean Dubois, in Starship Troopers, Jubal Harshaw in Stranger in a Strange Land and Lazarus Long by whichever name he's currently using, particularly in Time Enough For Love.
- And in at least one short story: — And He Built A Crooked House, where Heinlein is briefly mentioned as the "Hermit of Hollywood".
Gringoire in Victor Hugo's Notre Dame de Paris
Stephen Dedalus, the protagonist of James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and a major character in Ulysses, is a rather obvious Author Avatar — just look at book's title.
Randolph Carter is most certainly a stand-in for HP Lovecraft. Likewise Charles Dexter Ward from "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward" (who has a "long face" enjoys "rambling walks" and walks with a "slight stoop") and the ghoul in "The Outsider" are probably the author in various guises.
Ayn Rand admitted that Dominique Francon in The Fountainhead was her Author Avatar.
After Dorothy L Sayers' love affair with novelist John Cournos went awry (he'd wanted her to live with him without marriage, claiming a belief in free love, and revealed later that he was just testing her and wanted to marry her after all), she wrote a version of the affair into her successful mystery series featuring Lord Peter Wimsey. The novel Strong Poison features Sayers' avatar, Harriet Vane, on trial for the murder of the poet Philip Boyes, and Wimsey falling in love with her and setting out to prove her innocence. The next several books feature Wimsey's persistent courtship of Harriet, and in Gaudy Night she finally agrees to marry him, and the final book, Busman's Honeymoon, features the two solving a murder on their honeymoon.
- Sayers herself always denied the identification; when she once received a letter inquiring the name of the book in which Lord Peter had saved her from being hanged, she answered, somewhat severely, "Lord Peter has never rescued me from anything that I know of — except by selling sufficiently well to release me from being a wage-earner."
Werther, the main character of the epistolary novel The Sorrows Of Young Werther, serves as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's author avatar. Except for the suicide, which was in fact based on the life of one of Goethe's friends.
- Later in life, Goethe actually tried to distance himself from the book - he had grown to dislike his earlier romanticism, and was embarassed about the way he'd publicised his young love for Charlotte. To his ire, it remained one of his best-known works.
The nameless narrator of the original The War Of The Worlds is H. G. Wells with the serial numbers filed off.
Oscar Wilde, not wanting to be simple about it, is all three of the leads in The Picture of Dorian Gray, or so he claimed.
Sal Paradise from Jack Kerouac's On The Road.
Word Of God has it that Faramir is JRR Tolkien's avatar.
- Don't forget Beren from Silmarillion. That name is even inscribed on his tombstone! And "Lúthien" is inscribed on the tombstone of his wife, Edith. According to him, the story of Beren and Lúthien was their story, to the letter.
Esther Greenwood, the protagonist of The Bell Jar, is Sylvia Plath. Essentially every aspect of Esther from her appearance, talent for writing, bad luck with hypocrite boyfriends to her mental breakdown, suicide attempts, and subsequent hospitalization can be traced back to Plath herself in some way.
- Which takes a deliciously meta twist when Esther starts a draft of an account of her experiences, which is obviously The Bell Jar in a nascent form.
A particularly dismal example shows up in Moscow Petushki. Despite all the comedy, it's depressing when you realize that the real-life Venedikt Erofeev was, like the fictional one, living a miserable life that was unlikely to get better anytime soon.
The protagonist of Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas is actually named Raoul Duke, not Hunter S Thompson...
Michael Moorcock appears as his own great-grandfather in the first two books of the 'Nomad of the Time Streams' sequence of novels (The Warlord of the Air and The Land Leviathan), and as himself in the third (The Steel Tsar).
The Riverworld series by Philip Jose Farmer has as a recurring character Peter Jairus Frigate (note the initials), who is, of course, a writer of science fiction.
- Likewise, Farmer's World of Tiers series has a recurring character named Paul Janus Finnegan.
Author Clive Cussler makes appearances in most Dirk Pitt novels. The character usually has something named Periwinkle with him (a boat, a car, or in one case a donkey) and tends to act as a very small Deus Ex Machina to get Dirk out of whatever jam he's currently in (typically by simply providing him with transportation from point A to point B.) He'll often dole out small bits of wisdom, advice or insight as well. No matter how many times Dirk meets him Clive always seems familiar but Dirk fails to place him.
- The funny part is that Dirk Pitt is already a Marty Stu.
Author W.P. Kinsella wrote a fictionalized version of himself (named "Ray") as the protagonist of his novel Shoeless Joe (better known in its film adapation, Field Of Dreams).
Jeanette Winterson's novel Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, in which the narrator is named Jeanette, has a lot of autobiographical elements.
Ray Bradbury does this in three of his books - the unnamed narrator of Death is a Lonely Business, A Graveyard for Lunatics, and Let's All Kill Constance is almost certainly him. He's not the driving force behind the action, and is really just there to get it all down on paper.
Diana Tregarde, the occult detective heroine of three Mercedes Lackey novels: Burning Water, Children of the Night and Jinx High. Played straight in that Diana is, like Lackey, a novelist (though of romance novels rather than fantasy), a practicing neopagan, has delivered more than one Author Tract on behalf of Lackey's philosophy, and shares (according to reports) many of Lackey's own personality traits; subverted, ironically, by real life, in that Lackey found herself so often having to insist to fans with a less-than-firm grasp of reality that she herself was not a magically powerful occult guardian who fought hidden supernatural menaces that it contributed to her eventually abandoning the series. (The primary reason she moved on was simply that the books weren't making very much money, but the fan weirdness certainly influenced the decision.)
