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openFuture Quest and Wacky Raceland Print Comic
Okay since I haven't been able to get any responses on the Is This An Example? Thread and have been advised to try here instead, But could someone take a look at the following examples and see whether they are being used correctly:
- Art Shift: Characters not designed by Alex Toth were redesigned to unify the comic's art style.
- Shared Universe: The action heroes are part of a multiverse, though it is shown that Jonny Quest, Birdman and Mightor exist in the same Earth.
- Action Survivor: Their flashback tale makes it clear Luke and Blubber were this pre-racing. They survived the apocalypse as children and spent years fighting and surviving until well into their twenties in spite of being trapped in a world filled with monsters and cannibals and being dead drunk at least 90% of the time.
- All Germans Are Nazis: The Red Baron sings the praises of the Announcer by calling her an Aryan Goddess who is giving him a chance to create a new "Master Race".
- Always Save the Girl : Peter perfect as ever...this goes even worse for him than in the original since by the time he's trying to rescue Penny she's already gotten herself out of trouble...and to her exasperation she ends up having to save him instead. In a mythology gag the Ant Hill Mob offer to help when Penelope faces down a licentious mutant in the bar, although once she politely says she doesn't need any help they happily get on with their own fight.
- All Men Are Perverts: A mutant with three heads and Dick Dastardly both act lecherous towards Penelope.
- Ambiguously Evil: The Announcer. She's apparently omnipotent and is putting what may be the last of humanity through a road of death traps.
- Badass Long Coat: Dick Dastardly still wears one, now made of leather.
- Butt-Monkey: Peter Perfect is lucky to still be alive given how disastrous his attempts to help Penelope Pitstop go.
- Darker and Edgier: A post-apocalyptic version of a cartoon that was amazingly predictable.
- Ms. Fanservice: Penelope Pitstop now dresses in a latex catsuit and gimp hood. Since she's first seen in normal clothes just before recruitment and this outfit was given to her by the announcer this may have been an intended trope in universe as well.
- Mythology Gag: A few most notably Penelope and the Ant Hill Mob are clearly friendly and they rush to her aid during the bar brawl...not that she needs their help but she's still happy to see them.
- Nice Guy: Peter Perfect tries to be helpful and polite.
- Sentient Vehicle: The Announcer has given the cars awareness, intelligence, memory, and even the ability to talk. Mean Machine is quite vocally disdainful of Dick and Muttley.
- Transsexual: Private Meekly is a trans woman, in a departure likely meant to avert The Smurfette Principle. When Red Baron makes gross remarks at Meekly, she angrily tells him that she was never a man but a "damn fabulous woman".
- Xenafication: While never exactly helpless (especially in her own show) the new Penelope is a badass who drives around in a fetish catsuit, kicks ass all on her own and when her car breaks down rides an eldritch abomination to win the race.
- You Gotta Have Blue Hair: Dick Dastardly has Multicolored Hair that's dark purple and red.
openWhen comics introduce plots to mirror movie adaptations. Print Comic
Civil War II came out in comics right after the Civil War movie. I think the Apocalypse stuff happening in X-Men comics right now is probably because of the new movie. Is there a trope describing when comic book plots reflect their recent movies?
openOffscreen Legacy Character Print Comic
Is there a trope where a superhero (or other secret-identitied character) is stated to be the latest in a long line of previous bearers of the mantle, but none of the previous incarnations ever actually appear as characters (usually because the mantle only gets passed on when the previous bearer dies)? There often seems to be some sort of secret society involved with perpetuating the tradition, but I see no reason that should be mandatory. The Phantom is a good example, and the Dread Pirate Roberts would be a non-superhero example. Weirdly, the two dress very similar. What if the original Phantom and the original Dread Pirate Roberts were the same guy...
As I understand it, you only get to be listed as an example on the Legacy Character page if more than one of them actually shows up in person for at least one story.
Edited by BrokenEyeopenTrope about killling someone to get what they desire. Print Comic
an example Alice tells Bob that she can resurrect his wife Edith but he has to kill jack and then she would resurrect Edith
openUsing too often a newly-found, obscure word Print Comic
Do we have a trope for when a character starts using a word he has just found in a dictionary far too often, usually trying to seem sophisticated? Author Vocabulary Calendar seems to cover real cases, should it be given an in-universe section?
