Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Comics

Origin of the title of Kang Dynasty

I was a bit disappointed that our article didn't address this, but it seems like a given to me that someone named the comic that either because the character's name "sounds kinda Chinese-y" (*cringe*) or because it rhymes with the names of two historical Chinese dynasties (if one mispronounces them). I considered asking about this on the article talk page, but it's empty, and I don't know how to begin searching for reliable sources in this topic area. Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 16:47, 17 February 2023 (UTC)

It's nothing of the kind. It's because Kang wants to start his own dynasty, by having a son (actually a science project of some type, but it's basically a son), retiring as a conqueror villain, and leaving him as his heir. Just read the comic, the title makes complete sense. Note that Kang the Conqueror was created in 1963, and he was a regular and well-established character at the time of the story. Cambalachero (talk) 16:58, 17 February 2023 (UTC)

@Cambalachero: Are you sure? I would think that if that were the only reason, and it had nothing whatsoever to do with Chinese history, Kang Dynasty is a rather unintuitive title, especially when Son of Kang is right there. Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 11:10, 3 March 2023 (UTC)

Yes, because in the absence of sources saying otherwise, I have no reason to doubt that a plot-related title is, in fact, used in reference to that aspect of the plot. And it isn't either that they chose a name and then made a story for it: the Kang Dynasty is the culmination of stories that Kurt Busiek had been making with the Avengers for years by then. Cambalachero (talk) 13:43, 3 March 2023 (UTC)

Yes, and I'm sure Age of Ultron also wasn't just a cool-sounding title with little connection to the plot of the book, the existence of essentially the same joke in the sitcoms Father Ted and Community is just a coincidence😓 Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 13:27, 30 March 2023 (UTC)

Nomination for merger of Template:Infobox comic

Template:Infobox comic has been nominated for merging with Template:Infobox comic book title. You are invited to comment on the discussion at the template's entry on the Templates for discussion page. Thank you. MClay1 (talk) 14:05, 31 March 2023 (UTC)

Project-independent quality assessments

Quality assessments by Wikipedia editors rate articles in terms of completeness, organization, prose quality, sourcing, etc. Most wikiprojects follow the general guidelines at Wikipedia:Content assessment, but some have specialized assessment guidelines. A recent Village pump proposal was approved and has been implemented to add a |class= parameter to {{WikiProject banner shell}}, which can display a general quality assessment for an article, and to let project banner templates "inherit" this assessment.

No action is required if your wikiproject follows the standard assessment approach. Over time, quality assessments will be migrated up to {{WikiProject banner shell}}, and your project banner will automatically "inherit" any changes to the general assessments for the purpose of assigning categories.

However, if your project has decided to "opt out" and follow a non-standard quality assessment approach, all you have to do is modify your wikiproject banner template to pass {{WPBannerMeta}} a new |QUALITY_CRITERIA=custom parameter. If this is done, changes to the general quality assessment will be ignored, and your project-level assessment will be displayed and used to create categories, as at present. Aymatth2 (talk) 13:43, 10 April 2023 (UTC)

Notability issues on Marvel Comics characters

I've folded numerous Marvel Comics character pages into the Lists of Marvel Comics characters pages. It is not something I have done lightly but the pages were generally very, very poor in terms of referencing and upkeep. Judging by the tags on them have been largely abandoned. I've used redirects instead of AfDs to preserve the page histories and avoid broken links, and this should make ring-fence the notability issues and hopefully avoid mass deletion of pages far below Wikipedia's badly-applied guidelines.
However: -

1. This does mean the list pages are even worse. I currently have no time nor inclination to do research on generally shit characters from generally shit comics.
2. Pretty much every single entry needs a rewrite - common problems are switching between in and out of universe writing styles at random (out goes in Publication history, in goes in Fictional character biography)
3. A lot of them were blatantly written at one random point in the character's history.
4. The full Template:Cite comic needs to be added to any cited issue, otherwise you're left with meaningless information that provides no context for people who don't know the comics well anyway.

On the off-chance anyone cares about any of the characters, that's Step 1.
For Step 2 of returning them to standalone pages they need at least two and preferably three independent, notable instances of significant coverage. That means not material produced or licenced by Marvel, like DK books - though two and a licenced guidebook might pass muster. If steps 1 & 2 are done characters can be returned to their own pages and I'll happily help you fuck up anyone who says otherwise, and if there are any that meet that that I've incorrectly included I will apologise. However, please do not restore them on reflex. BoomboxTestarossa (talk) 14:31, 17 April 2023 (UTC)

"Kick-Ass - The Dave Lizewski Years" ?

