META: Comic Book Tropes You Loathe
Andrew Perron
increasingly extended contract negotiations over the RACCies (who knew that
Building Suspense Lad was such a sharp operator?), I'm going to ask: What's
your least favorite aspect of modern comic book stories, the stuff you
actively try to avoid in your own work?
For me, it's heroes arguing for no reason. Nothing annoys me more than
when, in the name of "conflict" and "characterization", the Flash takes
offense at some stupid little thing Green Lantern did and they're sniping
at each other for the rest of the mission. Now, arguing because there's
something worth arguing about can make for wonderful storytelling, but
arguing because the writer can't think of any other way to provide
interpersonal conflict sucks.
Andrew "NO .SIG MAN" "Juan" Perron, plerblah.
Tom Russell
> As part of a bread-and-circuses program to distract you from the
> increasingly extended contract negotiations over the RACCies (who knew that
> Building Suspense Lad was such a sharp operator?), I'm going to ask: What's
> your least favorite aspect of modern comic book stories, the stuff you
> actively try to avoid in your own work?
I've talked about various tropes in the past, but the big ones that
bug me are the ones that remove autonomy and/or responsibility from
the characters and/or call into question the veracity of what's taken
place, as neither is really, to my mind, playing fair with the
audience: outright mind control, body-jumping, doppelgangers
(alternate reality, shapeshifting aliens, clones, robots), illusions,
virtual reality, prophecies from the future.
==Tom
Dave Van Domelen
Tom Russell <milos_...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>I've talked about various tropes in the past, but the big ones that
>bug me are the ones that remove autonomy and/or responsibility from
>the characters and/or call into question the veracity of what's taken
>place, as neither is really, to my mind, playing fair with the
>audience: outright mind control, body-jumping, doppelgangers
>(alternate reality, shapeshifting aliens, clones, robots), illusions,
>virtual reality, prophecies from the future.
Heh. I've already hit most of those in ASH-universe stories this
calendar year, wonder if I can get a perfecta by summer?
Dave Van Domelen, in the proofreading stages of a story that uses
annoying 90s comics tropes.
Tom Russell
> � � �Heh. �I've already hit most of those in ASH-universe stories this
> calendar year, wonder if I can get a perfecta by summer?
Well, in the right hands, they certainly can be (and in your case,
are) used well.
> � � �Dave Van Domelen, in the proofreading stages of a story that uses
> annoying 90s comics tropes.
==Tom, Evil Government Conspiracy tropes also irritate the piss out of
me.
Andrew Burton
> What's your least favorite aspect of modern comic book stories, the stuff you
> actively try to avoid in your own work?
I have two:
1. Wangst. "My spider powers have ruined my life, what good are they?"
2. Stupid disuse of powers. "If only my eco-friendly, dissolving
polymer that can hold up tons of material was good for something besides
playing Tarzan."
--
Andrew Burton
tugly...@aol.com
http://utilitarian.us - A Guide to Esoteric Technology in Paragon City
http://jarodrussell.livejournal.com/ - Take a guess. ;)
Andrew Perron
> I've talked about various tropes in the past, but the big ones that
> bug me are the ones that remove autonomy and/or responsibility from
> the characters and/or call into question the veracity of what's taken
> place, as neither is really, to my mind, playing fair with the
> audience: outright mind control, body-jumping, doppelgangers
> (alternate reality, shapeshifting aliens, clones, robots), illusions,
> virtual reality, prophecies from the future.
Hmmmmm. Is it just using these tropes to trick the audience ("You see, it
was a Superman robot the whole time!"), or is it any use of them?
Andrew "NO .SIG MAN" "Juan" Perron, never lend an unreliable narrator
money.
Tom Russell
> Hmmmmm. Is it just using these tropes to trick the audience ("You see, it
> was a Superman robot the whole time!"), or is it any use of them?
I think when it's just used to trick the audience, though honestly
most stories where some kind of doppelganger frames the hero character
for some heinous crime are pretty damn cheap. The Superman robots are
okay, firstly because there's no imposter-framing-him-for-X thing
going on and secondly because they're just so awesome they get a
pass. (I guess the Kandorian look-alikes are okay too, because of the
pure silliness of there being Kryptonians who just happen to look like
Perry White, etc.)
> Andrew "NO .SIG MAN" "Juan" Perron, never lend an unreliable narrator
> money.
And I hate Keyser Soze-ism with more passion than one would think
possible.
Andrew Perron
> On Apr 17, 5:59 pm, Andrew Perron <pwer...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Hmmmmm. Is it just using these tropes to trick the audience ("You see, it
>> was a Superman robot the whole time!"), or is it any use of them?
