Thursday, September 24, 2009

There's gotta be some term...

...for when a character is "IRREVOCABLY CHANGED!" so that "NOTHING IS THE SAME!" as the status quo is changed to garner some interest. Kinda like Wolverine in the Fatal Attractions storyline, but then the creative teams just sort of leave the character in that screwed up state without returning the character to their original state or moving them on and having them grow.

Like Cyborg when he became Cyberion. ("Cyberion?" WTF?) Or Barbara Gordon after she'd been shot by the Joker. In these two instances the characters "got better", but what about those characters still sitting in limbo waiting for someone to remember them? Like Alpha Flight?

It reminds me of the Sid character from Toy Story. Via Wikipedia:
Sid Phillips is a hyperactive, ten-year-old boy and the main villain of the first film. He was Andy's vicious neighbour (until Andy moved), and the worst nightmare any toy could have. Sid is a young, bratty skate punk with metal braces, whose idea of fun is terrorizing his sister and destroying toys in various methods (exploding, burning or in his "mad doctor" plays). He also enjoys skateboarding. He is voiced by Erik von Detten. According to an interview, Sid is named after a former employee at Pixar who would take toys apart and sometimes rebuild them in different and disturbingly odd ways.


Maybe that's it. When a character's been messed up, when they were used as cannon fodder to show how dangerous a threat was, when they were pulled and stretched and twisted so no one recognizes them, and the marketing and licensing people are left shaking their heads wondering "How are we going to sell action figures of that?" and there don't seem to be any positive changes coming anytime soon, I'll say "Sid got 'em".

So... Alpha Flight? "Sid got 'em."
Aquaman? "Sid got 'im."

That works for me...

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