A throwaway bit I recently touched on in another thread: the Squadron Supreme — Marvel’s knockoff version of the Justice League, who pretty much only exist to get outclassed by the Avengers — have alter-ego IDs that wouldn’t be seen as riffing on anything in their world, but that were nerdy in-jokes for comic readers.
So instead of the aforementioned Arthur Curry, the Aquaman stand-in is ‘Kingsley Rice’. And instead of Hawkman being Carter Hall, try ‘Jimmy Dore’. And, faster than a speeding Kahlil Gibran, you could swap out Kal-El for ‘Zhib-Ran’…
In this case - I’ll just point out that Wolverine was originally a one-off opponent for the Hulk, and existed for a couple years as an X-man before we ever knew him as “Logan”, then still more years before it was revealed his original name was “James Howlett”. So maybe there’s a connection between howl and “Howlett” but if so it was dreamed up decades after the character originally showed up. I don’t really think it holds up.
Nope, as I noted, in the early years we didn’t even have that.
Yeah, that’s a Stan Lee sort of thing right there.
You’re overthinking it. Wonder Woman was Diana Prince long years before Diana Spencer was born.
Seriously? Are they intent on sucking every last bit of fun out of the Batman franchise? It’s been half a century since Adam West; you would think they could stop overcompensating by now.
Oh, that’s a whole other avenue of strangeness to think about. Back in the Silver Age, Superman’s Fortress of Solitude included tribute rooms for all of his friends*, including Batman, Jimmy Olsen, and Lois Lane, each containing various mementos and souvenirs of their time together. The Lois room even had a life-sized, perfectly detailed statue of Lois.
If you were at someone’s house and saw something like that, you’d politely excuse yourself at the first opportunity, then call the cops!
He even had a Clark Kent room, so as to maintain the fiction that Superman and Clark were two separate people who were good friends.
I’m puzzled by the OP’s bafflement. Evocative names have always been part of human storytelling–Prince Charming, Snow White and Rose Red, Tom Thumb.
“Beowulf” = “bee wolf” = “bee hunter” = “honey eater” = “bear” – Punning names in English literature go back to the very beginnings of English.
This idea that storytellers are trying to create a “fake, real universe” is a new idea. In past millennia, we understood that storytelling was evoking something beyond the real. It doesn’t work by the rules of reality.
It dates back to the Golden Age. Green Lantern was supposed to be Alan Ladd, a play on “Aladdin”, but they thought that too obvious, so it became Alan Scott. Then the actor Alan Ladd came along . . .
The Spirit’s sidekick was Ebony White, who was black.
Dr. Mortal was supposedly killed at the end of each story by his niece and her boyfriend but inevitably always returned in the next issue of Weird Comics.
Just a thought. Is it just a coincidence that these characters were often created and named by men who had given themselves more interesting (and less Jewish) names?
One of the names I couldn’t figure out from The Spirit was the femme fataleP’Gell. What kind of name is that? It sounds more like the name you’d give an alien in 1940s pulp science fiction. Or 1960s Star Trek.
It was recently pointed out to me that the name clearly comes from Place Pigalle, the famous public square in Paris (which became known to American servicemen as Pig Alley during WWII). (Also the name of a restaurant at Seattle’s Pike Place market)
Hilariously thats not it. I misremembered, its Supergirl and its the back-up feature of this comic.
Even funnier is its a sequel of sorts to the issue you mentioned. And both feature the kind of LL obsession I was talking about. With HaLLeys comet, HoLLywood, and beLLe of the baLL all worrying Kara in the Supergirl Action Comics backup.
I’ve never read the one with the Little Leaguer. I was just trying to give an example of the level of obsession the Supers have with LL and how far they will go to twist things.