>
> I think when it's just used to trick the audience, though honestly
> most stories where some kind of doppelganger frames the hero character
> for some heinous crime are pretty damn cheap. The Superman robots are
> okay, firstly because there's no imposter-framing-him-for-X thing
> going on and secondly because they're just so awesome they get a
> pass.
True; they're used more for tricking the supporting cast and the occasional
villain.
> (I guess the Kandorian look-alikes are okay too, because of the
> pure silliness of there being Kryptonians who just happen to look like
> Perry White, etc.)
We need a Bizarro Kandor. For one thing, it would be the size of Jupiter.
>> Andrew "NO .SIG MAN" "Juan" Perron, never lend an unreliable narrator
>> money.
>
> And I hate Keyser Soze-ism with more passion than one would think
> possible.
My personal least favorite brand of unreliable narrator is "The fantasy
story was all in the crazy person's head". It shows both the writer's
cynicism and their contempt for the audience.
Andrew "NO .SIG MAN" "Juan" Perron, haaaaaaaaaaaaaaate.
Andrew Perron
> 1. Wangst. "My spider powers have ruined my life, what good are they?"
Haaaaaaaaaaate. Hate hate hate hate. O, thou scourge of characterization,
O thou false friend to author!
> 2. Stupid disuse of powers. "If only my eco-friendly, dissolving
> polymer that can hold up tons of material was good for something besides
> playing Tarzan."
To be fair, that kind of short-sightedness is in character for Peter.
Andrew "NO .SIG MAN" "Juan" Perron, the Ditko version is interesting.
Tom Russell
> > 2. Stupid disuse of powers. "If only my eco-friendly, dissolving
> > polymer that can hold up tons of material was good for something besides
> > playing Tarzan."
>
> To be fair, that kind of short-sightedness is in character for Peter.
And, technically, he did try to sell his web fluid to some sort of
company when he was hard-up for cash, and was turned down because of
its dissolving properties[*]. (IIRC, somewhere in ASM # 17-19.)
[*-- Mind you, this doesn't gel with the "leave-the-webbing-on-
Jameson's-chair-over-night-so-he-gets-stuck-to-it-hours-later" schtick
back in ASM #... er, I wanna say somewhere in the vicinity of 5-10.]
==Tom
Scott Eiler
> What's
> your least favorite aspect of modern comic book stories, the stuff you
> actively try to avoid in your own work?
1. Decompressed storytelling.
2. Characters who won't stay dead. Although I'll allow it if they're
actually friends with Death.
EDMLite
I agree with you on both counts. I'm OK with most tropes
-- I can even stand a clone story now and then. But I
really, really dislike comic book deaths, and I'm pleased that,
as far as I can remember, pretty much everyone who has
died in an LNH story over the years has remained dead.
Of course, this means that I'll have to resurrect all of them
for the upcoming "Beigest Night" crossover...
--Easily-Discovered Man Lite
--Always finding new ways to beat an undead horse
Andrew Perron
> 1. Decompressed storytelling.
I think this is an example of something that *can* be used well, but whose
misuse and overuse has given it a bad rap. Giving a story a slower pace,
an atmosphere, a gentle slope of rising action can be quite effective.
It's when writing for the trade becomes mandatory and you spend eight pages
on zooming in on the Earth from space (that one New Avengers storyline
where they tried to address the whole Xorn thing) that it becomes pointless
padding.
Andrew "NO .SIG MAN" "Juan" Perron, padded for your protection.
Andrew Perron
> On Apr 19, 9:13�am, Scott Eiler <sei...@eilertech.com> wrote:
>> 2. �Characters who won't stay dead. �Although I'll allow it if they're
>> actually friends with Death.
>
> I'm OK with most tropes
> -- I can even stand a clone story now and then. But I
> really, really dislike comic book deaths, and I'm pleased that,
> as far as I can remember, pretty much everyone who has
> died in an LNH story over the years has remained dead.
There have been a few exceptions, like Obscure Trivia Lad's first death -
but, importantly, these were almost all deaths and resurrections that
occured as part of the same storyline.
Another category of resurrections I don't mind: Ones where the death was a
stupid shock thing in the first place. (In actual comics, I'll bring up Ice
as a for-instance.) We don't get many of those in the LNH itself, of course
- barring times when an author is ashamed of their previous work and
decides to drop a bus on those characters.
> Of course, this means that I'll have to resurrect all of them
> for the upcoming "Beigest Night" crossover...
>
> --Easily-Discovered Man Lite
> --Always finding new ways to beat an undead horse
Andrew "NO .SIG MAN" "Juan" Perron, beiger than beige!
Dave Van Domelen
EDMLite <robro...@gmail.com> wrote:
>I agree with you on both counts. I'm OK with most tropes
>-- I can even stand a clone story now and then. But I
>really, really dislike comic book deaths, and I'm pleased that,
>as far as I can remember, pretty much everyone who has
>died in an LNH story over the years has remained dead.
