Arc Words in Comic Books.
- In 100 Bullets, highly trained assassins known as The Minutemen are brainwashed into forgetting their time as killers only to be "awakened" by the use of the cryptic word "Croatoa". This is eventually revealed to be part of a larger conspiracy involving the founding of the United States of America.
- Jonathan Hickman's Avengers run has "Everything dies", being constantly used to refer to the inevitable destruction of the multiverse itself.
- Batman (Grant Morrison): "Zur En Arrh," a piece of graffiti that ends up being a Trigger Phrase for Batman. And it also ends up being his backup personality, the Batman of Zur En Arrh. It turns out that the phrase is a bastardization of Thomas Wayne's last words, "Zorro in Arkham", leading to the irony that even Bruce doesn't know what the phrase means, as the last thing he ever said to his father is "what?" implying he didn't clearly hear what he said.
- Blackest Night has RISE, spoken by the Black Lantern rings as they bring their victims back to life.
- Bodies (2014): "Know you are loved" and "So begins the long harvest" recur across the time periods, hinting at a greater connection between the discovered corpses.
- Brink has "leper heart", "unreach", "melancholema", "vovek", and "phase chronozon". Those who say them are inevitably involved with some sect or other.
- Captain Victory and the Galactic Rangers made frequent use of "Victory is sacrifice", "Sacrifice is continuity" and "Continuity is tribulation", the phrases emphasizing how the heroes' efforts to defend the universe from the forces of evil weren't always cut and dried.
- "Something fell" from Cerebus the Aardvark. It is usually said a moment before a sudden, life-altering event in Cerebus' life. The first time it was said, the falling object was directly responsible; the next few times, something just happened to fall immediately before the big event, and a character remarked on it. In later instances, a character just thinks he heard something fall, but we don't see that anything actually does. One interpretation is that the words themselves have the power to cause important things to happen, but none of the characters seem aware of this. Lampshaded in Rick's Story, when Rick tells Cerebus "something fell" just to freak him out. It's followed by a major event, anyways.
- In Circles, "Love". Love is a major theme in this story and many characters refer to their lovers as "love".
- Crisis on Infinite Earths: "Why the red skies?" and variations thereof. Used particularly in the titles running concurrent to the actual maxiseries, codifying the Red Skies Crossover.
- DC in general uses "Rebirth" as a recurring subtitle. With the 2016 relaunch, all its books got the title.
- Mark Waid's 2018 Doctor Strange run has "magic always comes at a cost", which pays off when the faltine come to collect the debt.
- Doctor Who Magazine
- The phrase "The Crimson Hand" kept cropping up in the post-Donna comic strip, along with the Arc Image of, well, a crimson hand. Eventually revealed as a ruthless gang Majenta Pryce was a member of, prior to Hotel Historia.
- The Eleventh Doctor comics had "What is buried in man?", which got resolved in the Jan-March 2013 strips (the first storyline of the 50th anniversary year).
- Ex Machina: "The Stars Are Down," which is a harbinger of the interdimensional invaders. It first appears as a Nirvana song repeatedly playing through a radio that somehow has reception into an alternate dimension. When Mitchell Hundred has dreams of the invaders, the sentence often appears.
- Hawkeye: "Okay... this looks bad." The phrase starts just about every issue of Hawkeye (2012), and it usually involves Clint falling to his doom or in some other horrible situation. Eventually, there's an issue that starts with him being held at gunpoint with his pants around his ankles, and the phrase becomes, "Okay... this looks... completely ridiculous."
- Hellboy: Several characters prophesy throughout the series that mankind's future lies "underground". This finally comes to pass in the concluding chapters of BPRD: The Devil You Know, as the end of the world -- and the dawn of a new one -- finally arrives. What's left of the human race survives by descending into the underground world, while a new race of man — descended from Abe Sapien — is born into the new world.
- The first issue of Hourman opens with Snapper Carr, Hourman's sidekick, writing down a list of arc words as they come to him. Since Hourman is a time traveler, Snapper has had a tiny vision of the future but only remembers it well enough to record about a dozen key phrases, such as "the century of solitude," "the giant nanites," and "the timepoint." Over the course of the series these terms become part of the storyline and are explained one by one. At the end of the final issue, Hourman and Snapper recite the list again, this time as a pair of friends recalling shared memories.
- Immortal Hulk: "Is he man or monster, or is he both?" (the iconic blurb in Hulk's debut issue) and "The strongest one there is" (a famous Catchphrase of the character since his early days under Stan Lee) get reinterpreted as much more ominous and portentous lines heralding cosmic revelations throughout the run. Other, more arc-specific ones are:
- "Am I a good person?" "What do you think?" Sometimes said by one person.
- "The night is his time."
- "Devil".
- "This is where we've always been. Where everyone's always been."
- "And when you hurt Banner...I take it personal."
- "This is me."