(With the caveat that I've paid limited attention to Millar since his decision to become the Rob Liefeld of writers) This seems to be a very over-used thing on the various Kick-Ass related articles. My understanding of this is that Millar has decided to retrospectively apply this name to the original wad of Kick-Ass titles. However, they weren't the names of the titles when they were published and it isn't the name used in the myriad coverage of when people actually cared about Kick-Ass. Retrospectively applying this branding to encyclopaedia entries feels disingenuous, needlessly confusing to laymen and against common name policy. Is there a salient reason why this term should stay in place, bearing in mind that "Mark Millar said so" is not binding for Wikipedia? BoomboxTestarossa (talk) 10:10, 22 April 2023 (UTC)

It is an official naming, so unless there was a more extended way to name this, there's no reason not to use it. It's like the first Star Wars film, that got things like "Episode IV" and "A new hope" added when more Star Wars films started showing up. Cambalachero (talk) 14:03, 22 April 2023 (UTC)

Yeah but the Star Wars names have long entered common usage; Episode IV has had cinema reissues and home media releases under that name. Does that apply to retrospectively rebranding a few TPBs? The films and the comics that actually got a relatively wide audience were just called "Kick-Ass". It doesn't seem to have been done for the renaming of Captain Marvel into Shazam, for example. If Marvel renamed Spider-Man as Web-Dude it wouldn't mean previous issues of Amazing Spider-Man should be referred to as Amazing Web-Dude... BoomboxTestarossa (talk) 14:13, 22 April 2023 (UTC)

If you want a comic book example, consider Sin City. It was initially the name of the story of Marv avenging Goldie. But later on, when Frank Miller started even more stories in that setting, that initial story was renamed to "The Hard Goodbye". Cambalachero (talk) 00:01, 23 April 2023 (UTC)

But that has common usage. I'm not convinced the Kick-Ass rebranding does.

"Kick-Ass - The Dave Lizewski Years" - 8920 results on Google, first few pages are just listings

"Kick-Ass" "comic book" - 910000 results

I get the argument, but this sort of thing really needs to be done case-by-case. Naturally the rebranding needs to be mentioned, but it needs to be kept away from infoboxes; there's no such comic as "Kick-Ass: The Dave Lizewski Years #1"

BoomboxTestarossa (talk) 08:12, 23 April 2023 (UTC)

As I said, that's the official naming. It is not mandatory to use it if some other naming has greater usage, but if there isn't such a usage, then there's no reason not to use it. Nobody ever said that an official naming should pass some arbitrary threshold of usage to be considered.

20 or 15 years ago, there was a single Kick-Ass comic, so the name was fine. Some years ago there was a relaunch, and that means that now there are two "Kick-Ass #1" comics (as so on). To solve that ambiguity, the original run was rebranded "The Dave Lizewski Years". We have a similar need to be precise when mentioning comic book issues, so why not use it? We wouldn't be making up anything. Yes, that was not the original name, but in case you did not realize it, retroactive renaming is a thing in the entertaining industry. Cambalachero (talk) 15:49, 23 April 2023 (UTC)

It is. But are we aren't in the entertainment industry, surely. Or at least I'm not. It strikes me as more confusing to bring the after-the-fact branding in on what seems to be every single article on the well-known series everyone calls Kick-Ass for the benefit of the little-known series no-one thinks of when someone says Kick-Ass. I mean, surely the point here is to make these articles accessible and easy to understand.

Surely official naming /should/ pass some threshold of usage. As I said above, most articles refer to Captain Marvel as Captain Marvel despite the whole Shazam thing. Isn't that what WP:COMMONNAME is all about? Some official changes reach a threshold where they become more notable - as you've listed there's A New Hope and The Hard Goodbye. Others haven't, at least not yet, and this I believe is one of them. That said, I'm not going to die on a hill for a Mark "You know what's edgy? RAPE!" Millar comic BoomboxTestarossa (talk) 16:36, 23 April 2023 (UTC)

You got some points wrong, but are you sure that your dislike for the works of Mark Millar is not getting in the way of your work as an editor? You don't have to edit those articles if you dislike those comics that much. Just let them be, and focus instead on the articles of comics you do like, perhaps raising them to good or featured status. Cambalachero (talk) 18:36, 23 April 2023 (UTC)

Not the works of Mark Millar, just the stuff that uses rape as an edgy plot device. Which admittedly is more than a couple, but still. I'm not entirely sure how it would affect my views on this matter either way, though, and if you don't mind me saying so it feels like a red herring to say so, and doesn't really affect the argument. BoomboxTestarossa (talk) 18:58, 23 April 2023 (UTC)

Comic Source Dump

Trying to do an archive of non-web comic sources at User:BoomboxTestarossa/ComicSourceDump. At the moment I've only done Wizard, of which I have various issues from 1991-2004. Amazing Heroes is next on the list but going to do some other bits for a while first.

BoomboxTestarossa (talk) 22:49, 22 April 2023 (UTC)

Possible redirects for Encyclopedia of Comic Books and Graphic Novels?

