Monday, January 19, 2009

Witless Dictionary #6--Ambition Collision

Continuing the every-other-day (or so) feature where we strive to create a vocabulary for the confusing and often damn annoying world of superhero comics.

Ambition Collision--An affliction often befalling multiple titles featuring a single character (OK, the Superman titles, especially circa the "Superman and the Legion of Superheroes" era, never mind the Batman titles of late.) this term describes the moment when every creative team on every book is jockeying to get across their Definitive Story for the character and the signal-to-noise ratio from all the pretension is so pronounced, one's mind shrinks from contemplating the massive puffery of it all.

2 comments:

Diana Kingston-Gabai said...

You should add concrete examples (and I can think of quite a few for this one) just to demonstrate how important this terminology is: it really does happen all the time. :)

Kazekage said...

You're right of course, the minute I hit "publish" it occurred to me that the Spider-Man and Batman titles alone are full of great wodges of this kind of thing . . .

I sense an edit coming on.