All Modern Codenames Come From A Thesaurus?

I've noticed lately pattern in comic characters from 200s and younger: They tend to use single existing word as a codename, or at very least existing term. Inventor, Maker, Requiem, Bombshell, Screwball, Penance, Sentry, Void, Hood, Coyote, Squid, Menace, Signal, Sideways, Silencer, Damage, Vulcan, Firstborn, etc. ^note  Yes, some of them are old characters using new codenames. Don't be pedantic.

Exception are characters who use their names as their super names (Thane, Hala, Morlun, Ikari, Daken) and I'm ignoring codenames that are deriving from existing ones (Ironheart, Ghost-Spider, Chipmunk Hunk, Batman Who Laughs, Gwenpool)

I'm trying to think of exceptions and all I've got is Mr Negative, Ghost Fist, Immortal Man, Professor Pyg and some members of Black Order. (Technically those are their real names but I'm letting it slide)

I'm not saying that these names weren't common in the past, but come on! Killer Croc, Doctor Doom, Riddler, Mysterio, Green Arrow, Giganta, Crimson Dynamo, Captain America, Scarlet Witch, Batman, Super-Skrull, Doctor Octopus, High Evolutionary, Madame Masque, Harley Quinn!

So, what happened? Are comics too serious to slap a color in front of a noun?

Well, yeah, some of that stuff gets annoying. Just like when they changed Icemaiden to Ice and Green Fury to Fire (that’s kinda old, but still).

Welll... Damage dates back to the mid 80s (yes, with that codename), and Penance back to the early 90s-ish (the first issue of Generation X), even though Robbie Baldwin stole the name for his emo phase.

And Harley is technically using her real name, or at least most of it (granted, she's hardly the first to use that codename- there was a villainness at DC calling herself 'Harlequin' way back in 1947).

Honestly, I'm not sure what you're driving at here- 'Riddler' is just as much of a just-a-noun codename as the ones you seem to be decrying.

I mean, I won't argue that a lot of the old-school codenames are great, but there have been a lot of stinkers over the years, too.

And the just-a-noun format dates back to the earliest days of superhero comics- Sportsmaster, Fiddler, Tigress, Flash, Spectre, Thunderbolt, Wildcat, Firebrand, Guardian, Tarantula, Jester, Midnight, Robin... all dating back to the Forties. It's really not a new thing.

EDIT- Honestly, I think a lot of the shorter codenames thing is a deliberate attempt to mimic callsigns, like fighter pilots.

Edited by TeChameleon on Oct 2nd 2019 at 3:37:10 AM

Yeah, Riddler is a word but it's new word - you couldn't find wikipedia article about it if Edward Nygma never took it. Same with Mysterio, Clayface, Titania, Tigra, Psylocke, Deathlok, Trapster, Metallo... As my title implied, writer couldn't get any of these just by grabbing thesaurus and flipping the pages till he landed on the right one.

And I'm not pretending that they're a new thing - Most of Spider-Man villains are named directly from animal book, except for Doc Ock and Man-Wolf. I'm just saying we had variety back then.

I feel like I should point out that Gwenpool is also using her real name ('Gwendolyn "Gwen" Poole').

But... I mean, I'm not sure what the issue is. Comic character names have trended towards single-word names for a while now, but some of that's just because the "Colour-Noun" or "Noun-gender descriptor" format has become strongly associated with the Silver Age, and unless you're designing a character to deliberately hearken back to that, you're not likely to use it.

I'm honestly not sure that it's all that big of a loss. We still get a pretty broad spread of super-names, even if some of them are more... thesaurus-y, as it were.

Random bit of trivia: the term 'brainiac' actually comes from the Superman villain, not the other way around.