Mundane Made Awesome / Comic Books

• Wally Wood's 22 Panels That Always Work is essentially a guide on how an artist can use this trope in comics, as evidenced by the alternate title: "Some Interesting Ways To Get Some Variety In Those Boring Panels Where Some Dumb Writer Has Some Lame Characters Sitting Around and Talking For Page After Page!"
• Similarly, the classic How To Draw Comics the Marvel Way by Stan Lee and John Buscema demonstrates this with two pages depicting the same potentially boring scene of a couple of guys talking in a room. The second, better version uses cool camera angles and more dramatic posing than the first.
• Batman: Black and White: In "A Black and White World", Batman and the Joker are Animated Actors who fight each other in comic books for a living but are ordinary people when they're off the set — albeit ordinary people who look like a deranged clown and a man in a bat costume. The scenes where they're not working are depicted with the same dramatic effects as the scenes where they're in character: Batman is always dramatically shadowed, even when he's just sitting in a brightly-lit green room reading a magazine, and a casual conversation between Batman and the Joker about how their respective families are doing is given the same dramatic lighting and framing as if it were one of their in-character confrontations.
• One scene in Empowered, where Thugboy and Emp are suiting up in the manner of a Lock-and-Load Montage, complete with jump cuts and action lines...in fetish outfits. Appropriately, it's narrated by the Caged Demonwolf.
• Yankee from the German comic Lula und Yankee "slaughtering" his piggy bank. "Now die, pig!" (Note that he's an adult man, not a boy.)
• The plot of The Tick New Series #8 follows The Tick looking after a group of super-powered animals. They lead him on a 22 pages quest to "Destroy the evil beast" A vacuum cleaner. The B-Plot focuses on a loquacious Captain Ersatz of Galactus.
• The 2009 Marvel Digital Holiday special. The Illuminati lend Santa the Infinity Gauntlet to save Christmas ("I still can't believe the reindeer were all Skrulls.."), but he goes mad with power. Namor the Sub-Mariner saves the day.
  Namor: Must use all my Atlantean might to throw this snowball!
• In Buck Godot: Zap Gun for Hire, the big innovation that humans introduced to the galactic community and caused massive cultural upheval was popsicles.
• In Reid Fleming, World's Toughest Milkman: High-speed chases with milk trucks. Milk trucks flying through the air. Reid himself, for that matter.
• In All-Star Superman, Superman keeps a journal... by carving it into stone slabs with his heat vision. This was part of Grant Morrison's theme in the series - that Superman does normal things, but bigger. When his family visits, for instance, it's from the 853rd century.
  • In pre-Crisis days, he kept a giant diary with nigh-invulnerable metal pages in his Fortress of Solitude. Originally he inscribed the words with his fingernail, but he later built a mind-reading headset and super-strong mechanical arm that could inscribe his thoughts for him (though he had to concentrate, because if his thoughts wandered, it would write down whatever random stuff happened to cross his mind).
  • For that matter, in pre-Crisis days, the Fortress of Solitude was just the world's most awesome rec room. It had a wall with dozens of TV screens he could watch simultaneously, giant canvases so that he could paint mural-sized paintings with a giant brush, his own alien zoo, countless souvenirs of his adventures, even a gizmo that could mix up a chocolate shake in a fraction of a second! While the Fortress had its practical uses, its main purpose was always much more recreational than Bruce's Batcave. It was where Superman went to relax.
  • It runs in the family, in Super Sons Jon's favorite part of their new headquarters is the mini-fridge.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic (IDW): Twilight can't wait to get back to add to her research on cave trolls.
  Rainbow Dash: Did you just use the words "excitement" and "research" in the same sentence?
  • Similarly with Fluttershy:
  Fluttershy: The vampiric jackalope and the chupacabra are natural enemies. They'll fight for dominance over the rights to eat us. (shot of the other five looking disgusted while Fluttershy is smiling in awe) Nature is so fascinating...
  • My Little Pony Micro Series #1 features Jade Singer's love of swing music.
  • #4, Princess Celestia's Extreme Art Contest. Also, Fluttershy's "CHAMBER OF EXTREME KNITTING!" Yes, that's how Fluttershy announces the name!
• In Marvel's Laff-A-Lympics special "The Man Who Stole Thursdays," said man had been a mysterious cloaked figure who called himself Tempus. He turns out to be Ranger Smith (from Yogi Bear) who was under the control of Mr. Mastermind, a foe of Dynomutt. Mastermind had a giant computer which was programmed to eliminate Thursday from the calendar (which was the basis of the story as a whole). Captain Caveman vanquishes Mastermind by simply unplugging the computer.
• This was American Splendor's whole raison d'être.
• In Final Crisis, Metron of the New Gods breaks reality by solving a Rubik's Cube in 17 moves, one less than is supposedly possible. Doing so confers the powers of the Judge of All Evil on Monitor Nix Uotan, enabling him to defeat Mandrakk the Dark Monitor.
• Wonder Woman, in both the comic book and the 2017 movie, tries ice cream for the first time and congratulates the vendor on his marvelous invention.

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