Except for, naturally, Cannon Fodder. And then there's Sig.Lad, who may
or may not be dead, depending on how you define it. And under certain
definitions of death, Kopikat has died numerous times, replaced in each
instance by someone with her memories. :) Squid Boy sort of died and came
back thanks to Suicide Squid.
Unless, of course, you mean just your own LNH stories.
Dave Van Domelen, notes that body/soul separability means death is a lot
less permanent in ASH, too.
Saxon Brenton
Andrew Perron asked:
> As part of a bread-and-circuses program to distract you from the
> increasingly extended contract negotiations over the RACCies (who knew that
> your least favorite aspect of modern comic book stories, the stuff you
> actively try to avoid in your own work?
Mainly, has the story trope been done many times before, and is being done now *without any new twists* that would at least allow it to pretend to be fresh? This is subjective, of course, because it really does depend on how many times the reader has already seen that type of story. I'm a C.O.O.F. (comic owner over forty) and have been reading since my pre-teens. I can't claim to have seen everything (well, I can, but I would be lying) but after a while things become familar, and over familiar, and eventually wearisome. The one that springs to mind at the moment is the current 'dystopian future' arc happening in Willingham's _JSA_. (And this is really strange, because it's a 'nazi occultism create a dystopian future' story, and normally I'm quite partial to nazi occultism stories. Nevertheless, I've put this book on my 'you get three issues to impress me or you get dropped from my pull list' list.) There are probably other tropes that would elicit a similar reaction, but you get the idea.
Then, on a specific level of personal taste: like Tom and a lot of others, I don't have much liking for 1990s style grim'n'gritty stories - in other words, dark stories that are dark for no other reason than to be dark.
---
Saxon Brenton
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Phantasm
> On Apr 16, 8:49 am, Andrew Perron <pwer...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > your least favorite aspect of modern comic book stories, the stuff you
> > actively try to avoid in your own work?
>
> actually friends with Death.
Worse: they kill off a character, have multiple plotlines running to
convince everyone else - including the readers - that YES, THIS HERO/
VILLAIN *IS* DEAD! And then, when everyone has accepted it and
they've had the person's protege/sidekick/partner/associate take over
the heroic (or villainous) identity, they bring back the original!
It's accepted that they'll eventually bring back Jean Grey ("Don't you
X-Men ever STAY dead?!"), but did they have to bring back Captain
America now that Bucky's taken over the role? (Batman doesn't count,
as the readers know he's time-traveling,)
Saxon Brenton
Dvandom replied to Easily Discovered Man Lite:
> Except for, naturally, Cannon Fodder. And then there's Sig.Lad, who may
> or may not be dead, depending on how you define it. And under certain
> definitions of death, Kopikat has died numerous times, replaced in each
> instance by someone with her memories. :) Squid Boy sort of died and came
> back thanks to Suicide Squid.
>
> Unless, of course, you mean just your own LNH stories.
mandated resurrection - that is alien to the setup of the Legion of
Net.Heroes, or any of the other story imprints on RACC. We don't have
any characters who are corporation-owned money-spinners who need to be
kept in the public eye in order to keep the action figure lines selling
and the copyrights active. When *we* resurrect our characters in
annoying ways, it's either because we're playing with the story tropes,
or because we're being drooling fanboys :-)
---
Saxon Brenton
_________________________________________________________________
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Tom Russell
> Dvandom replied to Easily Discovered Man Lite:
>
> > Except for, naturally, Cannon Fodder. And then there's Sig.Lad, who may
> > or may not be dead, depending on how you define it. And under certain
> > definitions of death, Kopikat has died numerous times, replaced in each
> > instance by someone with her memories. :) Squid Boy sort of died and came
> > back thanks to Suicide Squid.
>
> > Unless, of course, you mean just your own LNH stories.
>
> With respect, there's an entire *type* of resurrection - the Editorially
> mandated resurrection - that is alien to the setup of the Legion of
> Net.Heroes, or any of the other story imprints on RACC. We don't have
> any characters who are corporation-owned money-spinners who need to be
> kept in the public eye in order to keep the action figure lines selling
> and the copyrights active. When *we* resurrect our characters in
> annoying ways, it's either because we're playing with the story tropes,
> or because we're being drooling fanboys :-)
An excellent point. Not counting my tyro years-- basically, anything
before Net.Heroes on Parade is stuffed to the brim with stupid deaths
and resurrections-- I'm pretty sure I've only brought a character back
twice, and both times it was partially playing with tropes and
partially a drooling fanboy thing. :-)
Tyler Bridge was "killed" by Chatillon in Net.Heroes on Parade-- issue
seventeen or eighteen-- and then came back at the end of that arc. I
put "killed" in quotation marks not because it didn't happen, but
because the circumstances of Tyler's existence were peculiar-- being,
that is, a full-on walks-through-walls ghost, so he was kind of dead
already. He had come back as a ghost the first time around when he
was miserable and friendless; now, the second time around, he had
friends, people that he cared for and that Chatillon had put in
danger. When he returns, he says something like, "I came back when I
had nothing to come back for, did you really think I wouldn't now that
I have do?" I still like that moment an awful lot-- sure, it's
didactic and perhaps even a little emo, but I still really like it,
and most of (the revised) NHOP as a whole.