- Lackey is quite fond of this trope, actually; the most notable other example is Herald-Chronicler Myste from the Heralds Of Valdemar (a little more obvious when you know that Mercedes Lackey's nickname is "Misty").
The main character in The Great Divorce by C.S. Lewis is a stand-in for Lewis (or perhaps what Lewis would have been, in his own estimation, if he had remained an apostate), and even shares some autobiographical details.
Robert Rankin has inserted himself in at least one of the Pooley/O'Malley books, writing in a bar, with the characters complaining about him; in other books there are characters that darkly refer to "Rankin" in poking fun at his shameless Running Gags. Then again, considering the fact that his books have thoroughly demolished the fourth wall, it's actually an indication of his restraint in not doing it more often.
In Eric, the description of the Creator of the Discworld is described as a little rat-faced man with a put-upon voice made for complaining. It is strongly implied that the Creator's physical appearance is a reference to Terry Pratchett himself, and he is a self-parody of Pratchett's own act of creation in writing the novels.
Hermione from the Harry Potter books is, by JK Rowling's own admission, an exaggeration of herself when she was younger. Rowling says she was a bit of an Insufferable Genius in her younger days but gradually mellowed out, much as Hermione does over the course of the series. (This may be why, of all the young performers in the Potter movies, Rowling is closest to Emma Watson.)
- Rowling has admitted that each of the three main characters are aspects of herself.
Inheritance Cycle: by the author's own admission, series protagonist Eragon was initially written as a reflection of himself doing the things he would like to do. He claims that Eragon has become more of his own character as the series has progressed, though Your Mileage May Vary as to exactly how true this is (it probably doesn't help that a lot of people consider Eragon to be a Gary Stu).
- By "more his own character", Paolini said that meant that Eragon could do things that Paolini couldn't. Such as use swords, magic and ride dragons. Yeah...
Bella Swan◊ in Twilight.
Douglas Coupland plays a part in his novel jPod, in which all the main characters are fans of his earlier works. As it turns out, he's a "sociopathic shit" who steals the main character's friends and colleagues (even his mom), and tricks him into handing over his laptop on which the entire novel is based, spam mail, porn collection, and other stuff included.
Spider Robinson's narrator Jake Stonebender from the Callahan's stories is admittedly himself.
P. Frank Winslow in F Paul Wilson's "Repairman Jack" novel Bloodline. Amusingly, Winslow has a character called Jake Fixx to reflect Wilson's Repairman Jack.... O.K, the recursion is starting to hurt.
Possibly (according to several fan theories) Pseudonymous Bosch in The Name of This Book Is Secret and If You're Reading This, It's Too Late.
Children's picture book We're Off To Look For Aliens contains an obvious Author Stand In who writes a Book Within A Book that you can actually read, as it's physically a Book Within A Book featuring an obvious Author Stand In. In a Twist Ending, the Book Within A Book is a true story.
Robert Asprin's last two novels, Dragons Wild and Dragons Luck, are mostly set in the French Quarter of New Orleans (where Asprin lived in real life), and feature brief but ongoing cameos by a Cool and Mysterious Badass nicknamed (sigh) "Maestro" who is blatantly modeled on Asprin himself.
Kurt Vonnegut invented a sci-fi author character, Kilgore Trout, who was originally based on another real person, but later developed into his own avatar for purposes of self-deprecation... or self-abuse.
- Kurt Vonnegut also appears directly in Breakfast of Champions, where he tries to free his characters from his writing. He personally apologizes to Kilgore Trout on this occasion.
The character Grigoriy Aleksandrovich Pechorin in Mikhail Lermontov's A Hero of Our Time fits this trope perfectly. So much so that, much like Pechorin, Lermontov had an obsession with dueling — which ultimately lead to his death.
Multatuli's novel Max Havelaar actually has multiple, which the author admits in a fourth-wall breaking monologue near the end.
Max Frei in Labyrinths of Echo fulfills a sort of unholy trinity. He's named after the author's pen name, he's far more powerful than the other characters, and he becomes popular rather than staying the friendless nerd he used to be. The funny thing is that this series is really popular in Russia.
A.P. (Alan Patrick) Herbert's "Albert Haddock", defendant in numerous preposterous law cases in Misleading Cases In The Common Law. According to Herbert, Haddock's middle name was probably Percival.
Drosselmeyer in The Nutcracker has been claimed to be a self-portrait by the author E.T.A. Hoffmann.
Louis in the Wayside School series.
Most novels by Edgar Rice Burroughs have a Framing Device where a character who is obviously Burroughs is visited by a character (such as John Carter) who tells them the main story of the novel. Oddly, while the frameing character does seem to be Edgar Rice Burroughs (he lives in Tarzana and sometime characters allude to previous books he has published) some of his biographical details are slightly different, he grew up in the antebellum South rather than Chicago and he has been on giant hunting safaris and other huge adventures the real Burroughs rarely had.
Stephen King does this in his typical clumsy way in The Dark Tower books. He writes himself in in a warts-and-all snapshot of his life, including his alcoholism and his now-famours car crash injury. The main characters of the books rescue him after the accident, convince him to quit drinking and basically convince him he's God.
- On the other hand, while the characters have to save him to ensure that their story gets finished, it's clear that they aren't obligated to like him.
- They didn't really convince him that he was God. He got that idea after the first time they visited. By the second time, when they rescue him from the car crash, he has realized that he's not God, but rather the person that God decided to speak through to tell the story.