I'm thinking of the one-time antagonist of Lucky Luke who ran a newspaper and used "inique" several times in each sentence. (Don't know how this was translated.)
openIncoming superhero signal Print Comic
Is there a trope for the thing mentioned on Atop the Fourth Wall recently, used a lot in older superhero comics, where a hero does something to announce his presence to the villains before coming on the scene himself? The video mentioned things like Spider-Man having a flashlight that projected a spider symbol on the wall.
openBlue Skinned Child? Print Comic
Do We Have This One The Beano recently added a new character. Her name is Hayley Comet, a pun on Halley's Comet, and she's a little girl who crashed her spaceship and enrolled at Bash Street School to learn about human behaviour. She has blue skin, but being a child definitely wouldn't count as a Green-Skinned Space Babe. So what trope is she? Her other defining features are a pair of rocket boots (which allow her to fly) and a pair of orange braids.
openCast differentiation Print Comic
This is a pretty common trope in comics, but can apply to anything with superheroes. It's basically what happens when you gather several superheroes together and the only other way to tell them apart aside from their superpowers was their personalities, so a certain aspect of them gets exaggerated when they're in a group.
Compare the shows Superfriends to Justice League. Superfriends was pretty bad about this since all the members had the same personality with different tights, but when you look later in Justice League you'll notice that there's a lot of different personalities that contrast well with each other. Flash tends to be a lot cockier and reckless with the League than when he's solo. Batman tends to seem gloomier and darker when compared to the League, etc.
openBlack Sabbath's Iron Man: Bootstrapped theme? Print Comic
So we know Black Sabbath wrote Iron Man completely independent from Marvel Comics and originally had nothing to do with him, but in time it eventually became Tony Stark's de facto theme. Odds are when people think of Iron Man's theme, they'll be thinking of those riffs. Does it count as a Bootstrapped Theme if a song that was originally written independently of a franchise/work/character/etc. practically becomes its theme by pure accident or is this a completely different trope?
openA character thinks really hard and really long while walking in circles. Print Comic
And they do it for so long that their walking eventually starts carving a circle into the ground/floor/whatever they're walking on. I've seen it countless times in Donald Duck comics.
I was told it might be wise to head over here and double check that we don't have this one and should have this one; I feel we should, since it's a.) incredibly common practice, at least in Western comic book publishing b.) a distinct and specific (and specifically definable) practice that has nothing to do with "basic" publishing elements - not so broad or basic/obvious as to be People Sit In Chairs c.) has variations that could be delineated which might be useful and d.) there are a LOT of references to the term on this wiki and elsewhere. I just want to make sure there's no existing version? (Though it's possible this would be best as a Useful Notes page rather than a normal Trope page?)
ahem. lemme start:
Variant Cover. This is a gimmick used by a print publisher, particularly in the Western comic book market, to increase sales. The idea is to appeal to collectors by giving them incentive to buy more than one copy of a book upon release, achieved by making more than one alternate "variant" of the book to buy. This isn't a matter of "it's a different edition, therefore a different cover", mind you - the whole point is this is exactly the same edition, released at the same time and with identical inside contents, with only the cover being different.
Variant covers began hitting popularity with major Western comics publishers like DC Comics and Marvel in the 1990s, though it is still extremely common practice today, with the Big Two being particularly persistent in producing them (DC, for example, does a Variant Cover for every single one of their current monthly and biweekly magazine-style comic releases), though other companies, notably Dark Horse Comics, have engaged in this as well, particularly for popular titles such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 8. The "Variant Cover" (contrasted to the main cover) is sometimes, though not always, printed in smaller numbers than the book's standard cover, or distributed to only certain venues, so as to increase the rarity or even provide incentive to buy from those locations. A common sub-type being a limited-run Variant Cover that is only available from a specific convention, or from dedicated Comic Book Shops, or even specific comic book shops, if they have enough pull.
Common Styles of Variant Cover include:
Again, this is a VERY common industry practice but it's not like, you know, Printers Print On Paper level commonality or banality.. It's a super common GIMMICK, and it's very specific to the print medium and the collector-centric market (and aftermarket) for these products. It's also again, very much distinct from a book that has a second printing or new edition that changes the cover, since these are both otherwise identical, and released simultaneously with the original run (because they are part of the original run). And it's not a fad that's gone away, it's been here since the 1990s, and is now an established facet of Western comic book publishing and sales, at least among the bigger companies like DC, Marvel and Dark Horse. It's also the case that, quite handily, for the most part, the industry and fans have settled on the term Variant Cover - making an obvious title for the page.
I also feel like even though at least one "Useful Notes" article mentions Variant Covers, it's only really in passing and doesn't provide a detailed explanation of the concept, since its focus is not on this one aspect, but the larger context of the "crash" of the comics market in the mid 1990s - so it doesn't really provide "coverage" of the concept, and what little it does do on that front is both limited to the timescale it covers (which is about 20 years ago!), and and very vague. Not to mention nobody is going to look to "the Great Comic Crash of 1996" to learn that a Variant Cover is, so it's a matter of "how would people know to look there?"
I could believe this would be better as a Useful Notes article than a Trope page per se, depends on how other people feel on that front, but either way, I feel like it should be covered in its own right?
Discuss?
Edited by vorpalgirl