And then in JOLT CITY Dani Handler was presumed dead and trapped
between dimensions. She was presumed dead in number nine, Martin knew
she was still alive in number ten, and in eleven he rescued her-- in
addition to escaping from an escape-proof supervillain prison,
crippling Darkhorse, deducing Derek's secret identity, and thwarting
the Apelantian invasion. As you can tell, that story was meant to be
something of what TV Tropes would call a Crowning Moment of Awesome,
and the resurrection was definitely meant to be a part of that.
Otherwise, I think I've kept dead characters dead, and in my Eightfold
work I've stayed away from ghosts/confirmations-that-there's-anything-
beyond-our-physical-existence.
==Tom
Scott Eiler
> On Mon, 19 Apr 2010 16:13:58 +0000 (UTC), Scott Eiler wrote:
> > 1. Decompressed storytelling.
>
> I think this is an example of something that *can* be used well, but whose
> misuse and overuse has given it a bad rap. Giving a story a slower pace,
> an atmosphere, a gentle slope of rising action can be quite effective.
Agreed, but I suspect it's a marketing tactic whose time has gone.
How much attention span do comic book companies think the next-
generation reader has?
Tom Russell
I do understand where you're coming from, Scott; that's why I'm trying
to make sure all of my (prose) installments tell one complete, full
story.
Granted, the next JOLT CITY is going to take close to 20,000 words to
tell that one complete, full story. So maybe I'm a secret (or not-so-
secret) decompressionist. :-)
==Tom
Andrew Perron
> Except for, naturally, Cannon Fodder. And then there's Sig.Lad, who may
> or may not be dead, depending on how you define it. And under certain
> definitions of death, Kopikat has died numerous times, replaced in each
> instance by someone with her memories. :) Squid Boy sort of died and came
> back thanks to Suicide Squid.
Everybody knows that it doesn't count as dead if you have a spare. Haven't
you ever watched Time Chasers?
Andrew "NO .SIG MAN" "Juan" Perron, the secret to time travel fitting on
eight 4 1/4" floppies is pretty LNHy, mind.
Andrew Perron
Well, my point is that it's not a marketing tactic; it's a storytelling
tactic that was overused. And I thought it was *our* generation that was
supposed to be utterly lacking in attention span.
Andrew "NO .SIG MAN" "Juan" Perron, or, to be precise, every generation
born after the invention of television.
Andrew Perron
> Worse: they kill off a character, have multiple plotlines running to
> convince everyone else - including the readers - that YES, THIS HERO/
> VILLAIN *IS* DEAD! And then, when everyone has accepted it and
> they've had the person's protege/sidekick/partner/associate take over
> the heroic (or villainous) identity, they bring back the original!
Gah. Yeah, any situation where you promise never to reverse something and
then shortly after do so... (Spider-Man, "magic retcon", etc.)
> It's accepted that they'll eventually bring back Jean Grey ("Don't you
> X-Men ever STAY dead?!"), but did they have to bring back Captain
> America now that Bucky's taken over the role? (Batman doesn't count,
> as the readers know he's time-traveling,)
To be fair, I don't think *anyone* expected Steve not to come back. And
the overall storyline of it has been handled better than most.
Andrew "NO .SIG MAN" "Juan" Perron, quite a fan of Brubaker there.
Andrew Perron
> Mainly, has the story trope been done many times before, and is being done
> now *without any new twists* that would at least allow it to pretend to be
> fresh?
That's a good point. Really, for me, it tends to be how a trope is handled
rather than its existence at all.
> Then, on a specific level of personal taste: like Tom and a lot of others,
> I don't have much liking for 1990s style grim'n'gritty stories - in other
> words, dark stories that are dark for no other reason than to be dark.
Naturally. Vaguely interesting point: I first got into comics during this
era, yet it annoys me as much as anyone.
Andrew "NO .SIG MAN" "Juan" Perron, not that there's *no* nostalgia
involved, mind...
Martin Phipps
Ah but the thing you hate the most is precisely the thing you make fun
of in satire. I personally hate teenaged sidekicks because it
constitutes child endangerment. That plus masked vigilantes being
given access to crime scenes (because they are unable to testify if
they actually find evidence).
Martin