J Michael Straczynski appeared in the final episode of Babylon 5, as the janitor cleaning the station and turning the lights off for the last time.
Bill Lawrence is the janitor who tears down J.D.'s goodbye sign and gets the last word in the Scrubs finale.
- He also appears a few episodes earlier as the person who marries The Janitor to Lady, complete with a "We are gathered here in the presence of The Creator" line.
Ron Moore appeared in the final episode of the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica reading a National Geographic magazine.
Robert Hewitt Wolfe appeared on the 5th-season finale of Star Trek Deep Space Nine, bloodied and beaten, evacuating the station after a Dominion attack. The episode, "Call to Arms," was his last as a staff writer on the series.
Joss Whedon, creator of Buffy The Vampire Slayer, originally created the character of Xander Harris to be the avatar for his teenage self. However, he has since said that as he developed the characters, Buffy took on the role of his avatar, although he also asserts that this shift was largely subconscious on the part of the writers.
- It's also believed the character of Warren Meers is supposed to be Joss' dark side.
- On average, there is one "Joss" character per Whedon show. Wash and Topher fill these roles nicely, although knowing they are Author Avatars, it is a bit unsettling that they both die.
Patrick in Dead Set is basically a mouthpiece for the show's writer Charlie Brooker, hugely exaggerated to the point of total disdain for absolutely everything. Joplin also acts like this to some extent; both he and Patrick use lines from Brooker's earlier work in his Screen Burn columns.
- Dan Ashcroft from Nathan Barley is another example from Brooker's work.
Tina Fey is Liz Lemon. And Kate Holbrook from Baby Mama is Liz Lemon with a different name.
Eugene Wesley Roddenberry openly admitted that Wesley Crusher was a younger, idealized version of himself. Oddly enough, though, the character was originally envisioned as a teenaged girl named Leslie...
Chuck The Prophet is at least something an Author Avatar for creator Eric Kripke: a slight, mild-mannered, reserved fellow with a fairly high speaking voice who openly states, "Writing's hard." Kripke himself added Chuck's drinking habit into the script (it's probably a fictionalized flaw, but it's interesting to note that the creator did not choose to idealize the character).
- The above entry is referring to Supernatural by the way. In case you didn't know.

