Unfortunate Names / Comic Books

• Archie Comics: Something like "I'm Mr. Chovy, and I want to know why my daughter Ann didn't make it into the yearbook."
• Marvel Comics' Nova. His name is Richard. Richard Rider. Now what do people call Richard for short? Dick. During AXIS, Spider-Man told Richard's Legacy Character replacement Sam Alexander about Richard and added "There's a joke in there somewhere."
• Also, DC villain Blackguard, real name Richard Hertz, prefers people to call him Dick. He doesn't see what's so funny about it.
• Miracleman: Young Miracleman's real name was Dickie Dauntless. This was lampshaded during the Alan Moore run when Miracleman's wife Liz expressed her disbelief that someone with such a name ever actually existed.
• It's been pointed out several times in-universe that John Stewart, the African American Green Lantern, shares his name with comedian Jon Stewart. It's treated as a humorous thing, such as Arsenal asking if Kyle Rayner really knows the host of The Daily Show after he mentions John's name.
• Marvel has a supervillain-turned-hero named Radioactive Man. Obviously, he shares his name with a popular character from The Simpsons, and this was humorously Lampshaded by Ms. Marvel in an issue of Thunderbolts.
• In some portrayals of his origin, the child who would become Superboy of Earth-Prime (which was supposed to be the real world) was picked on by his peers for being named Clark Kent, "after a comic book character."
• Poor Dick Grayson. Luckily for him, he has a great sense of humor, so he makes a joke out of it. "I'm Dick." "What?!" "No, no, that's my name." Cue smarmy grin.
  Starfire: I love Dick!
  Beast Boy: So I've heard.
• In Star Wars: Republic, writer Randy Stradley, who was annoyed at his editor adding "Master" to the front of every Jedi's name in dialogue, created the character of Soon Bayts. (Say "Master Bayts" out loud.) Due to the editor for that issue changing, the name made it to publication. Randy, evidently a good sport, happily stepped on his own landmine in the Clone Wars-era miniseries Star Wars: Obsession, referring to Bayts by "Master Bayts" once and then killing him off.
• In MAD, Ziegleveit B. Schtoonk was an Al Jaffe character who recurred in his 'Snappy Comebacks to Stupid Questions' series. The stupid questions would invariably be about his name, but what do you expect if you engrave something like that on your nameplate?
• Patsy Walker once met an Alaskan Rebellious Princess, with one of the reasons for being an Emo Teen being her name, SsangYong Rexton:
  That's the name of a car! They named me after a car! There's no way I'm gonna live my life with people who have zero imagination!
• Vampirella, in the Valentine Special 2019, has a character named Valentin Boudreax. (It gets lampshaded, of course.)
• Miles Morales' father was called Jefferson Davis.^note For those unaware, Jefferson Davis was the president of the Confederate States of America, and Jeff is African American.
  • Apparently Brian Michael Bendis didn't realise that it was also the name of a Confederate president who owned slaves. In Miles Morales: Spider-Man (2018) #22 by Saladin Ahmed, he changes his name to Jeff Morales, wondering why his parents called him Jefferson Davis in the first place and pointing out how tainted it is.
  • This is arguably a case of The Artifact - Davis's name started out heavily ironic, highlighting his anti-superhuman prejudice despite himself being a target for bigotry. This initial irony was lost over time (it doesn't help that various adaptations tend to cut Jefferson's prejudices and depict him as a straightforward Nice Guy).
• The Italian strip Lupo Alberto, set in a World of Funny Animals, has Silvietta, plagued by an unfortunate species name: she's a dunnock, in Italy known as passera scopaiola, literally meaning "sweeping sparrow" after what a dunnock's tail does when they walk... Too bad that "passera scopaiola" can also be an euphemism for "vagina that has a lot of sex". In her second strip this was enough to earn her a stalker.
• The Transformers: More than Meets the Eye: Early during their adventure, the crew of the Lost Light briefly encounter a character originally named Prowl, who, because there was another more famous and considerably more assholish Prowl, decided to change his name to Dent. This is taken as final proof that their species has just plain run out of good names.

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