- "There are two people in every mirror. There's the one you can see. And there's the other one. The one you don't want to."
- "Hulk is Hulk."
- "Something is wrong."
- "Welcome to Planet Hulk."
- The refrain "Never stop making them pay", from World War Hulk, is resurrected but always in variants.
- "For the Left Hand is Strength; but the Right Hand is Mercy."
- Judge Dredd: Two of them, both related to the decades-spanning arc about the legitimacy or not of the fascist city-state.
- Laika:
- "I am a man of destiny," Korolev's Survival Mantra after getting out of the gulags.
- "It was only a dog," referring to the fact that humans don't value dogs as much as they do their fellow man.
- "Good dog. You can trust me. Don't worry." This is something Laika is told (and remembers), even as she is sealed inside Sputnik 2 and sent into space to die by the humans she loved and trusted, for reasons she does not understand.
- Mister Miracle (2017): Many parts of the story are abruptly interrupted by single panels containing nothing but the sentence "Darkseid is". It's a reference to the omnipotence of the evil god Darkseid, who personifies the protagonist's feeling of despair and ties in with the work's central theme of depression.
- The Multiversity: The word "S.O.S." is revealed to be the keyword to operate the Multiversal Cubes, which Red Racer was able to find reading all the Multiversity books.
- New X-Men: "Are these words from the future?", "Sublime," "White-Hot Room," and "Rescue And Emergency." All of these are only explained in the last issue: the White-Hot Room is the abode of the Phoenix, Sublime is the Greater-Scope Villain, "rescue and emergency" refers to the fact that the aforementioned Greater-Scope Villain broke time, which Jean Grey "rescues" at the very end.
- The Punisher MAX series has a reboot of Frank Castle's origins, and in the comic The Tyger, he reminisces on the night where he prepares to make his first kills in his war on crime. He muses that after his identity comes out, they'll blame it on the war, and they'll be right, and they'll be wrong. Most of the comic then divulges a scarring childhood event in which a close friend of his is raped and then commits suicide. As Frank prepares to take revenge himself, he sees the older brother of his friend viciously beat the perpetrator before setting him on fire. A later part of the comic has two all-black pages filled with speech bubbles, detailing the paramedics' arrival on the scene of his family's shooting and the horror of it all, and the doctors talking to him later in the hospital and telling him that none of his family survived. Returning to the present, Frank coldly snipes a group of mobsters and thinks "They'll blame it on Vietnam. And they'll be right, and they'll be wrong."
- Raptors: "Your kingdom is doomed", Don Molina's dying curse to his enemies and now carried by his children, who write these words in blood on the wall after killing every single target.
- In The Sandman (1989), the phrase "Wake up" and its variations pops up quite a lot, as is to be expected of a story about the adventures of a Dream Weaver.
- Superman:
- In Supergirl story Young Love, Dick Malverne often said "Hey-Hey! Linda Lee! You sure do look pretty..." when he and Linda were young. He repeats it when she visits him in a hospital because he is dying.
- During Sterling Gates' run, Supergirl often capped an inner monologue -usually about the mess what she had gotten into- with "I'm Supergirl. This is my life.". In the final panels of the final storyline Day of the Dollmaker, she repeats that line with a twist: "I'm Supergirl. This is my life... And y'know what? I'm pretty happy with it."
- The Transformers (IDW): Throughout the series, there were occasional references to 'Primus's opposite'. Longtime Transformers fans recognised this as an allusion to Unicron, who finally appears in the epilogue to First Strike.
- Ultimate Galactus Trilogy: When Sam hacked his entry into the bunker he mentioned an old saying, "Take two things that work and nail them together", that describes the old Russian habits of merging disparate technologies and try to make them work. He was talking about the door, that combined a modern keyboard with a dated system. The saying gets a whole new meaning inside the bunker, as they find that the Russians had been talking parts from an alien robot and grafting them into human test subjects, in hopes of making a new super soldier.
- Watchmen: "Who watches the Watchmen?" which is partially visible in many panels. The full phrase is only shown in its entirety on the very last page, after the story has ended. There's an interview with Alan Moore where he mentioned a possible double meaning: not who watches to see if the watchmen are criminals, but who watches them to look after them and take care of them. The question within the story is the first meaning, going unasked because someone already is. Afterwards, it's Alan Moore telling the reader that no one takes care of the watchmen, hence their various psychological issues and the slaughter of Manhattan. Heavy.
- In X-Men (2019), the word "inferno" is mentioned in terms of various things, but its importance is revealed in one of Sinister's Secrets:"We don't hear this word spoken often, so when we do, it's best to pay attention, because when you square that circle, what took a long time to build can come crumbling down rather quickly."[Inferno]
- In Zombies Christmas Carol, "the surplus population," a term Scrooge used for the poor in the original book, is used as a descriptor for the Hungry Dead. Its usage gets increasingly sinister the further into the future Scrooge goes.