The eponymous Piano Man is a musician named Bill. Everyone loves him, he's far too good for the bar he works at, and he spends the entire song being rather bitchy about the unrealistic dreams of the bar's patrons. Marty Stu or Parody Stu? you decide! The fact that Billy Joel himself claims to resent playing this song makes it even funnier.
- Although Piano Man may be less of a direct example of Author Avatar then straight up autobiography: Billy Joel actually played at a piano bar under the pseudonym "Bill Martin" for a time (the answer to the line "Man, what are you doing here" is actually "Earning a living while my terrible previous record contract is dealt with by my new record company's lawyers") and, according to Joel, all the characters in the song are based on real patrons of the bar he played at.

The opera The Mother Of Us All, by Virgil Thomson and Gertrude Stein, has a pair of characters named "Virgil T." and "Gertrude S."
The various fools in Shakespeare's plays are commonly seen as this, as is Prospero from The Tempest.

Anyone in Professional Wrestling who has booked (written) storylines and appeared in them onscreen can be considered an Author Avatar. Vince Russo, Jeff Jarrett and several members of the McMahon family are examples.

White Wolf did this in the old World Of Darkness - Pentex subsidiary Black Dog Games is a thinly veiled parody of White Wolf at the time, and Black Dog's employees are (slightly) twisted versions of White Wolf's. In a later supplement about Pentex, they extend the parody to the RPG industry as a whole.
Maid RPG author Ryo Kamiya features in the game's 'examples of play' skits.

The Nameless Mod pretty much runs on this trope, as the game takes place in a Tron-like representation of the Deus Ex community. Many of the major characters are people who worked on the mod.
The Author Avatar of Richard Garriott, creator of the Ultima series, is Lord British, the (not quite) invincible ruler of all Britannia.
- He was promoted to General British for his sci-fi MMORPG Tabula Rasa.
In Dark Seed, you are producer Mike Dawson.
Sol Badguy from Guilty Gear is stated to be the creator's alter ego. Hell, the creator is a fan of Queen and based Sol's design around that.
Many people from Ambrosia Software appear as minor NPCs in Escape Velocity.
Indigo Prophecy opens with David Cage himself instructing you on how to play the game.
In both .hack video game series, the character of Piros/Piros the Third is the author avatar of Matsuyama Hiroshi, the president of the actual company CyberConnect2 and the director of much of the series.
Arguably done in the visual novel Umineko no Naku Koro ni, although a bit hard to explain if you haven't read it or seen the anime. Basically, the game is a story about characters in the meta-world playing a game, which is represented as a story. Battler, who originates from the 'game board', plays the human side, including himself. In episode 2, Beatrice puts herself on the game board, similiar to how Battler is present in both worlds. From episode 3 onwards, all non-human characters are also able to join in on the story, although they cannot be seen by the humans. Episode 5 takes this even further, when Bernkastel places a double of herself, Erika, on the game board, completely breaking the game board's fourth wall repeatedly, to the point of claiming she can do the things she does because as a murder mystery detective, she has the Detective's Authority.
Nagase in The King of Fighters Maximum Impact is a direct author avatar of producer Falcoon. Considering he's homosexual, there are no Unfortunate Implications here.
- From the same series, protagonist Alba Meira was designed as a "cooler" Falcon. No, I'm not making that up. It would explain why he has such blatantly overpowered moves such as a triple projectile and anti-air reversal...

