Tuesday, February 24, 2009

Witless Dictionary #13--The Secret Origin Of . . .

Continuing after rather a long time off, our series in an effort to try to forge a vocabulary for comics criticism continues with yet another installment!

The Secret Origin Of--Term given to the most creatively bankrupt of stories--the story in which an iconic but ultimately insignificant element of a characters mythology is slowly and painstakingly explained for the sake of allowing a burnt-out writer to fill 22 pages that month.

Examples of this would be "The Secret Origin of the Dinosaur in the Batcave," "The secret origin of the Bat-signal," "The secret origin of Cerebro," and too many others too hideous to mention.

4 comments:

Diana Kingston-Gabai said...

That reminds me of a Stan Lee interview I read years ago; apparently, he made the X-Men mutants simply because he didn't want to deal with more convoluted, "accidental" origin stories like Spider-Man, the Hulk and the Fantastic Four.

(Not that this prevented later writers from submitting Secret Origins for every. single. mutant. ever.)

Kazekage said...

Hell and damn yes. :) And continually undermining the original zeitgeist that they were "children of the Atom."

Seriously--how many ancient, eternal, mutants are there now?

Diana Kingston-Gabai said...

Enough to start their own "I Read Beowulf In Its Original Form" fanclub, I imagine...

Kazekage said...

In short--too damn many. ;)