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.
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4 comments:
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.)
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?
Enough to start their own "I Read Beowulf In Its Original Form" fanclub, I imagine...
In short--too damn many. ;)
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