Many webcomics do this. Bob and George most famously, seeing as its author is an entire cast of supporting characters, including an evil doppelganger version of himself, a shadowy version of himself, and not to mention all of his "Parties" consist out of Webcomic/Subcomic/Forum posters as Author characters, and his friend's Rick O'Shay's Author character being a tag along with random beer runs inside of the comic, not to mention Disgruntled Ferret showing up in his MS Paint Masterpieces subcomic etc. etc. etc.
Polk Out does this with its entire cast, except for obviously embellished strips like Faulty Economy or Twee, which no longer run anyway.
Since the Insecticomics is a toy comic, the author avatar is literally just the author — either in hand-drawn art (as seen here) or in photographs of herself (as seen here).
Penny Arcade is an odd example. The two main characters did not start out as Author Avatar, but due to fan pressure were later converted into them, to the point where the creators are now better known by their character's names than by their own.
Everyday Heroes has the Generic neighbors (literally), who are avatars for the author and his wife. Oddly, she's appeared more often than he has.
Phil Foglio shows up from time to time in Girl Genius as a nameless storyteller who appears to be picking up Agatha's story. At one point he has a fight with a nameless Jagermonster who wants a bigger part.
- On another occasion, Oggie meets him, and joyously recognizes him as his several-times-great grandson.
- The "nameless storyteller" is, of course, Phil Foglio's Author Stand In from his earlier strip, What's New? with Phil and Dixie.
- Phil's collaborators — co-writer (and wife!) Kaja Foglio and colorist Cheyenne Wright — also make occasional appearances.
- Master Payne, showmaster of the sparky circus, is a real person (though not the author). Yes, he really is that big, and he really has that hair.
In VG Cats, Pantsman fulfills this role.
Andy, Of Skewed Reality.
In Irregular Webcomic David Morgan-Mar has himself as a main character. He appears in several strips (Fantasy and Space in particular, since they started out as just role-playing games, with him as the DM) He also did a strip just for his Author Avatar, titled "Me". "Me" was killed by himself from the future. However, when the me that was killed got into the position to become the killer, he chose not to. However this, combined with several other events in different strips, caused a paradox that wiped out the universe. With the birth of the new universe, he is now on the run from the Deaths
Overcompensating is suppose to be semi-autobiographical, hence the main character looks like and shares the same name as the creator.
In Union of Heroes there are interludes between the end and the beginning of a new episode. The main character of most of these interludes is the photographed creator of the photocomic talking to the audience and providing them with making-off information.
Sequential Art's author uses a hamster avatar. Why? So his Hot Secretary assistant can give him rides in her cleavage, of course.
This◊ strip of the comic Dumnestor's Heroes. Irony-chan is also the author of Get Medieval.
Amber Williams of DMFA often appears one panel sight gags and Fourth Wall Mail Slot strips, always accompanied by the comic's "real" mascot, Fluffy.
MS Fhigh: Subverted. The Author Avatar, while in the back-story, and writing all of the RPG sourcebooks, has disappeared by the time the comic takes place.
Barry T. Smith's InkTank site used to have a strip called Angst Technology, in which the four main characters (Hugh, Dante, Yaz and Marc) were based on different aspects of Smith's personality. It has been replaced with InkTank, a strip in which a fictionalised Smith himself works at Angst Technology.
Orion Gates writes Beyond Reality, the main character of which is named... Orion Gates. Orion the character has a girlfriend named Natty, who is based off of Orion the author's girlfriend NJ.
Tom, the author of Twokinds, has been known to appear in his comic, usually as a delivery boy of some sort.
In Sonichu, Chris-chan starts out as an Author Avatar character before steadily becoming more and more involved in his own series, moving on to Life Embellished as he depicts himself fighting against people who antagonize him in Real Life, until he becomes a full-on God Mode Sue and, in fact, the central focus of the entire series, with its title character Demoted To Extra.
Pepe Val Pew, the Fursona of Dave Hopkins appears in Jack both as Pepe Val Pew and as The Devil. Interestingly only when appearing as The Devil does he appear to be able to discuss plot points and openly break the forth wall, other appearances are little more than cameos.

The Whitman Literary Girls in the Whateley Universe are blatant Author Avatar figures. They have names similar to the authors, they write (really bad) stories for each other, and they wish they could be the Big Damn Heroes of Whateley Academy instead of the superheroes in Team Kimba. They're not. Most of the time, they're comic relief.
Canadian-born, Catholic-raised computer geek Raimi Matthews from Broken Saints has elements of this.
The toys the writers at OAFEnet use to represent themselves are author avatars in the most literal sense, but also fit the definition of this trope when they show up in the comics with personalities based on the real people.

Brian/Seth MacFarlane in Family Guy has been drifting this way, slowly but surely.
- As a strange use of the trope, Seth Green's character Chris has twice been used as an Author Avatar, when Robot Chicken was mentioned on Family Guy.
South Park has Stan and Kyle as stand-ins for Trey and Matt, respectively. Or at least, that was the original idea; they have since said (half-jokingly) that they're each more like Cartman.
- The creators use Cartman as a way of expressing some of their more controversial beliefs or beliefs that would antagonize them in the eyes of the fans (most notably Cartman's rainforest rant and his hatred of the show Family Guy).
This trope is applied with a bizarre twist in the Animated Adaptation of Herge's Tintin comic books. While Herge himself had died long before the series was made, the producers still included him as a character. An animated likeness of Herge can be spotted in numerous crowd scenes, although he never says or does anything besides occasionally doodling in a sketch pad. He's also apparently Tintin's neighbor, as his name can be found on the mailbox next to Tintin's.
- This was also the case in the original comics.
Lisa Simpson serves as this in The Simpsons, also being a great tool to swat strawmen conservatives/Christians/business people with.
Chowder has this with a puppet version of Greenblatt in "Shnitzel Quits" and "Endive's Dirty Secret".

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