Possible redirects from the "Encyclopedia of Comic Books and Graphic Novels" at Wikipedia:WikiProject Missing encyclopedic articles:

• The Frank Book
• The Homeless Channel
• I, Joker
• King: A Comics Biography of Martin Luther King, Jr.
• Mystery Men (comics)
• My Troubles with Women
• Nat Turner (comics)
• The Sandman (Golden Age) = Sandman (Wesley Dodds)
• Stagger Lee (comics)
• The Summer of Love (comics)
• Yossel
• Jack (Jaxon) Jackson = Jaxon (cartoonist)
• David (Dave) McKean = Dave McKean
• Walter (Walt) Simonson = Walt Simonson
• James (Jim) Steranko = Jim Steranko
• Wallace (Wally) Wood = Wally Wood
• Adaptations from Other Media
• Cold War
• Espionage = Spy comics
• Fantasy = Fantasy comics
• Feminism
• Folklore in Comics
• Funny Animal Comics
• Gay and Lesbian Themes
• History in Comics = Historical fiction#Comics and graphic novels
• Jungle Comics
• Memoir/Slice-of-Life = Autobiographical comics / Slice of life#Anime and manga
• Themes
• Nazis
• Politics and Politicians
• Race and Ethnicity
• Religion
• Satire
• Underground and Adult Comics
• Youth Culture in Comics
• Comics Scholarship = Comics studies
• Merchandising and Licensing

74.94.190.241 (talk) 21:00, 24 April 2023 (UTC)

• • Nat Turner (comics) = Kyle Baker

• • Stagger Lee (comics) == Derek McCulloch (comics)

• • Feminism = List of feminist comic books

• • Gay and Lesbian Themes = LGBT themes in comics --Nat Gertler (talk) 03:23, 25 April 2023 (UTC)

Gorilla Grodd

Is Gorilla Grodd a member of the Rogues? 98.223.102.250 (talk) 14:11, 1 May 2023 (UTC)

Guardians of the Galaxy (New Guard)

As someone not well-versed in comic book history I would love a second opinion on this article: Guardians of the Galaxy (New Guard).

This article purports to cover a version of the team published from late 2015 to 2017 and featured in "vol 4" of the Guardians run. Now I am no comic book expert but it seems to me that almost every fact in the body of the article is concerning the 2008 iteration of the team rather than this other version featuring Kitty Pryde, Thing, and other new characters. Just look at the references in the Publication and Team history sections: almost all of them range from 2008 to 2014, before the team was apparently established. The only parts that do seem to actually concern the 'New Guard' from an outsiders pov are the lead, collected editions section, and the paragraph devoted to All-New, All-Different Marvel which I gather spurred this new iteration. I understand wanting to include some of the backstory and lead up to this shake up for this new team, but to not include any of the 'New Guard' in the article raises serious questions over the scope, notability, and factual accuracy of the whole thing. If I am wrong and off base though please let me know. Yeoutie (talk) 03:24, 9 May 2023 (UTC)

Threshold for some categories?

While categorising some articles a question popped into my head about a couple of comics categories.

1. Category:Comics controversies: what is the threshold for a controversy? I mean some are easily defined in terms of legal, political or media attention, but things like creators bitching about how a character has been handled or how they fell out with another creator or company (or in Alan Moore's case, all companies ever) can be classed as controversial. For example, I've seen Chuck Austen's X-Men stuff described as "controversial". Is it decided by a 3rd-party source calling it a controversy?
2. Category:Unfinished comics: same thing, really. Some are clear cut, like - for example - the Tintin album Herge was partway through when he died. However, numerous titles are 'unfinished' in terms of being cancelled and/or hitting other bumps and leaving plot-lines dangling and the like, such as Uber, Red One or a billion and one eighties titles where the publisher folded. It's also subjective to some degree, in terms of what's an intended 'finish' and what isn't, And also technically any ongoing running right now is unfinished.

Thanks! It's nothing pressing but I thought I'd raise the question now before I do something wrong... BoomboxTestarossa (talk) 15:14, 14 May 2023 (UTC)

• When it comes to unfinished comics I would say it should be enough that there is a source that explicitly states that the comic is unfinished.★Trekker (talk) 16:52, 14 May 2023 (UTC)

  And I think that any comic that has not yet been translated into Finnish should qualify! -- Nat Gertler (talk) 20:05, 14 May 2023 (UTC)

  =D BoomboxTestarossa (talk) 20:21, 14 May 2023 (UTC)

  Ah, that makes sense. So much sense I feel dumb for asking! BoomboxTestarossa (talk) 20:21, 14 May 2023 (UTC)

Should Birdy get a separate article?

Does anyone think Birdy (comics) should have a seperate article? I found some third person sources. Sabretooth's Old Ally Birdy Might Save the Marvel Universe (cbr.com) , X-Men: Wolverine Brought Sabretooth's Forgotten Sidekick Back Into Action (cbr.com) , Marvel's marauding mutants must face judgment as Judgment Day arrives in Marauders #6 first look | GamesRadar+ Dwanyewest (talk) 07:59, 30 May 2023 (UTC)

I started a conversation on Talk:Sabretooth (character) Dwanyewest (talk) 08:10, 30 May 2023 (UTC)